I found the unwatched, unloved 2007 show The Next Great American Band to be fantastic and was very disappointed when it fizzled and no album made for the winners, The Clark Brothers. Going on a year later, and having a craving for the Clark Brothers, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I found on YouTube were posted nearly all of their performances. With an older version of WireTap Pro, bought at the last MacHeist, I recorded all the songs. Tedious, but easy.
One at a time, I dragged the audio files into GarageBand and use it to trim the songs. I used the export to iTunes feature to send them directly to iTunes with a 256 kbps VBR rate. GarageBand was very beneficial, as it automatically normalizes the tracks during export, drastically improving the sound compared to the straight recording.
After exporting all the songs to iTunes, I edited their info to have the right artist, track name, and track number. I copied a photo of the group from their MySpace page and pasted it as the album art. A few hours later, I've got a 14-track quasi-bootleg, semi-live album of a band that I hope will soon have a real album for me to buy.
With this process, the only change I'd make is to find a better audio editor. GarageBand is adequate, and its auto-normalization and integration with iTunes is great. But it's somewhat clumsy for basic audio-file editing. Beyond that, creating a decent-quality "CD" from online sources is straight forward.
I found on YouTube were posted nearly all of their performances. With an older version of WireTap Pro, bought at the last MacHeist, I recorded all the songs. Tedious, but easy.
One at a time, I dragged the audio files into GarageBand and use it to trim the songs. I used the export to iTunes feature to send them directly to iTunes with a 256 kbps VBR rate. GarageBand was very beneficial, as it automatically normalizes the tracks during export, drastically improving the sound compared to the straight recording.
After exporting all the songs to iTunes, I edited their info to have the right artist, track name, and track number. I copied a photo of the group from their MySpace page and pasted it as the album art. A few hours later, I've got a 14-track quasi-bootleg, semi-live album of a band that I hope will soon have a real album for me to buy.
With this process, the only change I'd make is to find a better audio editor. GarageBand is adequate, and its auto-normalization and integration with iTunes is great. But it's somewhat clumsy for basic audio-file editing. Beyond that, creating a decent-quality "CD" from online sources is straight forward.
I think they're working on an album, maybe it will be through the efforts of the NGAB people. I hope they get something out. The Clark Brothers knocked me out -- I would love to see them in concert. Ah, found Idol's clip. Their "Little Light" song was their audition song for NGAB and seems to have become their "single". It's my second favorite from them so far.
