* 24bit 96Khz version *

Broadcasted on 24 march 1977 by Radio Arancia on FM Stereo and, therefore, with the DJs talking over the music here and there.

This is a revision compiled from 2 cassettes, one being an edited copy of the other one and some other (now lost) cassette. These two cassettes are one TDK D-C90 from 1979-81 and an older obscure c90 cassette branded Diamante, but which looks suspiciously like some cheap cassettes produced by the old italian Scotch/3M factory on behalf of this Diamante brand. The full RAW transfers of these 2 cassettes will be torrented shortly.

Lineage of the Diamante c90 tape: nakamichi 550 with two external mics > aud master cass > remastered (and edited?) on 1st gen R2R tape for the broadcast > FM b/c > Diamante cassette > Technics RS-B565-MH * > Echo Audiofire 4 > WAV 96Khz 24bit

Contents of the Diamante c90 tape: DOGS , PIGS (3DO) , SOYCD 1-5 , SOYCD 6-9 , Money.

Lineage of the TDK D-C90 tape: nakamichi 550 with two external mics > aud master cass > remastered (and edited?) on 1st gen R2R tape for the broadcast > FM b/c > Diamante cassette + some lost cassette > TDK D-C90 > Technics RS-B565-MH * > Echo Audiofire 4 > WAV 96Khz 24bit

Contents of the TDK D-C90 tape: POTW pt1 , DOGS , POTW pt2 , PIGS (3DO) , Sheep (missing the very end) , SOYCD 1-5 (missing some of the beginning) , WTTM (fades out a bit too early) , WYWH , SOYCD 6-9 , Money (missing a piece in the middle of the guitar solos just before the end, and it also misses a few seconds at the very end).

* The Technics RS-B565-MH is a deck modified by vince666

The added lineage on this torrented version is: (Diamante and TDK) WAV 96Khz 24bit > WAV 96Khz 32bit float > speed correction > editing/patching > dither to 24bit > WAV 96Khz 24bit > track splits > FLAC 96Khz 24bit

01. Sheep (incomplete)
02. Pigs on the Wing part 1
03. Dogs
04. Pigs on the Wing part 2
05. Pigs (3 different ones)
06. Shine on You Crazy Diamond parts 1-5
07. Welcome to the Machine (fades out a bit too early)
08. Wish You Were Here
09. Shine on You Crazy Diamond parts 6-9
10. Money

Total Running Time = 98:27

Nipote's comments: A few years ago, talking with an Italian collector, I learnt that some guys from a radio station in 1977 went to Paris and recorded the Pink Floyd concert which, exactly one month later, was broadcasted by the same radio station. The collector told me that he was in possession of a digital copy of the master, but for a crashed pc he had lost everything (but if I have to tell the truth I didn't believe him much ...). However, this was the starting point of this research. I went back to the broadcaster and the taper, who is now a political figure and has never responded to my attempts to make contact with him. The research had stalled but it was always one of my priorities, also because I had listened to the Money sampler and there were some really good reasons to continue. A couple months ago, by chance, browsing a Facebook page about Pink Floyd, I saw a post by MV, who published a picture of two cassettes recorded from the radio broadcast of Radio Arancia, a radio station that no longer works. I contacted him immediately and convinced him to send them to me. The tapes were actually in very bad condition, so I thought I'd ask for help to one of the best technicians and Pink Floyd enthusiast in circulation, sending him everything. I am very satisfied with the final result, really enjoyable despite the DJs. Anyway, the hunt for the Master continues, and who knows ... One Of These Days ....

MV's comments: What I'd like to say is that, possibly, this one is the best gig i've listened from that 1977 tour and, then, I believe we did lose a really great show!

Vince666's comments: While thanking nipote for his very sweet words (and for finding these tapes, of course!) , I have to admit that, when he told me that the reels of these cassettes didn't turn too easily, I couldn't just imagine which were the actual conditions of these cassettes... Really, I had never happened to handle any cassettes in such a bad shape then, at first, I thought it would have just been a success if I were able to play only a portion of them. But, with a whole lot of patience and some madly careful work, I could finally play both tapes entirely! Into this torrent, you will find a folder containing a few pictures i've taken before, during and after repairing these two cassettes, just because I wish to show you what was going on with them. The titles of the pictures where i added words like "before" , "fixing" or "fixed" will tell you at which stage of the work I did shoot any of the pictures... As you can see, the Diamante cassette was in terrible shape, with some incredibly uneven winding and, as a consequence, the tape which had folds each few centimeters throughout the whole 135 meters of the tape lenght, and which i had to unfold one by one (see pictures n7-8 of the Diamante cassette) to avoid that the tape got immediately eaten if tried to play with those folds which reduced the tape width and made it skew into the deck's tape guides/path, as well as physically covering part of the playable tape surface. But, before going to unfold all those segments, I had to carefully wind the whole tape manually with a BIC pen (and I had to wind it fully, by hands, a few times) because all of the folds and the uneven winding made the tape reel a bit too large to correctly fit into the cassette shell. Once the tape was nicely wound, I did transplant it onto a good Sony shell, because the original Diamante one is really a poor quality one. While, the TDK tape was in much better shape with uneven winding and tape folds only on the most external part of the tape reel. The TDK tape was left into its own original shell, being just a good quality one.

Then, I was finally able to play and transfer them!
I had to make more transferring attempts to finally get a reasonably good transfer, in fact, the 3rd transfer of the TDK and the 2nd transfer of the Diamante are the ones which I did actually choose for this restoration work and release.

The Diamante cassette does contain only 5 songs in total, but it's lower gen than the TDK (being one of the source cassettes used to record it) and it does also have some more segments of audio before the start and after the end of the songs. The TDK cassette does contain the same 5 songs as in the Diamante (even if with a few cuts) and also some more songs which were suppousedly copied from another source cassette which is lost now. Of course, after all these years, the owner of these cassettes just cannot remember exactly all the details related to these cassettes and how they were copied, but it's quite evident that the TDK is a sort of compilation tape made from the Diamante and from some other (now lost) tape.

While transferring these tapes, I did soon realize that, even if these tapes have a lot of damage due to the very bad winding, their sound was just good (and especially the sound of the Diamante tape, the one which is damaged throughout the whole lenght) and, luckily, save for the surface damage which did cause lots of drop-outs here and there, the tape itself did survive well and, in fact, it wasn't sticky nor it did release any dirt on my deck's transport.

So, the second step of the restoration process was to load both transfers on my trusty Steinberg Wavelab to try to make the recording as complete as possible and by choosing the better sounding portions from these 2 cassettes. Please, don't be misleaded by the sound quality of the first song, Sheep, which is the one with the least good sound into the whole recording (even if it's not that bad anyway!)... Most of the times, when I had the same song from both cassettes, I preferred to choose the Diamante version, the one with a lot of damage and drop-outs but also with a better sound quality and, of course, I went and made a considerable number of patches from the TDK, to fill the most noticeable/annoying drop-outs. When I did use short segments from the TDK to patch a song taken from the Diamante, I had to apply level adjustments and also some EQ to the short patches, to try to make them slightly less noticeable. But they will still be a bit noticeable, even if I believe it's better if you can notice the sound changing from a short moment than to simply hear a drop-out, which means almost no sound on one channel (or both). But when I did directly choose a whole song from the TDK, I did only apply some minor level adjustments. While the audio taken from the Diamante wasn't altered neither in level nor in EQ, save for some local level adjustments on the most ruined bits. Of course, I did also apply speed correction process to the whole thing.

The finished work is still far from perfect, and I know I might have kept working on it like forever to try improving it even more than this but, at a certain point, when the recording did finally flow in a quite nice way, I had to consider it ready to go, so that we can all enjoy it right now. The full raw transfers of both of these cassettes will be soon available, if you're curious to listen to both cassette transfers in raw/untouched/unrestored shape. I must admit this was the most long and difficult work I happened to handle, so far. But, surely, the final result is a whole lot better than I expected when I gave my first look at these damaged tapes. Then, even if the recording is still full of imperfections, I do still consider it a really successful tape repairing and restoration work!

here below, you have a detaled list of which versions I did choose while compiling this torrent:

Sheep = taken from the TDK with some local level adjustments here and there.

POTW pt1 = taken from the TDK with level boosted by 1.5dB

Dogs = taken from the Diamante with several drop-outs patched from the TDK, starting from about 10:40 and on.

POTW pt2 = taken from TDK with level boosted by 1dB.

Pigs = taken from the Diamante, with several short patches from the TDK but from about 16:50 there is a long patch of about 30 seconds which lasts up to the last drums hit at the very end of the song, because that zone at the end of the song was very damaged on the Diamante tape and, on the TDK, that part doesn't sound that bad at all, in comparison.

Shine On 1-5 = first (circa) 7:30 minutes are from the Diamante, the rest is from the TDK but the very end is, again, from the Diamante.

WTTM = taken from the TDK as is.

WYWH = taken from the TDK with level boosted by 1dB.

Shine On 6-9 = taken from the Diamante with several patches from the TDK (mostly from about 0:26 to about 0:39 and from about 3:40 to about 5:40).

Money = taken from the Diamante with a couple local level adjustments.

Last but not least, I did write all the DJ's chat and also translated it to english. The guys talk so much that, at least, if you can understand what they're saying, then their talking will become part of the fun, otherwise it will only be some unwanted/unneded noise which is covering some of the music. Moreover, you will just get that funny "time capsule" impression of being back in 1977 while listening to a PF gig over the radio! You'll find a rtf file containing the DJ's chat in both italian and english but I also added a pdf version of it, which is a more universal file format. Since english isn't my mother language, I hope my translation will be of sufficiently good quality. The DJs used to say several expressions which I never needed/happened to translate to english before and which wouldn't properly work with a strictly literal translation, then I needed some help from websites such as context reverso to try to find a "working" english version of some of these expressions.

enjoy, Vince.

MV cassettes / nipote arrangements / vince666 tape repair, transfer and restoration, November 2020.