Intrada Soundtrack Forum

8/2/07

One of our biggest, one of our best!

Intrada's newest release goes on sale this coming Tuesday and it's a gem. You'll need over two hours to play the whole thing, too! Anyway, it'll post on Monday evening and can be yours just a few hours later!

8/8/07

It's cool to get such favorable responses on THE WIND AND THE LION. We knew it was a good project. However, not being limited, we didn't anticipate so many people jumping on it so fast. Two thousand copies out the door already. Well, on their way out. Give us a few days to play catch up. Even our local post office is taking notice!

Anyway, on behalf of all of us behind this fabulous album, I'm saying thank you. Somewhere up there, way up there, I'm sure Jerry does, too.

We've obviously made improvements on our previous version. Having additional music counts for a lot. But we've managed to improve the sound, too. Like many people, I consider the original album one of the all-time greats. Re-presenting it with improved fidelity is a bonus!

Little could be done to improve the sometimes shrill, tinny sound of the actual recording, of course. It's present on both the actual LP masters and multi-track sources. The musicians in Munich have never played their butts off so well as they did on the 1975 sessions for this one. But their performance ended up kind of thin on the masters, that's for sure.

But those trumpets tearing up "Raisuli Attacks" have nothing to worry about. They sure get their point across!

8/11/07

Take the gloves off.

Most of the time we play soundtracks while processing orders. Sometimes we talk instead. WIND AND THE LION orders are hogging our attention right now and hi-def DVDs are conversation pieces while we work.

So what's up with the hi-def DVD format war anyway? If one side really wants to win, go for it! Throw some real punches! It's amazing to see after a year of weaving and jabbing, neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray has really started slugging. Both sides seem to be playing chicken. Sony (Columbia) and Universal are the two main studio battlers but neither has thrown many heavy punches. Some nice titles are dotted about but where are the heavy hitters? Disney packed a one-two combination punch with PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 1 & 2 but few other blows have been thrown. Come on guys. We can buy FLYBOYS in hi-def but not SPIDER-MAN! We've got low-ball thrillers like BLOOD & CHOCOLATE on the Best Buy shelves but nary a Hitchcock spellbinder in sight! Even Disney timidly represents animation with THE WILD, leaving their classics out entirely. Pixar, anyone? Sure stuff's in the works, but this battle is getting old. No Lucas's or Spielberg's jumping up to the plate, no STAR WARS, no INDIANA JONES, no JAWS. I can't even find a Criterion release on hi-def. I sure wish I knew which way those guys were headed.

If one camp or the other really wanted to throw solid punches, they should consider issuing recent blockbusters in hi-def formats only. No regular DVDs. See what develops then!

I'm convinced high-definition is the route to go down eventually. But consumers remain innocent pawns. It's time for the companies behind this battle to shed blood and really go for it.

Take the gloves off!

8/16/07

We said we'd try to release something new at dependable intervals. So, maintaining our current bi-weekly pace, we'll offer a new Signature Edition this coming Tuesday. We don't expect to knock it out of the ballpark but it's great music just the same!

8/22/07

Not completely surprising, we're blowing through our re-pressings of THE WIND AND THE LION. Actually, I guess it's really you guys that are blowing through them, we're just wrapping the boxes and mailing 'em out. Anyway, we've got still more on order but may have a gap between pressings. Then again, maybe not. New ones are due within a week. We might even be caught up with last weeks orders by then, too! The activity on ZONE TROOPERS is certainly manageable. Then again, we haven't let George go home for eight days now so he may soon be telling me to take a hike. If Jeff joins him, I'm stuck with our bookkeeper and a cage full of hamsters. My kids are back in school so I can't coerce... I mean I can't invite them to volunteer. The solution's obvious. Let George have a dinner break tonight. Maybe... a lunch break tomorrow, too. But no time off for Jeff. (Fortunately, he doesn't have time to read this little corner.)

8/23/07

Okay, so I bailed already. Yessiree. When Paramount & Dreamworks went HD-DVD only, I figured the war that looked to be coming to a close just spiraled further out of control. So my brief affair with Blu-ray is over. At least for now. I wasn't really an early adopter. The formats have been around for a little while now and we're even into second generation machines. I suppose I was an early-ish adopter. Whatever.

Personally, I think this format war is sadly helping to kill off the sales of DVDs in general. I thank Toshiba, Microsoft, Sony and all the other big combatants for that sorry development. It took ages but film studios gained a lot of good will by at last making their film libraries available for us all to own. Restorations, expansions, behind-the-scenes stuff, good films, bad films, lost films, you name it.

I keep reading people say that the two battling hi-def formats can actually survive side-by-side. I doubt it. They cite past examples like cassettes and CDs. Baloney! From where I sit (which is actually next to a stack of CDs waiting to be shipped) I see mostly harm to everyone. Format changes have been going on since long before I was around. I didn't get to see what it was like when 78's turned into 10" "long play" records. I wasn't around when those became the tried and true LP. I did enjoy the changes from mono to stereo that dominated the sixties, however. Anyway, these were all advances in technology allowing us better products. CDs replaced LPs, DVDs replaced videocassettes (and laserdiscs) and whatnot. I just can't see two competing hi-def formats sharing space, however. Betamax couldn't do it with VHS, laserdisc couldn't do it with DVD, SACD couldn't do it with CD. Head-on competitors seldom nicely sit together. And with hi-def, we've actually got the extra problematic situation of having software titles available in just one format or the other. Insane!

In fact, there are not two but three competing video formats available to us once-happy film collectors. Besides the two hi-def battlers, we've still got the tried-and-true DVD. However, none of these formats seems satisfying right now. So I'm sorta backing off on all three.

So congratulations to the competing format makers that selfishly play out a war while us end buyers retreat, abandoning the good will that took years to develop. While hi-def TV becomes entrenched everywhere, our software simply heads in reverse!

8/24/07

Back up and running! If you popped onto our site yesterday you couldn't find the forum. Ditto this morning. But it's up now. Isn't technology wonderful?

Actually, knowing we're overworked, someone (probably Jeff) let our hamsters loose for a day so they'd possibly do what hamsters do when they're loose which is hopefully make more hamsters. Alas! All they did was unplug wires and shut us down. So we put them back on their treadwheels where they're back to spinning circles and supplying us with the raw energy needed to keep our electricity running.

(Just for your info. We are not cruel to our hamsters or any other animal types.)

8/31/07

Mark your calenders, doodle on your palms, send yourself text messages. Our every-other-Tuesday interval comes next week so we'll have a new Special Collection release to tempt your music buds with. It's got action, it's got energy... and it's got lots of musicians - including a big chorus - to deliver the sonics!

If you've got some extra jingle in your purse and you feel like spending it... this CD's a pretty fair exchange in return!