Boxset, Update #1: The SHNdig
- Posted by mariteaux on April 7th, 2021 filed in Remasters/Restorations
- Comments Off on Boxset, Update #1: The SHNdig
So while I’ve got the motivation and it’s bouncing around my head, I’ve started assembling Sunbeams. I don’t have any live stuff in my three current rough tracklists, and that’s likely staying that way. I’ve actually had to go grab more bootlegs (I didn’t have Into the Black, which I was pulling tracks from the Dale Demo/Love Buzz sessions from), and some of them, hilariously, are still in Shorten, or SHN.
Shorten, for those of you who aren’t up on your obscure old-school audio formats, is basically first-gen lossless. If you’re into live bootlegs/tape trading bands of a certain vintage at all, you’ll undoubtedly run into Shorten files at some point. Lossless is lossless, so converting them to FLAC doesn’t do any harm, and in fact saves a good 40-70MB per CD (first-gen lossless wasn’t exactly efficient). This is my first time properly handling Shorten. A quick run out to get a Foobar2000 plugin so I can convert them later and I’m golden.
The first disc has already changed a lot from my initial running order. I know I’m not really gonna get an airtight tracklist out of five years worth of studio and 4-track demos, but that’s my goal regardless. I’m still subbing in tracks that kinda suck for ones that don’t, I’m trying to get some more notable Nirvana songs in a more primordial form, and I’m trying to not blow past CD length here. At the moment, my rough order is actually a good ten minutes shorter than the first disc of WTLO (which are all about 73 minutes in length).
The second disc, I’m feeling a lot better about. The first disc was always gonna be rough, scratchy, early Nirvana, but the second one’s where my favorites really start to pile up. I’m using most of the 1991 Music Source session, for one thing, which lets me get in a very early “Radio Friendly” and a very early “All Apologies”, plus some of the Sound City rehearsals and outtakes, most of which weren’t on the box. Of all three discs, this is probably gonna be the biggest improvement on the original box.
Have a small sample of what I’m thinking up right now for posterity:
