So, my best (male) friend Chadd did a wonderful thing for me today.

There’s was a film made in 1998 or so called π (That’s “pi” for you symbollically-challenged people).

This accoladed indepedent film is about a rogue mathematician who is doing some wild research into detecting and tracking mathematical patterns — specifically in the stock market. His research makes him the prey of the government and a fanatical sect of hasidic jews.

The soundtrack to the movie is out of this world. It’s a continuous mix of ambient/techno tracks interspersed with soundbites from the movie. I had the soundtrack on CD and loved it but then it got lost — along with nine or ten other favorite titles — when I lost my CD wallet a couple years ago.

I’ve managed to replace most of the CDs that were in that wallet. I had high-quality rips of most of them anyway, so I could still listen to the music. For one reason or another, however, I didn’t have a rip of the π soundtrack. I kept my eye out for it at music stores and used CD shops, but never saw it and started looking for it online. I quickly discovered why it was never showing up in stores: it’s out of print.

This made me sad.

There were some online vendors selling this “rare,” “collectible“ soundtrack CD online for upwards of $50 and I probably would have eventually broken down and spent the money. Luckily, I didn’t have to.

Chadd has a subscription with some Russia-based online music site. Everything’s legitimate, from what we can tell; He’s not one of these crazy music-swapping criminals. He found the π soundtrack on the site and downloaded it for me. It was in MP3 format and was encoded at 192kbps (a pretty high bitrate).

He told me about this download today and let me get to it to download it to my machine. As soon as I started playing the first track, I had shivers going up my spine and a big grin on my face. It’s quite a reunion — me and π.

Listening to the soundtrack makes me want to watch the film again. This is one film that is definitely “projector-worthy.” That is, I could set up a video projector and watch it on a big screen. Apparently, the band owns a projector now. Maybe I should ask Thom about getting my grubby hands on it and inviting him and some others over for some movie-watchin one night.

That’d be fun.