NIN – The Slip

by 5:4

Continuing the practice of Ghosts I-IV a few months back, Nine Inch Nails‘ new album The Slip (Halo 27) is again available entirely free of charge. The 10-track album can be downloaded in a variety of audio formats: mp3, FLAC, apple lossless and high-resolution 24-bit/96kHz WAV files (apart from mp3, these are all downloaded via torrents). The last of these is a remarkable offering; Trent Reznor seems to be the only significant artist at present who both acknowledges the reality of how listeners want to procure the music and also that they’re rather keen to have that music at the highest possible resolution. In truth, i can’t see many people downloading the high-res files, as it only makes sense if played back on high-end audio equipment. It’s possible to download any/all of the available formats, so i went for everything except the mp3; download speeds this morning were very fast, the FLAC and apple formats taking about 4 minutes each to download (the high-res files took about 40 minutes!). In addition to the music, a JPG of the cover art and a PDF booklet are thrown in; an advantage to downloading the high-res WAV files is that the individual track artwork is included in separate high-quality JPGS (as it can’t be encoded within the audio file).

i’ve listened to the album once and found it impressive and thought-provoking, but it’s too soon to say more than that. To get The Slip and judge for yourself, click here. Incidentally, when Ghosts I-IV was first released, only the the first of the four EPs was available free of charge. Since then, however, Trent Reznor has put the complete album onto the Internet Archive for free download, available in FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, VBR mp3, 320Kbps mp3 and, bizarrely, 64Kbps mp3 (for dial-up users, perhaps?!). So if you haven’t got the whole album yet, get it here.


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