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Full Discussion: Remastered Beatles CD's
The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Remastered Beatles CD's Post 302367138 by Perderabo on Sunday 1st of November 2009 12:56:19 PM
Old 11-01-2009
Remastered Beatles CD's

I assume that anyone who might care already knows that The Beatles catalog has been remastered and is currently available in two boxsets, one in Mono and the other in Stereo. I have both boxsets. I also have several other sets of Beatles CD's including the original official issues and several bootleg series. I even still have several vinyl albums.

I must give very high marks to the packaging. The mono's are like tiny replicas of the original vinyl releases including inserts for the white album and Sgt Pepper. The Stereo versions are mostly newly created trifolds with some new booklets. The Stereo boxset is twice the size of the Mono boxset. Some attention was paid to the labels on the actual CD's as well. The earlier albums have Parlophone labels, and the later albums have the green Apple label. One exception is Magical Mystery Tour which has the rainbow Capitol label. One fumble is with the Stereo Let It Be (there is no mono Let It Be). At least in the USA, Let It Be was released on vinyl with a red Apple label. The Russian bootlegs got this right. Too bad these official CD's did not. Still, as I said, very high marks for packaging.

Extra's? Well here we have a problem. A very few extras are present and this suggests that the folks who developed the sets must at least be acquainted with the concept. But the extras are pathetic. It would have been better to have no extras at all. The only real extras are some very short videos on the Stereo CD's. We need to use a computer to view them. But they have been all consolidated onto a DVD that is available with the Stereo boxset. The best extras I have encountered are on the Purple Chick bootlegs, but PC went too far with some of them. I am disappointed with the lack of extras on these new remasters

Nothing was remixed on these sets, they were simply remastered. The original official CD's had mono only versions of the first 4 albums. This decision was made by George Martin. Then Sir George made a second contribution to the original CD releases: he remixed Help and Rubber Soul. Opinions can vary, but my opinion is that he ruined the first 6 albums with this meddling. Here, the first 4 stereo CD's are the actual stereo. Help and Rubber Soul are still the stupid remixes. But the original Stereo mixes are on the Mono CD's. (Don't ask me why.) So by buying both boxsets, I now have great Stereo versions of the first 6 albums. The rest of the albums sound a little bit better than the original CD's, but is the first 6 that are really the reason to buy these sets. Even the remastering missed some opportunities though. Most high end CD players can display the song title if it is stored on the CD because CD's have a litle Table of Contents. These CD's only show up as "Track 1", etc. They couldn't be bothered to type in the name of the tracks during the mastering process. And why are they only on CD? Why not a special set on SACD or even Blu-Ray Audio? This would have been a great job in 1987, but in 2009, it is a pedestrian effort.

Overall I give the sets a C grade compared to the original set which gets an F. They took a step in the right direction but they still have a ways to go.

As I said this my opinion. I would be interested if anyone else has a different view.
 
CTHUMB(1)						      General Commands Manual							 CTHUMB(1)

NAME
cthumb - a themable web picture album generator SYNOPSIS
cthumb -c [options] imagefile ... > file.album cthumb [options] file.album DESCRIPTION
Cthumb creates themable web picture albums with thumbnails of all the pictures, comments for each picture, etc. Cthumb allows you to cre- ate web picture albums, i.e. collections of digital pictures, with small thumbnails of your pictures and with captions. In addition, it allows you to have several views of the collection of pictures. An album is composed of a series of pages, each composed of a collection of pictures. For each album page may optionally have two or more versions, like for instance in English, Spanish, German, French, etc. So your visitors would go into the English version of the web album, into the Spanish version, etc. Typically (this is what I use it for and why I wrote the program), you accumulate lots and lots of digital pictures and you need to label them and sort them out. Perhaps also you have friends and family that speak different languages. This program lets you very easily make picture albums and have the same pictures labelled in one or more languages. You can customize almost everything in the way the albums look on the screen, from the size of the thumbnails to the background and fore- ground colors, the border colors, whether you want film-strips and their picture, etc. OPERATION
Cthumb has two modes of operation. The first one, which is active when option -c is specified, prints an album file, via stdout, comprising all the images given as arguments to the command line. This is the first thing you need to do if you have never tried this program before, just to get you started. Once you have an album file, you edit it and put comments to the pictures, titles to the album pages, etc. In this mode, all the provided options in the command line will be passed through to the album file. See the format of the album file in section ALBUM FILES below. The second mode is the regular mode, the one that actually creates web pages, given the album file, so it is the one that does the real work of the script. Given an album file, cthumb generates web pages containing picture albums and an index with links to all the albums generated. Cthumb creates several HTML files, one per "Page" in the album. Check the README file (probably in /usr/doc/cthumb*/README) for more detailed info. OPTIONS
-c <files> Create an album file with the files listed and spit it out in stadard out. -l <n> Do pages in <n> languages. -f <n> Go into film mode (<n> thumbnails per row). -r Force re-generation of all thumbnails (slow). -x <n> Make thumbnail width <n>. -y <n> Make thumbnail height <n>. -n In film mode, don't generate the strips. -m Don't generate a main index file. -k Generate text captions under the thumbnails. -t Check the thumbnail width/height from the thumbnail image itself. This is slow. -b Put the bytes of the main picture in the caption. FILES
By default cthumb creates the following files (foo being the name of the album file): foo-index.html The table of contents. ALBUM FILES
Album files have a simple, textual format. First, comments in the file are started by the # character and last to the end of the line. The best way to find out the format is to use the -c <files> option for album creation mode, which outputs an album file in stdout. PER-USER VARIABLES cthumb allows users to have their own variable settings in $HOME/.cthumbrc which is read and interpreted by perl. If perl cannot parse the file, cthumb will complain rather dryly that there is a parse error in the file. VERSION
This is cthumb version 4.2. The latest version of cthumb can be found at this URL: http://puchol.com/cpg/software/cthumb/ AUTHOR
The main author Carlos Puchol <cpg@nospam.puchol.com>. A couple of other people around the net contributed to this program. See the AUTHORS file. LICENSE
This program is released under the GNU GPL license. COPYRIGHT
Copyright by Carlos Puchol, 1999, 2001. Warranty: the usual. No guarantee whatsoever is provided. No liability whatsoever is accepted for any loss or damage of any kind resulting from any defect or inaccuracy in this information or code. SEE ALSO
perl(1), pnm(5), djpeg(1), rdjpgcom(1), cjpeg(1) BUGS
Option -r regenerates all thumbnails as the program sees them, i.e. one per language. If a picture is listed twice in the album, it will be generated double the amount of times. If you have a lot of thumbnails, this can get lengthy. A workaround is to delete the thumbnails you want re-generated and run cthumb without the -r option. 7th Edition 02/19/01 CTHUMB(1)
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