Fantastic torrent available from the Burlington Irene Benefit concert. <a href="http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=379356">This is available via Dime A Dozen</a>. Thanks to JSJoyce of the forums for pulling all this info together. For those unflacers - <a href="http://uploadingit.com/folder/bvulqlzgvx6nfxaq/Grace&#37;20Potter">here is an MP3 archive of the show</a>

For those of you in the BitTorrent world, here's a link for some superb audio captured from the live broadcast (thanks "Mudshark" for the upload):


Grace Potter & the Nocturnals
Good Night Irene: Flood Relief Benefit Concert
Flynn Center for the Performing Arts
Burlington, Vermont
October 9, 2011

Lineage: HDTV > MPEG-2 (LPCM 16/48) > FLAC (16/48)

Detailed Lineage: Vermont Public Television HD > Cisco RNG200 DVR > Alpha-Core Micro-Purl 1M L/R RCA interconnects > Panasonic DMR-E500H DVD Video Recorder, internal HDD (XP/LPCM mode) > MPEG-2 (LPCM 16/48) > Audacity v1.3.13-beta with FFmpeg v0.6.2 for Windows > FLAC (16/48) > CD Wave Editor v1.98 (track splitting) > FLAC (16/48) > MP3tag v2.49 (file tagging) > FLAC (16/48)


01 - Vermont Public Television Intro
02 - U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy and Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin Speak About Tropical Storm Irene
03 - Nothing But the Water (I)
04 - Nothing But the Water (II)
05 - Only Love
06 - Sweet Hands
07 - Goodbye Kiss
08 - Joey
09 - Grace Introduces 'Apologies'
10 - Apologies
11 - Treat Me Right
12 - One Short Night
13 - Grace Delivers a Public Service Announcement
14 - Here's To The Meantime
15 - Ragged Company
16 - Grace Introduces 'Mad Mad River'
17 - Mad Mad River
18 - Tiny Light
19 - Colors
20 - Stop The Bus
21 - Paris (Ooh La La)
22 - Medicine
23 - Crowd and VPT Announcer Chatter
24 - Wild Horses (with Martin Sexton)
25 - Goodnight Irene (with Martin Sexton)
26 - Vermont Public Television Outro

Recorded, prepared for seeding and seeded (on Oct. 27, 2011) to Dimeadozen by Mudshark.

<!--more-->

Taper Notes:

I had the pleasure to attend this benefit concert in person. Before leaving home for the show, I set my Cisco RNG200 high-definition DVR to record the VPT high-definition simulcast. The audio and video quality are truly astounding for a last-minute local production (see below). As for the concert itself, I have seen Grace Potter & the Nocturnals perform at least a dozen times since 2005 and have heard recordings of countless other shows. This Goodnight Irene concert was -- along with New Year's Eve 2010-11 at Higher Ground in South Burlington, Vermont (the "Big Lebowski" show), which does not circulate -- the best they have ever sounded to my ears. This show features absolutely ferocious performances of concert staples such as "Joey," "Treat Me Right," "Stop The Bus" and "Medicine," to name but a few. In addition, the band performed a new song, "The Mad Mad River," which is about the devastating flooding effects that Tropical Storm Irene caused throughout Vermont in general and in the Mad River Valley town of Waitsfield in particular, which is where Grace Potter grew up. (There really is a "Mad River" in Vermont, and during Irene it overflowed its banks and wreaked massive havoc in the process.)

What also differentiates this show from any number of GPN recordings in circulation is the stellar sound quality. It could easily be a live album thanks to the excellent VPT production and sound mix -- it's that good.

To get the show off of my Cisco DVR so I could torrent it, I dusted off my 2005-era Panasonic DMR-E500H DVD Video Recorder, which contains a 400 GB internal hard drive. I set the Panny to XP/LPCM mode, which records audio (and video) directly onto the hard drive at the Recorder's highest sampling rate -- 16/48 LPCM. The Panny has a build in DVD burner, but I chose to bypass that and instead offloaded the resulting 7.5 GB MPEG-2 file directly onto my PC using the 'hack' described in this link: http://www.cjas.org/~jamesy/dc/dmre500h-offload.html. This is why there is no DVD in the lineage.

I then loaded the giant MPEG-2 file into Audacity (which is linked to FFmpeg), and that enabled me to save the MPEG-2 file's audio stream in FLAC format. I chose to keep the FLAC files in 16/48 format to preserve sound quality. The downside is that they cannot be burned to CD. However, the good news is that they can be burned to a DVD using a program such as lplex.

Finally, using Audacity I removed two diginoise clicks from "Treat Me Right" and one click each from "Ragged Company," "Stop the Bus," "Medicine" and "Wild Horses." There might be a few stray pops and clicks still about, and there are several random VPT announcer voiceovers during the show, but nothing that would cause someone to tear off his headphones in disgust.

Please stick around to help seed and please leave a comment if you like the show, but please do not torrent or upload this show elsewhere in a lossy format. Finally, if you do upload or torrent this FLAC file set elsewhere, please include the original info file and Checksum files. Thanks.

Here is a bit more about the concert and the VPT telecast from the VPT web site (http://www.vpt.org/node/1458):

Thousands of Vermonters tuned in to Vermont Public Television on air and online Oct. 9 to see the Goodnight Irene Flood Relief Benefit concert by Grace Potter & The Nocturnals live from the Flynn Center in Burlington. The concert brought the band back to Potter’s home state to support the Vermont Disaster Relief Fund, the Vermont Farm Disaster Relief Fund and the Mad River Valley Community Fund that are helping people recover from the effects of the late August floods after Tropical Storm Irene. Potter delighted fans with familiar numbers and the premiere of her song “The Mad, Mad River.” Interest in the webcast of the event was so high that VPT's server crashed briefly but was restored by the time the band came on stage. When the concert sold out within hours after it was announced in mid-September, VPT saw an opportunity to open it up beyond the 1,482 people lucky enough to get tickets. Televising and webcasting the concert made it available statewide and beyond, to people who have had losses from Irene and to the many who continue to dig deep to help them.

VPT had just two weeks to put the telecast together, a major effort made possible by partnerships with other broadcasters, equipment manufacturers and generous sponsors. For the first time on a remote production, VPT used a fiber optic Ethernet circuit from Teljet Longhaul to bring high-definition video from the theater back to its Colchester control center. This allowed for greater flexibility and higher quality than with traditional satellite or microwave transmission.

VPT officials were pleased to add to the band’s efforts by raising nearly $28,000 by phone and online during the two hours of the live coverage. The band is still tallying the results of their performances and related auctions.

Ben & Jerry’s, The Carris Corporate Foundation Inc., Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, People's United Bank and the Vermont Community Foundation sponsored Vermont Public Television’s production. The concert program is the latest effort by Vermont’s public television network to help Vermonters recover from Irene. It follows a joint fundraising effort with People’s United Bank, a call-in special with Gov. Peter Shumlin and a continuing web gateway for the disaster relief funds.