The wonderful Portico Quartet have made their debut album ‘Knee-deep in the North Sea’ available to members of Society of Sound.
This album is only available via our Download Manager.
The Mercury-nominated album has been fully remixed by legendary producer John Leckie.
Leckie’s track record as a catalyst for emerging talent is legendary: not only for the famous examples, Stone Roses, Doves, XTC, Radiohead, but also for pioneering systems orchestra Lost Jockey (which spawned Man Jumping, ZTT’s Andrew Poppy, Orlando Gough, and soundtrack supremo John Lunn) and World Music stars such as Rodrigo & Gabriela and Papa Wemba.
It is Leckie who has now taken the original tapes of ‘Knee Deep in the North Sea’ into Real World Studios to be remixed. Now heard for the first time on the Society of Sound is a transformed version of their groundbreaking debut and Mercury-nominated
The band are currently on tour in Europe ending with two dates at the London ICA on 3rd and 4th December 2010.
Sounds like it could be interesting, but I’m again disappointed that this is only available to users of the Download manager :(
Posted: Wednesday, 20 October 2010I agree with Taint.
The download manager is really not a good idea. First of all it’s just another piece of unknown and potentially damaging software to install. Second subscribers running Linux/UNIX/BSD on their machines cannot install this piece of software.
Posted: Wednesday, 20 October 2010Portico Quartet
This really is an amazing album, faultless.
Music rarely gets any better than this.
Posted: Friday, 22 October 2010Even for Windows users the Download Manager is a annoyance – each month it wants to reinstall.
Posted: Tuesday, 26 October 2010Just reiterating previous comments that the Download Manager is not the best piece of software. It is slow, some trackes do not download completely and redownloading is a pain as it is not geared to downloading individual tracks. Please provide direct links to zip files as you have done in the past.
Posted: Thursday, 4 November 2010Dear Arild,
Installed correctly the download manager will not damage your computer. We also recently tested it on the latest release of Ubuntu Linux 10.10 and it works very well.
Kind regards
Posted: Monday, 8 November 2010Susanna
I have never had a problem with the download manager. Works great! I actually like it….
Back on subject.
Great great album with wonderful sound.
Posted: Wednesday, 10 November 2010Dear Susanna,
Thank you for the feedback. The ability to install the Download Manager on Ubuntu was good news.
I was able to install the Download Manager as well, on openSUSE 11.2. First I had to install Adobe AIR directly from Adobe, close and restart the browser, and then run the “Install Download Manager” from Society of Sound. And, it works!
But, and this is a big one, I still do think that the Download Manager is an unnecessary piece of software, – and that the Adobe AIR framework for running small programs is potentially a security risk. However, I will not urge anyone not to install it, just ask Society of Sound to keep on providing the download links on the web site (they appear to be removed) and perhaps to reconsider the Download Manager.
Kind regards,
Posted: Wednesday, 10 November 2010Arild
I also use the Download Manager under Ubuntu. But it is a bug-ridden and pointless piece of software. Even simple things, like trying to move its window while it loads the “login” page causes it to crash. And the tabs never remember where you were, so when you swap between them, it resets everything! Very vexing. Given behind the scenes it just fetches data via HTTP like you would in your web browser, it is a bit vexing. Oh, and then there’s the consuming all the CPU time when it’s sat there doing nothing.
I’d even offer to write a replacement for them for free that didn’t suck quite so much, if the details of how to fetch album information and content was available!
Still, the music you can download from it still rocks :) Only downside of the whole scheme for be beyond the quality of the download tool is the lack of higher sampling frequency downloads. 96kHz, or even 192kHz, would be lovely. (Assuming they were recorded at such rates; no point in just handing out upsampled versions.)
Posted: Thursday, 11 November 2010I agree with all “grumblers” – the download-manager is amiss in terms of:
-incomprehensible storing dialog
-lower speed than in past times, in cause of the “single tracks concept”
-usability lacks because the steps are not self-explanatory
-backup features are missing – seems absolutely necessary in online file handling
PS
To import an ACC album faultless into i-tunes the cover art file has to be named “cover .jpg”.
Please note for future preparation!
Regards hj
Posted: Tuesday, 14 December 2010I’ve now just written my own downloader tool, which is native to Linux. I shall tidy it up and email B&W asking if I may distribute it to a wider audience if people are interested. It’s basically the same UI with some extra features and without the bugs and crashes.
Posted: Monday, 31 January 2011I’ve been mad busy at work so my client has festered somewhat; I’ll try to work on it this week. In the mean time, I threw together a quick guide to getting the official B&W Download Manager working under Linux: http://www.rjek.com/bw-install-linux.html
Posted: Monday, 9 May 2011Salut; I still don’ t afford to take this technologyes in use but i believe in my dreams of sound insight me;
Posted: Monday, 9 May 2011