The Decemberists - May 30, 2014 - Portland, OR

The Decemberists (May 30, 2014)

Location

V for Victory Charity Concert, Crystal Ballroom, Portland

Audio

Tracks

01 - Cheer and Intro
02 - Leslie Anne Levine
03 - Chat
04 - Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect
05 - July, July! (extended outro)
06 - Chat
07 - A Cautionary Song
08 - Cheers
09 - Odalisque
10 - Chat
11 - Cocoon
12 - Chat - Don't Move Here
13 - Grace Cathederal Hill
14 - Chat and Warmup Intro to Next
15 - The Legionnaire's Lament
16 - Chat
17 - Clementine
18 - Chat and Warmup Into Next
19 - California One:Youth and Beauty Brigade
20 - Second Intro and Warmup into Crane Wife
21 - Crane Wife 1, 2, 3
22 - Chat
23 - Down By The Water
24 - Chat - 18 new studio songs
25 - Hank's Calamity Song
26 - Chat
27 - Rise to Me
28 - Chat
29 - Rox in the Box
30 - Chat
31 - Hazards (Combined)
32 - Chat
33 - Engine Driver
34 - Chat
35 - O Valencia
36 - 16 Military Wives
37 - Calling for Encore
38 - Encore Return
39 - (This goes out to Lola's Room)
40 - The Chimbley Sweep
41 - Chat
42 - June Hymn
43 - Exit
Extra - Hank Eat Your Oatmeal lead-in

Processed for Better Levels, Cut to Tracks

The first version of tracks here for downloading has been enhanced to bring out better audio on each track. Without processing, the audio levels have muted vocals because of strong bass hits, but enhancing smooths out the loud crashes to allow enhanced vocals.

alac, Lossless

alac zip; enhanced (2.9 GB)

Convert alac to aac by importing into iTunes then right clicking on everything and selecting AAC conversion.

flac, Lossless

flac zip; enhanced (2.8 GB)

opus, Lossy (removes data you can’t hear anyway)

opus zip; enhanced (237 MB)

Processed for 25% Speed Increase, No Pitch Shift

No time to listen to the entire concert at real-time speed? Listen to the concert 25% faster!

Processed for 50% Speed Increase, No Pitch Shift

The same as above, but 50% faster than real-time!

alac, Lossless

alac zip; 50% faster (1.9 GB)

flac, Lossless

flac zip; 50% faster (1.9 GB)

opus, Lossy (removes data you can’t hear anyway)

opus zip; 50% faster (183 MB)

Raw, Uncompressed, Unprocessed, Uncut, Intact

original unprocessed wav files with cue points

2309 wav (2 GB) 2309 track positions

0011 wav (1.3 GB) 0011 track positions

2309 wav (1.7 GB) 0113 track positions

Unprocessed, Cut to Tracks

Audio sample, original, unprocessed:

alac, Lossless

alac zip; unprocessed (2.7 GB)

flac, Lossless

flac zip; unprocessed (2.6 GB)

opus, Lossy (removes data you can’t hear anyway)

opus zip; unprocessed (273 MB)

Recording

Device

Recorded concert using Zoom H2n

Device Location

Jacket pocket, standing two rows back from the stage.

Device Settings

wav

Mic Configuration

Front-facing XY stereo configuration¹

Format

24-bit, 96 kHz, stereo

What does 24-bit/96 kHz mean?

96 kHz means the recorder saves 96,000 audio samples per second. 24-bit means each sample is an audio level value between 0 and 16,777,216 (2^24). The sampling is performed for both the right and left channel.

Don’t confuse 24-bits or 96 kHz with compressed audio rates of “96 kbps.” These recordings were recorded uncompressed, so there is no “kbps” audio value to restrict the quality.

If we do the math, 24 bits per sample with 96,000 samples per second per channel gives us:

a data rate of 281.25 KB/s per second per channel
- so that’s 562.5 KB/s for two channels (over half a megabyte per second of audio)
if we scale these numbers up, we get
- 16.875 megabytes per minute per channel, so that’s 33.75 megabytes per minute for two channels
- 988 megabytes per hour per channel, so that’s 1.9 gigabytes per hour of stereo audio.

The math tracks. I ended up with 9 gigabytes of audio from the start of the opening act to the end of the second set four or five hours later.

Gain

This is my third attempt at recording a concert with my Zoom H2n and I think I’ve finally figured it out.

The first concert had a too-high gain level, but there was a lot of audio clipping.

The second concert had a too-low gain level, but all the audio detail didn’t get captured.

Then, I read the manual. The recorder has an auto-gain setting. Duh.

I recorded this concert with the H2n CONCERT AUTO-GAIN setting and it captured everything perfectly.

Editing

On the flight back to NYC, I listened to the entire concert recording in real-time and manually cut the large wav files into tracks.

Most tracks are seamless cuts against the previous track with most cheering and chats between songs cut into individual tracks. There are two hard cuts for tracks: one hard cut between the two sets and one hard cut when I switched the recorder position from horizontal to veritcal (so you don’t hear the microphone picking up shuffling movement sounds).

The result: 43 total tracks (15 are chatty non-song tracks).

Note: For tracks 01 through 29 the recorder was recording sidways so the right channel is pointing up towards the sky and the left channel is pointing down towards the floor. For tracks 30 through 43 the recorder was repositioned to record vertically so right is right and left is left. The position makes almost no difference in this scenario though because the concert hall was so loud and the concert just used giant PA speakers for the audio, so there was no stereo sound field being projected towards the audience.↩