For the age-old debate about album lengths, I'll say that I'll always take a consistently interesting 30-minute album over one twice that length but with half as much quality material. Maybe I'm just getting old, and maybe it's the music, but I don't need every shred of transitional music crammed in there just for completion's sake; what Goldsmith referred to in his "Hollow Man" commentary as "fucking-around music" has its place in a film but not necessarily on CD.
Zimmer's gotten a lot of static from people (myself included) but he does do some really cool stuff from time to time. "The Pledge", "The Thin Red Line", "The Ring"... great scores, creative and unusual and interesting. I just wish he hadn't embraced and welcomed and cultivated a style of music production that's modeled after your typical big corporation.
Come on, haven't you people ever made mix CDs before? You're hardly impugning on an album's integrity by doing your own non-commercial fiddling with it; it's still going to go back on your shelf, while the highlights are what underscore the drive to work every day. The full-length "Futile Escape" from "Aliens" plays really well in the album's context, but damn it, when you're sitting at red light after red light, those opening few minutes of quiet noodling get aggravating pretty fast.
Audacity has a distinct advantage over Audition: it's free.
