I doubt you remember me, but we “met” via the old MP3.com back in the golden age of MP3 distribution. I’m still making music when I find the time, but since then I’ve relocated to Australia and I’m currently working as an academic at Macquarie University. Anyhoo, after reading your post here, I’d be interested in catching up with you via email for a chat. I’m currently involved in a research project investigating musicians attitudes towards online distribution and the so-called “music 2.0″ revolution. If you’re interested in being interviewed please shoot me an email.

Follow-up interview with Saul here.

Yep, it must be handy having a hundred thousand willing fans’ emails on tap. I gave up collecting emails or maintaining a mailing list a while back – I never really appreciated getting newsletters myself, which I never really read (always seemed to arrive when I didn’t have time to read them, so got overlooked – either that or they were far too frequent and became annoying).

This is why I think RSS feeds are important – you can still have the info, but you can receive and read it when you want, not when the band want to mail it out. A system whereby you can pull information at your convenience will always be much better than a push system, in my opinion.

Yeah, after thinking I’d never buy an mp3 I went and bought Mr. Projectile’s last 12″ release in mp3 form (Momentary Lapse of Sensitivity – it’s ace). I have it on 12″ too, only I’m currently lacking the means to play it. Bloody pricey though – £1.29 per track is not something I’ll be paying regularly for mp3s, and if it was available on CD I’d have bought that instead. Very convenient though – at half the price I’d make more use of Beatport etc.

Well, keep in mind that the sample rate is precisely double the maximum sampled frequency, so to sample a frequency of 15kHz, you’d need a sample rate of 30kHz. Likewise for your 44.1kHz SR, you’d be able to sample frequencies up to 20.05kHz. Read Nyquist frequency for more info.

Plus, it depends on the mp3 encoding settings on how heavy-handed the low-pass filtering is. On a good VBR setting (say V 2) using LAME you can easily capture just over 18kHz. Encode at VBR V 0 and you’ll capture everything just under 20kHz. Source.

I was wondering, if mp3 generally cuts off around 15khz or so, then whats the point of encoding it up to 44 and 48? I need to do more research on this.

You missed something, tho probably a very low number of people could think about. I didn’t pain for radiohead’s cd, neither I downloaded it tho, just for a simple reason, they were asking my email and at that point I felt like I didn’t want to give my email ONCE AGAIN, so they could spam me with news that I would try to unsubscribe once again. Seems like, if you look at it in that way, the CD was too expensive for me

Maybe they offered the CD for “free”, but they got a lot of emails. And having emails is something very powerful nowadays.

Anyway, it won’t matter much to 99% of the people tho.

Cheers!