Yoko Kanno (The Seatbelts): Super Dimensional Star Festival Tanasonic 7/7/2009

Unofficial recordings of this wonderful concert have been posted before. There are at least three different sources. I took the undoubtedly best sounding one found scattered around mediafire, clean-tagged it and re-packed it. The tags are the same as I tag everything in my YK collection – Yoko Kanno as the artist name (she is the sole composer after all!) and English song titles where applicable. The files are thus ready for your iPods without any additional trouble. Unless you want to name/tag the songs your way, this is the ultimate version of the concert you want to have – until it’s released officially, that is (if only…).
Enjoy!

http://www.sendspace.com/file/q4gjjy
http://www.sendspace.com/file/u7b4ag

Hey Nitrus, Just checked out your version.

I am planning on Re-mastering the whole set, just tried voices. Track 16 as a sample. This is your track filtered for cracks, hiss and pops. Took about 35minutes. I plan on doing the whole set. I think it’s sounds FUCKING FANTASTIC. Let me know what you think.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=UOMOWVUF

I’m going to run the Orchestra Melody Track overnight and see how it goes. It should take a few hours to clean up.

This is the source of the mediafire version mentioned by nitrus (mastered by me):

Free File Hosting Made Simple – MediaFire (http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=861ac808adac7d2067cd7f7bd65f7eefe0552b5d 46473a75b8eada0a1ae8665a)

I’ve always been happy how it sounds (the original material sounds like crap), but if stingray get something better, go for it!
: )

I hope they release this on cd! Some of the tracks sound unclear, but still enjoyable. Thanks for sharing!

The retagged version by nitrus is dead.

stringray2501 – are you planning on finishing your remaster?

I never heard anyone comment back on the track I did – did you think ti sounded good, did you find there was a difference? Let me know, and I may go back and look at it.

stingray2501 – just compared what you did to crispain’s. Yours gets rid of the pops, clicks and hiss, but the EQ mids and highs are reduced. So there’s a bit of a tradeoff.

Then I will leave it alone, right now I am working on X-men by Shuki Levy – recording the first season this morning…

I honestly don’t know why people are bothering with this concert… The source recording is atrocious which you would expect since it was made from inside the coat pocket of an audience member. There isn’t a note of music here that isn’t available on commercial CD. Why on earth would you want to listen to this, with audience racket and all the rest of it?

That said, there is a lot more quality to be extracted from this than previous attempts have managed. I feel a demonstration coming on…

OK, here we go – "Voices" again so you have something against which to draw a comparison. This is about ten minutes work. (The following contains criticisms of previous remastering efforts; NO OFFENCE INTENDED to the folk who did them – I am speaking only the truth.

Original, clean source: Mild noise, atrocious EQ in the midrange, crackling interference.

Crispain: High frequency noise (and therefore crackling) boosted to infinity. Too much bass and compromised dynamics. Improved but generally unnatural EQ. (You boosted frequencies where there was no music, only noise – making the noise louder for absolutely no reason.)

Stingray: Based on Crispain’s therefore exhibiting all its problems plus: Filtered to absolute buggery, claustrophobic, ambience removed. Is that a noise gate you used?

I have taken a rather more pragmatic approach. The three most important rules of audio restoration: 1) You cannot create sound that isn’t there; you can only balance and in some cases, take away. 2) If the effect of your restoration compromises the original signal, don’t do it. 3) Just because you can apply an effect 100% doesn’t mean you have to; the purpose of noise reduction isn’t to completely obliterate noise at any cost – it is to ameliorate the distracting influence of noise. With that in mind, the equalisation is more natural. Noise is significantly reduced but not to the extent of swallowing up ambience.

It’s not perfect, and it never will be; but at least you can listen to this and not get a thumping headache. And it has the distinct advantage of a natural frequency response. The voice sounds like a voice. (I really do believe that whoever recorded this has the microphone in a pocket or otherwise disguised; perhaps by a coat or a jumper or something.)

There you go; enjoy. I hope this pleases somebody. I still think this concert is an absolute waste of time from an auditory point of view. It’s like taking a poor quality photocopy of the Mona Lisa and then spending hours trying to colour it in so it looks like the original… when you have the original painting hanging up in your lounge. I suppose you could say it has "atmosphere" but personally I’d rather listen to the more artistically valid CD versions. Tank is particularly atrocious.

Peace and love etc. 🙂

Download voices_eq.mp3 from Mirrorcreator – Upload files to multiple file sharing sites (http://www.mirrorcreator.com/files/1CORXLGI/voices_eq.mp3_links)

Edit: Belated response to JBarron2005 for the benefit of anybody else who may be wondering about a CD release… I recall that no professional recording was made of the concert (for various reasons I don’t remember) so unless that is a lie, a commercial release is impossible. It would’ve sold fifty trillion copies. I can’t think why they wouldn’t have; but by the same token if they had it would have been released at least a dozen times in various DVD, Bluray, CD, special Box Set edition with packaging in the shape of Yoko Kanno’s tits, by now.)

Yeah, I don’t need this anymore; I found the fourth disc of the Cowboy Bebop Box Set to be exactly what I was looking for.

@ Tangotreats: It sounds clean. Would you consider remastering tracks that received orchestral/vocal arrangements not found in other recordings? (Yakusoku wa Iranai; Blue; and especially the tookumori medley) I’m currently attempting to restore them myself via Audacity but running into all the same problems you mentioned. If you could even message me what editing software, functions, and settings you found most useful, it might keep me from pulling absolutely all of my hair out in frustration. 😛