Artist: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Album: F#A#Infinity
Year: 1997
Genre: Post-rock
Quality: Lossless

Lineage of Audio Files:
LP -> Numark TT1650 turntable with Numark CC-1 elliptical stylus -> Radioshack RIAA-EQ stereo pre-amplifier -> AC97 integrated sound card -> EAC V0.99 prebeta 4 WAV Recording / WAV Processing (record lead in / lead out removed) -> FLAC v1.1.4a with FLAC Frontend v1.7.1

Lineage of Image Files:
Physical artwork -> Canon CanoScan LIDE 30 -> Adobe PhotoShop Elements 3.0 / GIMP 2.4 (TIFF to PNG conversion; some image mergers required slight digital editing)

Contents:
01 - Nervous, Sad, Poor....flac
02 - Bleak, Uncertain, Beautiful....flac
fsharpasharpinfinity.ffp
fsharpasharpinfinity.cue
folder.jpg
album_cover_front.png
album_cover_back.png
inserts_1.png
inserts_2.png
inserts_3.png
inserts_4.png
description.txt
description_ansi.txt

Description:
This is the first album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, titled F#A#Infinity. I know that the vinyl version of this album is already available on Demonoid in the form of 192 Kb/s MP3 files, but I wanted to experiment in making a more complete package akin to some of the things that I see posted. Additionally, everything that I have available is lossless. My aim is for this to be as organic of a release as possible.

The vinyl edition differs from the compact disc edition in several ways. I personally prefer the CD to the LP in this instance, since the remastered edition actually sounds better (this isn't a comment on analog vs. digital; their original version just doesn't sound as good) and because some of the new recordings of the movements are musically superior. The album ends a bit abruptly because of the infinite playing time that the LP has due to the locked groove (hence the infinity in the album name).

The following breakdown comes from the Wikipedia article on the album:

Side one

   1. "Nervous, Sad, Poor..." - 20:43
         1. "The Dead Flag Blues (Intro)" - 6:09
         2. "Slow Moving Trains" -“ 3:23
         3. "The Cowboy" -“ 4:16
         4. "Drugs in Tokyo" - 3:29
         5. "The Dead Flag Blues (Outro)" - 1:52
         6. (untitled segment) - 1:34

Side two

   1. "Bleak, Uncertain, Beautiful..." - 17:40
         1. "...Nothing's Alrite in Our Life..."/"The Dead Flag Blues (Reprise)" - 2:00
         2. "The Sad Mafioso" - 5:33
         3. "Kicking Horse on Brokenhill" - 5:36
         4. "String Loop Manufactured During Downpour..." - 4:29

I constructed a CUE sheet (though it's probably not "correct" to an enthusiast, as I've never created one nor used one, personally) to adhere to the movements, but I provide the music in two FLAC files. Long tracks should be nothing new to somebody who already listens to GY!BE, but if you want to split up the tracks into movements to burn this to a CD, use the CUE sheet. I'm providing the FLAC Fingerprint File, too.

Once again, because of many factors, this version will not sound as good as the CD version! My pre-amplifier isn't the greatest; the original analog edition of this album is not mastered extremely well; the LP, though I brushed it, contains unavoidable artifacts; quiet parts of any record, no matter how clean, reveals a noticeable tracking hiss; the list goes on & on. I cleaned the stylus before and after recording each side for the best result. I can at least say that the sound levels never broke 0 db while being recorded, so no clipping occured.

I really wanted people to hear this version of the album in addition to experimenting with a project like this (I've integrated ideas from both the studio album sharing community and live concert recording sharing community). It took me all day to do these things! Please download, copy, and share with fellow fans of the band. DO NOT disrespect the band by selling copies! Please consider purchasing the album if you like it enough.

One last thing for this diatribe: the FLAC files are tagged with the proper unicode characters, I think, but some players (ahem, Winamp) don't support the encoding. Make changes as you need!

-Pedantic