Cain CDs...

[Risu-chan]

Gotta run in a couple seconds, but I thought I'd enthuse about the mailman and the nice package he brought me today -- the 3 Count Cain CDs I found back in February! ^___^ (Two of them are still for sale; the third never was for sale, it was a Hana to Yume special.)

Some of the casting is just insanely brilliant. For example:

Cain - Ishikawa Hideo (apparently a relatively new seiyuu but he's got a very good voice for Cain -- light, teenage tenor -- the only other thing he's done that I recognize is Tatsuha from Gravitation)

Riff - 1. Koyasu Takehito (who's been in EVERYTHING. He's been everybody from Aya in Weiss Kreuz to Hotohori in Fushigi Yuugi to Aburatsubo in MTT to Ilpalazzo in Excel Saga -- broody angstfest to ultrabishonen to flamingly gay to barking mad wannabe-world-conqueror... go figure...)
(Riff #2 in one of the CDs is Sugita Tomokazu; I don't know his name from anything but he's a fairly close vocal match for Koyasu Takehito, which is eerie because Koyasu has one of the most distinctive and unusual voices in the business...)

Alexis - Kosugi Juurouta (mostly known for Lantis/the other guy whose name starts with a Z that I can never remember in Rayearth, deep brooding baritone... ^__^)

And here's the one I think is particularly brilliant --
Dr. Jezebel - Miki Shin'ichirou (aka Allen Schezar in Escaflowne). I honestly can't imagine anyone ELSE doing his voice...

^______^ happy happy... wonder if S-C.net might want to host a couple representative tracks to give people encouragement to go find the CDs so they might make more of 'em...?

[tenjou_sama]

::resists the urge to strangle Risu-chan out of jealousy:: [img]wink.gif[/img]

I've never been able to find the Hana to Yume special release CD...but then again I can't remember the last time I looked [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[crisisdreams]

Hehe...Risu-chan, we would LOVE to host some sample tracks!

Oh, and Carole, and if you're realllllly dying for the CDs I can pick some up for you in Hong Kong. (If they're still there...besides, I owe you a favour for buying all three Alichino books) They were selling them in the shops here, but I never bothered buying them because I
1) am a cheapskate when it comes to buying anything for myself and
2) was stuck at home for a month. ^x^

*sigh* I still regret not buying that "Count Cain Special Pack" (stickers, postcards, folder, GAHHHHH) I saw in the shop, which was about $30 US. I guess it wasn't THAT much...
....
I'm going to slip into depression if I keep thinking about how awesome that pack would have been. Hopefully no one got to it yet and there'll be more, since Count Cain is getting really popular now. (There used to be tons of AS stuff, but those are slowly being replaced)

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ April 17, 2003 03:32 AM: Message edited by: Crisis ]</font>

[Risu-chan]

If you're looking on eBay, don't bother -- I've only seen one of the CDs in 3 months of looking and it went for $60 something.

Whereas Yahoo JP has LOTS of all three of them -- one going at $5 at the moment...

My standard "Count Cain" search on Yahoo Japan

I paid $25 for both of the normal CDs, which is about what one of them would cost new, and $10 for the not-for-sale one... of course the shipping ended up being $20, but I shipped a couple other cheap and ancient CDs with it. (I love it when you find something that's been out of print since 1991 and because nobody over there wants it anymore, you get it for $2.50...)

If anybody wants 'em, I can testify that www.celga.com are friendly and efficient... just keep track of what you bid on, because they charge you as things happen, and once in a while they misread someone's handwriting when something's been shipped to them and they send you the bill. It doesn't happen often, but once I bid 3000 yen (about $25) on an auction and they misread the seller's handwriting as 3600 yen and tried to charge me that instead; I wrote back and gave them the auction URL for proof and they fixed it promptly though.

if anyone wants some that are ending in the next few days, poke me and I might be able to add it to the order that's got the Cain doujinshi in it. (But I'd rather not try to join up an auction lasting any longer than Sunday because that would put off the shipping that much further...)

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ April 17, 2003 11:27 AM: Message edited by: Risu-chan ]</font>

[Risu-chan]

The sound levels on the two older CDs are a lot different than on the new one -- you'll probably need to push the volume a lot (and/or the preamp) to be able to hear the old ones very well. I'll try to fix some of that when I WMA-ify some of them this evening (so they take less space)...

I actually think Riff's new actor (Sugita Tomokazu, on the Hana to Yume zen-in God Child CD) is a whole lot better for the part than Koyasu Takehito is. Koyasu-san's got too much of an "I'm the center of any story I'm in" voice -- it works great for playing emperors and megalomaniacs and brooding and/or outrageous lead-types, but not so well for Riff. ^^;;

His replacement Sugita-san, though, both has a lower baritone than Cain's range (so they sound easily distinctive from each other on the CD) and knows how to make himself sound like a polite and restrained and soft-spoken servant...

$.02... ^__^

[darkSana]

Ooooh, please, rip them and put on s-c.net I beg you ! You can use my account to keep them if there is no much space on s-c.net for mp3 files O____O

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ April 18, 2003 07:54 AM: Message edited by: Ami Kurata ]</font>

[Risu-chan]

I WMAed them (because you can get equivalent sound quality in less space and Winamp still plays WMAs), but here's the ironic thing:

I don't ordinarily release MP3s of CDs into the wild, so to speak, unless I've got something I know is out of print and bloody impossible to find and there's no chance that a sale of it would help the original author because the company that made it isn't releasing it anymore and the only copies available are used.

In the God Child zen-in CD's case, that definitely applies -- it's not only out of print, it was never for commercial sale in the first place (you had to collect Hana to Yume things and mail them in).

So I think it's not hurting the company's profits to release all the tracks on that CD -- plus that one's STILL the one that's most worth tracking down in an auction and buying, because it has the most cool extras that come with it (including an illustrated book with all the dialogue written in it so I could theoretically translate the whole thing if I ever got insanely ambitious).

I find it ironic that they didn't include that many cool extras on the ones that ARE for sale, but they didn't...

and unlike manga, if you have the music of a CD without many extras, there's nothing else to encourage you to buy them. Scanslations aren't a replacement for real manga; they're lower quality because they're on a screen which has lower resolution than print, you can't really appreciate the intricacies of the linework and shading since the scaling often does nasty things to the gradients used, and a lot of people go and buy the real manga so they can use scanslations to study the original language with.

With music tracks, they're not "scanslatable." The music is all there is to it. So if you have all the tracks of a CD that's still for sale, you have no reason to go buy it...

So I think I'm going to pick some sample tracks from the two that are still for sale and give S-C.net samples, but not the whole CDs, because that way it'll encourage people to go get the actual CDs of the ones that ARE buyable... (of course I'm going to pick out the ones I think are really cool tracks, so that people will have good motivation! ^^;

It really is ironic that the one that's the hardest to find and the one I consider the most worth buying is the one that's not for sale! ^_^;;

[Risu-chan]

Yay! Have my finger back! ^__^ And yay! Crisis has the music files via FTP...

Ami, were you still potentially interested in hosting 'em?

(I also sent a bunch of stuff for the Goodies section while I was at it... ^_^)

[crisisdreams]

Whoops...this was originally posted in Kami no Matsuei nocturnes. I have no clue how it ended up there. ^^

The CD files were lovely. ^^ I've got them all set up on a page yet, but I'm going to hold it for a few more days before releasing it since all of the files together are 55 mb (whoo!) and that would be a lot of space of bandwidth. Sakura and I are still looking at hosters and seeing how much space we have available now, so that problem should be solved soon. XD

And I love Riff's voice. Mmmm...perfect choice.

Merry sounded perkier and cuter than I thought she would be, but it fits after listening to it for awhile. ^^ It would have been nice if the mother goose songs (like the pudding song) had been sung in English though. XD

Oh, and I love all of the goodies! Yay...goodies goodies goodies. Phone cards, cd covers, calendars...

[Risu-chan]

Will wonders never cease....

eBay search which currently turns up both a full set of Cain manga (1-5) AND two of the three CDs...

I never thought I'd see the day when a search on eBay produced those! Looks like S-C.net has been winning some converts outside Japan...

shh, back to work. ^_^ But thought I'd post it here in case anyone wanted to own their own copies of the CDs...