Covered With Soul Volumes 1-24
Here’s a treat for the audiophile soul fans. Reader Mark P. from London has gone through the trouble of recreating all Covered With Soul mixes so far in a bitrate of 320 kbps, which gives a better audio quality than the more compressed but size-effective bitrates I use. He says that 95% of the tracks are now 320k mp3 files, while the rest are at least 192k — except one song that stubbornly remains at 160k.
Mark has kindly made the collection available to the friends of Any Major Dude With Half A Heart. The file is just over 4GB. To see what you can expect, have a look at the tracklistings. PW in comments.
EDIT: Reader Fredrick Beondo has kindly made the lot available on his Google Drive. Same password as usual.
Categories: Covered With Soul
PW = amdwhah
Wow thx for this, but unfortunately not able to do to get it without taking a subscription because the file is over the 4GiB free size limit.
Possible to split it into 2?
What was the source material? If he used original MP3 files of a lower bitrate you can’t add back missing audio just by re-encoding at a higher rate. Did he have the source wav or flac files?
He is an audiophile; I presume that just upscaling bitrates would be anathema to Mark. I have a large number of these files myself in 320kbps — I downscale for size purposes.
Wow!! Thanks.
-Its possible to download this without a subscription, you just need to install the Mega App. I just did the dl. i do not have a Mega sub
— i wish you would not downscale your files. But, you site, your choice.
— to be honest, when i saw the opener ( “for audiophiles”) i was hoping that the files would be lossless FLAC :-).
—- thank you to Marc P. and thank you for the post, like all your posts, its very much appreciated
You can download straight from Mega via your browser, AFAIK.
The need to downscale is diminishing with storage spaces increasing. Though the In Memoriams would be unwieldy without downsizing.
Wow, quite the project. I’d be interested how many other people downloaded and replaced. I did and replaced about 350 of your original files. I didn’t bother to do a critical comparison, I just assumed that the 320 would be better and deleted the 192 or lower bitrate ones. I do miss having the original album art you so kindly provided but figured it was a fair trade off. I’d like to know if others hear a noticeable improvement. For years I burned everything at 192 because I didn’t hear much difference between that and higher bit rates, and hard drive space was an issue. Now with 16 terabyte drives that’s not a concern. But thru my car speakers they all sound pretty much the same. Thanks for everything you do here.
For my purposes — car, Bluetooth speakers etc — even 128kbps isn’t an awful suffering. From 160k up I have no problems. My concern is with people who keep music on their phones, on which space can be limited, even with a 124GB SD card.
It’s all first-world problems, isn’t it?
@amdwhah
Yep, you can do that via WWW. But the Free Limit is 4GiB and this download is just over that. So after 4GiB has been downloaded, it stops for xxx hours and then you (maybe) can continue.
Ah, I didn’t realise. Thanks for the insight.
@James
To answer the questions about how I compiled these updated versions, at least 97 percent were taken either from FLAC originals or 320k rips of original sources. Where possible I downloaded
the original album from various sources including funkmysoul.gr which is a great source of quality vinyl rips of albums not otherwise available in the digital domain. The FLAC files were downconverted to 320k CBR MP3 using dbpoweramp.
The rest were sourced from the best sources I could find. I would NEVER upconvert from a lower bitrate mp3 to a higher one, so there are a few 256k files and a tiny number of 192k which I consider my lowest limit for pleasurable listening.
About 6 tracks were ripped direct from YouTube as I couldn’t find them anywhere else, (and I really did try!) using Adobe Audition to ensure the best quality, topped and tailed and then transcoded from .wav to mp3 as above.
ALL tracks were fully tagged using the excellent mp3tag software and should import into a music playing app without any further actions needed. They have the iTunes COMPILATION tag eset so that iTunes marks them as Various Artists compilations. All have artwork attached as part of the id3.2 tag which again should be picked up by your software.
If you’d like to hear any of my radio shows you can find me as follows (please excuse the plug – feel free to skip the rest of this post!)
kcfm.live is my own radio station which is on 24 hours a day. I try to do 1-3 fresh shows a week Mon/Weds/Fri 4pm to6.
solidgoldgem.co.uk Mon-Fri 10am-12 noon. 2 hours of oldies evry weekday morning
247clubclassics.com my classic soul show Saturdays 4-6pm
All times are UK adjust as neccessary.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xRrEwvGRKhnzWIFIoXSGqPJ9T3-SmvEO/view?usp=sharing
As I understand there is no download limit for Google Drive, I will host the compressed file on my GD at the above link. for anyone having issues with Mega’s ‘free’ services. Same password as usual.
@Fredrick Beondo
oooh wow !!
Thx a lot I have been trying and trying to get it. (Not wanting to install the MEGA app).
Really appreciated