Live: Summer’s End (2003)

Here comes another “Gutterflower” concert. And here come complaints about it as well.

The bootleg I recently obtained is titled “Summer’s End”, and tagged as a 2003 release. Only six songs are included. I couldn’t find any setlist entry for it. However, on YouTube, there are video clips of the band playing it. You can check them out here (make sure to browse carefully, as some of the videos the search engine returns are not it).

I am not sure if this actually is a portion of a concert, or the entire performance. What I do know is that, unfortunately, even this time we are dealing with a poor bootlegging job most likely coming from the same source which worked on the last two releases I published here on the blog. Just like the previous time, I am not repeating myself and will simply post my comment about it, in terms of how the mp3 files were encoded.

On top of that, whoever digitized the files had likely zero knowledge about the whole encoding enterprise. As a result, we get .mp3 files encoded at 96kbps, at a frequency of 32khz. Just to give you an idea, 44khz is the standard for audio frequency, and 192kbps is considered the minimum amount of bitrates for decent results. In some cases, especially, at the beginning of the .mp3 revolution, 128kbps had become the standard, but it was not that good due to the amount of cutoffs it performed on the song’s waveform. Hence, the switch to 192kbps first, and then to 320kbps later, in our modern times. The dude who encoded this went even lower than 128kbps. I am already picturing in my heard audiophiles tearing their hair out with their bare hands as they are reading this…

As far as the audio quality is concerned, overall it is not that bad, but keep in mind that the limitations I described above do play a negative role, and ultimately have an impact on the listener’s level of satisfaction.

You can listen to the show below. Download links are provided at the end of this post.

TRACK LISTING:

  1. Slide
  2. Big Machine
  3. January Friend
  4. Broadway
  5. Sympathy
  6. What A Scene

DOWNLOAD (Main Source)

DOWNLOAD (Mirror 1)

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