Cowboy Junkies 2001-02-10 @ Grand Theater - Kingston, ON

After my first year as archivist in 2000, I started to look for ways to do more for the band. I knew of what the taping community called "matrixing," where you take a soundboard source of a show and an audience source of a show and time-align them using an audio editing program like Pro Tools. By doing this, you get the solid sound of the soundboard as well as the resonance of the hall from the audience source. Most soundboard tapes sound too dry on their own; blending solves this. As a matter of fact, another band I really like, Widespread Panic, discovered this when they were getting ready to release their double-live CD "Light Fuse, Get Away." The soundboard tapes were too dry, so they put a call out to tapers for audience recordings of the shows they had multi-tracked to get some of the "live" feel in. In early 2001, I proposed the idea to Michael, and he decided it would be an interesting experiment. The band was doing a short three show tour in Canada in February, and we tested it there. Michael had the soundboard taped to 2-track DAT, and I arranged for tapers to be there for audience recording. Jean-Pierre Thibault taped the show on the 10th for me. After receiving both sources, I got a lesson in matrixing from a sound engineer I know named Chris Mickle, who has done some webcasting and live recording for bands like Sonia Dada. Using a program called Saw Pro (Software Audio Workshop), I blended the two sources together, using about 65 percent to 70 percent of the soundboard source and the rest from the audience source. By expanding the waveforms to the smallest time platform, I was able to align them perfectly, a neat trick when neither source has time-code. I had to time-align each track to compensate for "drift," caused by having the audience recording about 100 feet back from the stage. The results came out quite well. Michael liked the tapes, but ultimately it was decided not to pursue this on a regular basis. This show was the first time the band played all three parts of their "River Waltz" trilogy, though they didn't play them in order. Several months later, at a show in Albany on June 28, 2001, the band finally did play all three in order. To this day, the 2001 tour remains one of my favorites in terms of overall song selection and quality of playing.

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
udp://open.demonii.com:1337
udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969
udp://exodus.desync.com:6969

Foolishness (2008-03-07)

You can decode the Lossless audio FLAC files into WAV files with
your favorite decoder ( see
) then write them to a CD with no gaps
between the tracks (i.e. Disk At Once) for a complete "Live"
show.

When you finish downloading this Torrent you can decode the FLAC files into a different folder to make the CDs. That way you can continue to seed the show for awhile.
I'm at the end of a long, very slow pipe and I stupidly put up all 25 shows at the same time. So when one show completes I pause it so the others will speed up. I didn't expect that there would be so many people who hadn't gotten the shows from http://www.4thellamas.com/index.htm .
This was an experiment for people who were on dial-up and couldn't download easily from the site. I do leave the second machine in the other room seeding all the shows, but it isn't as fast as this one. I'll keep seeding, but help with that from the faster machines out there is appreciated.
Thanks.
These shows are out here because the band gave permission.