The Music

In glorious living mono!

Here are 24 MPEG sound clips, with .WAV file equivalents for 13 of them. These clips cover most periods of Spizz's career, and feature unreleased demos and live performances, as well of some of the official releases. Apologies for the sound quality on some clips - especially the demos and live stuff, which were sampled by plugging a walkman into the back of my computer.

Now that MPEG-3 is so common and popular I will be making .mp3 files available in the future. The .mp3 files will be in stereo and there will be some complete songs available. To start the ball rolling here is the complete reality edit of Spizzenergi's latest song E For England...E_for_England.mp3 (Full stereo, 3.6Mb)

Year	Song	Band	Length	.MP2	.WAV

1978	6000 Crazy	Spizzoil	16 sec	62Kb
1978	Cold City	Spizzoil	17 sec	67Kb
1978	Fibre	Spizzoil	22 sec	89Kb
1979	Where's Captain Kirk?	Spizzenergi	22 sec	105Kb
1980	Hot Deserts	Athletico Spizz 80	25 sec	101Kb
1980	Spock's Missing	Athletico Spizz 80	29 sec	114Kb
1982	Work	Spizzenergi2	19 sec	75Kb
1982	Jungle Fever	Spizzenergi2	21 sec	84Kb
1982	I Am An Island (demo)	Spizz with Colin White	51 sec	206Kb	1145Kb
1983	I Am An Island (demo)	Spizzorwell	53 sec	213Kb	1184Kb
1986	Spizz It Up (Live)	Spizzsexual	34 sec	138Kb	766Kb
1986	Living Is Better With Freedom (Live)	Spizzsexual	33 sec	132Kb	732Kb
1986	I Am An Island (Live)	Spizzsexual	66 sec	264Kb	1469Kb
1987	Living is Better With Freedom	Spizz	27 sec	106Kb
1987	Where's Captain Kirk?	Spizz	28 sec	113Kb
1988	Love Me Like A Rocket	Spizzorbit	23 sec	92Kb
1989	I Am An Island (Live)	Spizzivision	71 sec	283Kb	1573Kb
1990	The Sound Of Silence (Live)	Spizzoil	52 sec	208Kb	1156Kb
1990	Red Hot (Live)	Spizzoil	69 sec	277Kb	1537Kb
19??	Xplosive TV (Demo)	?	55 sec	220Kb	1223Kb
19??	Kate Adie (Demo)	?	43 sec	173Kb	963Kb
1996	The Sun Never Sets On Aston Villa	Spizzenergi	29 sec	115Kb	636Kb
1997?	The Model	Spizzenergi2000	38 sec	150Kb	1667Kb
1992	Where's Captain Kirk?	REM	60 sec	240Kb	670Kb

About the samples

Why MPEG? What's wrong with .AU or ..WAV?

MPEG gives much greater compressions than those other formats, which means the files are a lot smaller so I can fit a lot more into my allocation of space and you don't have to wait hours for them to download.

Why are they in mono instead of stereo?

Space again. Converting to mono cuts the file size in half. I also used a very low bitrate when converting the files which sacrifices some more sound quality, but makes the files even smaller. The end result is that a 510Kb .WAV file can fit into a 90Kb .MP2 file!

Why are the samples so short?

Partly for filesize reasons, but mainly because it helps to keep lawyers away! (I hope...)
The length and quality of the files are sufficient to give a reasonable idea of what the music sounds like: to hear the full tracks in CD-quality sound you'll have to get hold of the CDs. (Check out the info page.)

Where can I get more information about MPEG, and MPEG players?

Its not as hard as it sounds, here are some places you can go for more detailed help and a range of software.

MPEG.ORG
Everything you need to know about MPEG (audio and video)
Xing Technology
Creators of MPG Audio decoders and encoders
Syntrillium
Creators of Cool Edit - a sound wave editor which can read and create MPEG files.
MuseArc
A company which produce MPG software. (Only for Windows 95 and the documentation is in German)
Tucows
Generally good place to find software
SimTel
Another good place for software
Slightly Miffed
A British band who have a smart web site, containing large samples of their new CD in MP2 format, information about MPEG Audio, and a selection of MPEG Audio players for PCs, Macs, Unix and even the Amiga.