Intrada Soundtrack Forum

I just got an email from HDtracks.com letting me know that Varese Sarabande's Sold Out club CDs are available for 16/44 download on their site.

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Chris

I noticed that as well. It was a pleasant surprise to see Varese putting some albums on HDtracks. I hope they put a lot more on there.

I bought both albums on HDtracks. The files are truly lossless with no deceptive transcoding from lossy encodes or anything like that. In fact, the checksums for The Right Stuff are an exact match to proper CD rips uploaded on the AccurateRip database. I'm sure Goonies would also be a perfect match if the download had included the bonus tracks.

Much more importantly, Goonies sounds amazing.

Anyway, I really like the idea of a company like Varese selling rare soundtracks on HDtracks. The price is certainly right.

I'm glad I have the actual discs and I'm not condemned to pay for downloading music and get crappy CDRs at best !

Physical copies are preferable. But, I've reached a point in my life where looking at my wall of CDs isn't nearly as interesting as it used to be. Now when I get a new CD I usually immediately rip it to hard drive, read the liner notes and put the CD away to collect dust.

Playing lossless files on a Hi-Fi system is much more convenient than using a CD player connected to said Hi-Fi system. And yes, having a good backup routine is important when it comes to downloads.

If I was going to rip all of my discs on my HDD... I should first invent the zillion Terabytes hard disk drive to store all of them, and pray that it won't ever crash (maybe candles all around it)...

You can fit over 5,000 losslessly encoded CD rips on a single 2TB drive.

Buy backup drives for if that "crash" ever occurs. 5400RPM 2TB drives were cheap prior to the awful and unfortunate flooding in Thailand, but the low costs should fully rebound in the coming months. However, if you have over 5,000 CDs then I suspect cost doesn't concern you much.

The issue is time more than cost. At least for me -- especially since as I get CDs I rip only the "good" tracks into Mp3.

If I hwere richy, I'd buy maybe five more computers and hire someone to just rip my entire collection to FLAC correctly.

The time it takes to securely rip a large collection and ensure correct metadata is definitely the major downside to the whole thing. It gets quite tiring after a while.

Outstanding news. I've been waiting for The Right Stuff for a long time. Thanks for the tip!

I'm still wondering if a label like Intrada could negotiate with studios in selling downloads of less popular scores on HDtracks and iTunes. A label like Intrada would of course handle the transferring, mixing, mastering and liner notes. The cost savings would come into effect by not having CDs pressed, and there would be no worries of having to move inventory. The $20 price point could still apply.

Would this make releases of scores by unpopular composers like Gil Melle and Leigh Harline much more doable?

I realize that some collectors oppose downloads, but something is a lot better than nothing and it sure beats having older masters continue rotting in studio vaults or some odd place like a restaurant basement.

I noticed that Varese added Brian Tyler's score for Columbus Circle to HDtracks for the low price of $11.98.