Steve Litchfield

Back in the day, a photo used to be a negative or print, a video would be an 8mm film or perhaps VHS tape - and then the digital age was upon us, with the advent, especially, of phones with cameras. Starting with, arguably the Nokia N93, in 2006, we had useable, focussed, 3MP photos, and useable 'DVD quality' video files - captured from a phone. A photo was, typically, a .JPG file and a video was, typically, a .MP4 file (I won't get into codecs here, to keep things simple). Each - literally - just a file. And then manufacturers started adding on information. Some of which could be contained within the original files, but mostly... not. Starting with Nokia's experiments with 'live' photos on their Lumia phones around 2012, where a small section of video (from before the shutter was pressed and after) was captured and stored with the JPG photo. Then, with the core of Nokia's imaging team being made redundant and moving to Apple, we had live photos making a wel...

It occurred to me, when listening to a 'deluxe' album, remastered from a 1970s classic, with loads of bonus tracks, that recording music used to be a lot more fun, a lot more spontaneous. In 2023, in fact since about 1983, so for the last 40 years(!), recording music is about assembling parts of a jigsaw - drum parts here, bass there, keyboards there, vocals, and so on. All of which are recorded in 100% isolation and can be replaced, broken up, and generally juggled until the rendered whole, down to stereo, is as the artist wants it. I have some knowledge of all this, having at first done lots of home recording onto Foster and Tascam multi-tracks, then recorded an album in a real studio, plus lots of 'live' recording along the way in a variety of settings. So I'm listening to some of these 1970s out-takes and bonus tracks and it's blatantly clear how different recording was, especially for rock bands. Several tracks started with studio chatter "This might b...