Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Radiohead Update

I got the "your download is ready" email last night. I was already asleep, so I didn't read it until this morning. I clicked the download link and voila, In Rainbows downloaded very quickly to my computer. It was a 48.4 MB zip archive of 10 MP3s. The MP3s were 160 KB CBR, which is a little disappointing. There was a lot of speculation that they would be 320 KB CBR. Actually 160 KB VBR would have been pleasing to me. Are there any MP3 players that have problems with VBR? It's superior to CBR in every way, especially @ 160 KB.

Anyways, everything was very smooth and fast. I was able to re-use the same link again from another computer. This is very nice and convenient. It looks like pre-ordering was definitely the way to go. I read this bit on NME about the official Radiohead site going down. What's interesting is that In Rainbows is not distributed from the official site. So the distribution site was obviously able to hold up to huge traffic and bandwidth demand, but the band's homepage did not. Maybe they should just move their homepage to MySpace like everybody else and let those guys deal with the infrastructure.

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