A few things to get out of my system here.

Sons Of Nothing at The Depot -- thoughts

Last Saturday, Sons Of Nothing played at The Depot in Salt Lake City.

First, the venue. This was my first time at The Depot and I have to say I was pretty impressed with the place. It nearly has the charm of the late Zephyr Club and is certainly, hands-down, the nicest venue in Salt Lake City. As for other venues the band has played in, I'd compare it to The Big Easy in Spokane, WA and The Mesa Theater in Grand Junction, CO (although it is larger than the latter).

The sound for the show was engineered by "Todd Almighty" (as Thom called him) and it was awesome. Todd engineered audio for SoN the last couple times we played at The Zephyr before it closed down, so we had confidence in the guy. His professionalism and perfectionism still intact, Todd made the set-up and soundcheck, "a joyful experience," Thom said.

Todd got to do his work with one of of the most technologically advanced mixing consoles I've seen in my life. Very cool.

Lighting was a different story. The venue programmed lots of cool stuff into their Jans Hog lighting console (similar to the one I used at the Arts Festival earlier this year) and then lost all that programming due to powering the unit down without saving the programming to a disk. At least, that's how I understood it.

As a result, the lighting for the show was fairly tame. There were a few times when Davey (the lighting technician) did some extra stuff, but mostly he was trying to keep the stage lit using really boring presets.

The lighting was a bit of a disappointment, but in the end, it worked out to our advantage in another way. We recorded the show on 4 video cameras and snagged an audio recording off Todd's board. The lighting, being pretty uniform and generally brighter than usual, worked out good for the video.

Most of the staff I encountered at The Depot were very friendly and helpful. Most were also digging the music.

The band opened for itself, playing a 45-minute set of original tunes before launching into the 2-hour FloydShow. The original tunes sounded great.

Audience turnout was lower than we had hoped. Between 100 and 150 people showed up. That number appeared smaller given The Depot has a capacity of 1200 people. But, the people who came were receptive and generally seemed to enjoy themselves.

A couple geeks I know from UOSP came and said hi too.

Since the show, I've been editing the video from the four cameras and joining it up with the audio from the board. It may become a "bootleg DVD" from the band. We'll see.

If you're interested in seeing some lower-resolution XViD-compressed samples, let me know.

This next week, we'll be taking the same 45-minute originals set and FloydShow performance to three venues in Colorado. We usually get very good response from our friends in CO so I'm looking forward to it.

Rush Replay - DVD

A couple weeks ago, I saw "Rush Replay" on DVD at our local Target store. The price wasn't too bad, but I thought I might be able to find it online for a few bucks cheaper. Sure enough, I did and a few days later, it arrived in the mail.

This 3-DVD, 1-CD box set has special meaning to me and probably anyone else who was a fan of the Canadian prog-rock group during the 1980s (I got into the band in 1987 or so). This box set features the first DVD releases of the "Exit Stage Left," "Grace Under Pressure Tour," and "A Show Of Hands" live concerts. I still own "A Show Of Hands" on VHS and probably had second or third generation copies of the other two on VHS at one time as well.

The audio for these DVDs has been restored, remastered, etc. into Dolby and DTS 5.1 mixes as well as stereo. The video looks great- as good as it can, anyway, considering the era and medium from which it originated. The DVDs don't offer much in the area of extra features. The packaging, on the other hand, includes some treasures: replications of the original dead-wood programs from each of the tours these DVDs are comprised of.

Since music from "Grace Under Pressure Tour" was never available on CD, the 3-DVDs are accompanied by a bonus CD containing this audio. Very cool.

Rockbox

A couple weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and try out Rockbox on my iAudio X5 portable music/video player. Rockbox is an open source firmware you can install on a few different popular portable music players including the iPod, iAudio X5, iRiver H100 and H300, and Archos players.

The X5's official firmware already supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC, so I wasn't interested in Rockbox for support of other audio file formats. It was more just curiousity.

Overall, I was very impressed. The Rockbox firmware gave me a lot more control over the X5. The equalization options were vastly superior to the official firmware. I seriously think all my music sounded better with Rockbox, but I admit I may have been imagining it.

In addition to providing similar functionality for playing music, the Rockbox firmware also includes a bunch of toys including a Bejeweled clone, an Asteroids-type game, and some xscreensaver-type screen toys.

I was really only disappointed with two things: First, the Rockbox doesn't play video yet. The X5 will play XViD-compressed video 160x120 (or smaller), but it's very picky, even inside of these parameters. Even iAudio's JetAudio Windows program can't seem to generate totally-X5-friendly videos as well as transcode in Linux can with some experimentation.

Video is coming, though. In the future, Rockbox will be able to do eveyrthing the X5 firmware can do, video-wise, and more.

The second thing Rockbox is missing is the ability to record from line-in to compressed audio files. It can digitize to WAV files, but that takes up a lot of space. By contrast, the X5 firmware lets you digitize directly to MP3.

I looked around on the Rockbox site for some information about encoding directly to MP3 files and it looks like recording directly to multiple audio formats is planned for version 3.1 of the Rockbox firmware (I grabbed the latest which is v2.5). It will be even better if I can record directly to Ogg Vorbis files or FLAC on occasion.

Need an enclosed cargo trailer

If anyone reading this knows of anyone selling or willing to rent or lend-out a small (5x7, 6x8) enclosed cargo trailer, I'd really like to know.