jossec

You know how Adventure of a Lifetime has quite a dynamic bassline? Where you'd expect to hear at least some minor variations between live performances? Did you ever notice there never are any? It sounds exactly the same every time. That's right, I'm convinced that Guy Berryman has faked nearly every performance of the song since 2015. A rare exception to this is here, where he actually plays a simplified version. Apparently he can't handle the complexity of the line in the album version, so in nearly all other cases they just play it off tape. I think aside from vocals this is the first time we've seen a band member just flat-out and consistently fake a performance on their primary instrument. At this point I'd be surprised if this was the only song where he does this. But with other songs it'll be harder to tell because the basslines are generally simpler than this one. I know, it's a big show for thousands of mostly casual fans, most people notice and probably wouldn't even care. It's kinda funny to me though, I thought some of you might be interested to know

I like most of the individual tracks on the album, but I think I would enjoy the album as a whole more if the interludes ✨ and ? weren’t there.

Not sure about the other songs, it's just that I happened to be familiar with the version of Clocks on Ghost Stories Live. I liked how it sounded back when it was released, so I listened to it a lot, and when the iHeart thing happened I recognised it immediately. Turns out it was probably a studio recording all that time… Anyway, tip of the iceberg probably

Coldplay have a long history of making their live music less live than one would initially assume in various ways. They’ve been evolving up to this point over the years. They like to have control over their live performances after the fact. They go to town on the post-production whenever they get the chance. For their iTunes festival concert in 2014 it took multiple days before Coldplay’s VOD was available after the live stream, while other artists had their VODs up immediately after broadcast. When it finally arrived it was clear that the audio was tampered with. They’d adjusted the mix and fixed mistakes (most notably Chris’ mistake on Atlas) but also messed up by introducing artefacts throughout. It’s easily verifiable that many of their live releases didn’t actually originate where they claimed to be, simply by comparing the release with fan-recorded footage. For example, the track names of the CD of Ghost Stories Live indicate where they where supposedly recorded, but those locations are largely just a lie. The Tokyo Remix of Something Just Like This differs clearly from the actual Tokyo performance if you look it up on YouTube. Then there’s the habit of reusing audio. Again take the Tokyo Remix of Something Just Like This, which was reused for the Buenos Aires CD, including vocals. On Love in Tokyo all the tracks sounded exactly the same as their Buenos Aires equivalents aside from some superficial differences. The audio of the alternative version of Always In My Head on Ghost Stories Live (the one with an audience) is exactly the same as the main one, except the crowd noise that was added. The instrumentals for Clocks during their performance at the iHeartRadio Music Festival 2020 were the same ones as those used for the Ghost Stories TV special from 2014. (The lead vocal track was different, and the instrumentals are mixed slightly differently.) Yes that’s right, they took the time to film new footage of the band playing the song, and probably spent a lot of money on those visual effects, but didn’t bother making the musical performance authentic. There’s lots of fakery on stage. Backing vocals are rarely live. Lead vocals are sometimes not live, or live with auxiliary tracks. When Jonny or Guy play on keys it’s usually muted. Acoustic guitars are usually augmented with more acoustic guitar in a backing track. The laser harp during Midnight sure looked cool but Guy never played it live. (You could see him play a mistake at one point but you didn’t hear it.) So if you see a band member playing anything besides their main instrument, it’s a pretty safe assumption that you’re not hearing what they’re playing. (I know that there are exceptions.) Besides the clearly lip-synced vocals on Church in Jordan, people questioned whether it was realistic to make the instruments, especially the drums, sound so good in such an environment. While I don’t have hard proof of fakery, I have to agree with them. Knowing all this, it should surprise nobody that these “live” performances of Higher Power are really just music videos to a studio mix. (Was that badly applied autotune really necessary though?) The use of backing tracks at all, starting with In My Place at the end of the Parachutes era, was the first blow to the musical integrity of their live performances. Since then it’s been a slippery slope of ever-more non-liveness in various ways. These days, generally, if they can make something sound better – or just be lazy – by faking it, they’ll do it without hesitation, it seems. These most recent videos are more of a pop act than a musical performance. What it comes down to, I guess, is that they mostly cater to their main audience, who enjoy the richly textured, highly melodic music and the visually interesting show, but aren’t necessarily their biggest fans. That audience is their bread and butter after all. Clearly, musical integrity isn’t as important to this audience as it is to some of us. Coldplay’s main concern is that their show is as good as it can be, and they’re probably making the right tradeoffs. They definitely succeed in putting on a great show. But it is a bit unfortunate for us die-hard, overanalysing fans. Over time I’ve gotten less and less excited about any of their live output, but I guess the most healthy attitude is to enjoy what they’re putting out there for what it is. If you desire musical integrity, maybe look elsewhere. There are enough musicians that value it more highly than Coldplay do. I’m mostly happy that they can still make new music that’s interesting and enjoyable, for both fans and the general audience, at this point in their career. I’m excited for the new album.

That mic feedback happened on the first of two nights in Buenos Aires; the live release is supposedly from the second night. Even if it were a problem, there are plenty of other performances to use. The band have a multi-track recording of each concert. The Tokyo Remix from Kaleidoscope EP wasn't even recorded . To me it just strikes as laziness. Makes me wonder where else they've cut corners. Like how different are the tracks which are on both Live in Buenos Aires and Love in Tokyo? Sure there's different vocal takes here and there, but overall they sound very similar. I'm too lazy to do a full analysis, but I can find examples where I'm fairly confident that the vocals have been reused. I wouldn't be surprised if the instrumentals are exact copies. I'm sure most fans won't notice or care, but this is a disappointing release to me for multiple reasons, and this is one of them. Anyway, sorry for the negativity, luckily there are other things to listen to!

I think that’s due to a bad rip of the original CD. Unless you own the actual CD?

An interesting tidbit on the topic of fading. CD1 ends with a fade-out of a guitar loop at the end of Charlie Brown; CD2 fades in with the piano outro for Charlie Brown, on the track for Hymn For the Weekend. This is the case for the Spotify version as well, although the fades are obviously unnecessary for the non-physical versions. However on iTunes/Apple Music the track lengths indicate that Charlie Brown's piano outro is included on the track for Charlie Brown itself, so most likely the unnecessary fades have been removed for the "mastered for iTunes" version. I'm not subscribed to Apple Music, nor did I purchase the album from iTunes, so I haven't been able to verify, but it would be nice if someone else could.

Have you checked the iTunes preferences? (Under the Edit menu on Windows.) Under the Downloads section there's a toggle for the preferred resolution.

Just listened to the CD, haven't seen the film yet. I've some first observations. (They're rather negative, open spoiler at your own risk.)

So per Coldplay's latest tweet, we know that Live in São Paulo will get an HD release on iTunes, at least. Still, a Blu-Ray version would be nice, which would be in a less compressed video format, and of which the copy-protection could be stripped without transcoding (I think).

The file is copy-protected, so simply sharing the downloaded file won't work. The only option as far as I know is to make a screen recording, or re-encode in some other way. (Or crack the protection somehow, but that's nontrivial, if at all possible.)

Some thoughts on the new UATW release. Most people seem to like the new silver bird part, but I liked the song for its humbleness, while this new addition makes it a bit too… grand? for me personally. About the production: I applaud them for not editing in excessive amounts of crowd noise for once. Also, Jonny sounds amazing, especially at the beginning. But what the hell happened to Will’s voice? His part sounds so autotuned and/or otherwise processed he almost sounds robotic to me. Or am I just crazy? Haven’t seen anyone else mention this. On the Butterfly release as a whole, I’m happy that they’re putting out (almost) full concerts this time, that’s a nice change from Live 2012. The mix of live performances and documentary didn’t work well in my opinion. I always skip around to watch just the performances. That said, I kind of wish they’d just put out more live stuff. As others have mentioned, this past tour had many special one-offs. I would find it more satisfactory to have a selection of concerts with a variety of setlists instead of just two “definitive” and highly-edited ones to listen to over and over again. Some bands release each and every concert. Anyway, I'm still looking forward to watching and listening to the release, and curious what they'll be like.

That’s right. Conversely, the São Paulo gig will only have a video release. Of course it’ll be possible to rip the audio from the video, but that might not work well because, as mentioned earlier in this thread, the Viva video uploaded yesterday has crowd noise fading in and out in sync with the video, which will make listening without watching feel weird.

Oh, right, the song wasn’t played that night. My mistake.

That's weird, yeah. I can't imagine this film not having a HD release at all, so perhaps another exclusive streaming deal is yet to be announced before the Blu-Ray version appears. Seems like it. That song has had a curious history, hasn't it. It also means that their claim that this is the first time a Coldplay concert has been released in its entirety is not 100% true. Also, if you play the newly released performance of Viva la Vida alongside a crowd-filmed video of that performance, say , you can see that in some shots Chris' position and movements don't match up; so those shots have been taken either from different concerts or from a different part of the song. Which isn't a big deal, they have so much footage to use; just something interesting to note. Edit: Since they played two dates in São Paulo, they'll probably use footage of both concerts, similarly to Live 2003.

Thanks for a very enjoyable listen! I was a bit worried at the start since I'm not fond of ranking music myself, but in the end the lists didn't bother me and I thought the discussions on the songs were very good. There was never a dull moment. It was striking how similar your lists often were! (And how different to mine, if I were to make them.) This may be a bit early in the show's lifetime, but do you have any plans to monetize the show? It seems to me like podcasters have an easier time to keep going if they get some revenue from it. Anyway, best of luck! I hope it gains some traction with music lovers. Also one small thing on the discussion on Aliens (if no-one else has pointed it out yet): the song actually originated in the Viva era, so that's why Brian Eno is credited. Check this post where someone pointed out that part of the song appeared in a documentary in 2009. So unfortunately it's very unlikely that they sat down with Eno in recent years.

Antwerp, Belgium. Hard choice, but I'll have to go with A Rush of Blood.

Could be, but then they would be incorrectly labelled FM. Also if the signal was already digital, then they shouldn't have re-encoded it at all. Unless that's impossible due to DRM or something. Here's 2011–2012. I might've missed something, I'll update if so. 2011-07-03 Main Square Festival, Arras, France 2011-06-11 Pinkpop, Landgraaf, Netherlands 2011-12-9 O2, London 2011-12-06 Dingwalls, London 2012-08-28 Parken, Copenhagen, Denmark 2012-09-06 Malieveld, The Hague, Netherlands ← This one is straight from the mixing desk. It's not a capture of a broadcast. Sounds pretty good :) 2012-09-12 Olympiastadion, Munich, Germany I'll repeat my edit from before which you might've missed since I wrote it while your were already writing your reply:

Yes, most of the Ghost Stories concerts sound really bad. Looking at the spectrograms of the other concerts I have in a lossless format, none of them seem to be truly lossless. Perhaps the band seeded the radio stations with a lossy stream or something. Anyway, here's the only other two Ghost Stories concerts I have in a lossless format. Both seem to have had a lossly conversion somewhere along the line. 2014-04-26 Kurhaus, Baden-Baden, Germany 2014-05-28 Casino, Paris, France ← This one's in .shn but it's a lossless format so it can be converted to FLAC without further loss of information. Edit: The recording of the Sydney you just uploaded sounds pretty bad. I guess it's an audience recording? I have an MP3 of the radio broadcast which sounds much better, if you're interested.

Okay, here's the one I mentioned. I'll upload more tomorrow, probably. 2014-07-01 Royal Albert Hall, London

Alright, so I should, for instance, upload the 2014-07-01 Royal Albert Hall concert, even though it was an “official” resource on the site previously?

Here's a first one. 2014-06-12 Tokyo Dome City Hall, Tokyo, Japan The spectrogram makes me suspicious of the actual losslessness of the audio, but I myself didn't convert the files in any way. Also what about these? Will they be (or are they already) up? The threads are still there but the associated resources don't seem to exist anymore. Just so I know whether or not to bother with the ones of those I have.

Great initiative! I'll contribute. I assume we post the links here in this thread?

Wow that’s very interesting and weird. For the first part of the first verse the live audience certainly got the prerecorded track; I recognize it since I’ve heard it way too many times. Then near the end of the verse I think I can hear a bit of both mixed in, until it’s fully live. I guess the intention was for the broadcast to be live as well but something got screwed up. Reminds me a bit of what happened with Up&Up on the Rose Bowl stream.

Interesting to know that such a thing happens in the industry. Chris definitely knows though. A little while ago they let a fan play Clocks on the piano with the rest of the band during a rehearsal (which is quite cool in itself) and Chris asked explicitly for his vocal track to be activated. The fan was blind, so Chris lip-synching while right next to her is quite the irony. She didn't know it was happening at all, apparently. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to link to her personal Facebook profile (links were deleted from ColdplayAtlas's Twitter page it seems) so I downloaded and re-uploaded the audio: https://mega.nz/#!hqRlxBoI!RB4eKqJYohG3rksgl_uLPg4Y3_TUmosFdBSO0CFnPNE Yes. Whenever they have the chance to do some post-production on the live tracks, they take the opportunity. From the same session, Will's backing vocals on Viva la Vida sound very weird.