100 songs.
Two historic franchises.
What. A. Weekend.
I’ve been a Love Live fan since the winding-down days of the original School Idol Project, but during that time, I picked up the iDOLM@STER series starting with 765Pro and later Cinderella Girls. So to say this weekend had me excited is a pretty severe understatement. Albeit I know far more of the Love Live! side than the iM@S side, but getting to hear both in one weekend, and collabs across the two franchises, was nothing short of amazing.
What isn’t amazing, though, is the audio quality Stagecrowd gave to us. After going through so many hoops to get these (a DRM-protected platform for international fans, guys? Really?), I managed to back up copies of both days. Importing them to Handbrake to encode them in the usual H.265 MKV container I use, I discovered that the two channels of audio were given a measly 63 Kbps worth of bandwidth. That results in smaller source files than I’m used to, but also significantly worse audio quality than I would prefer.
Audio quality aside, these two nights are a must see for fans of either franchise. And I wouldn’t skip a night unless you’re really a solo oshi of one of the iM@S idols, as there were different iM@S cast members present for each night. And minus a few songs, the setlists were completely different between the two, meaning different solos, different group songs, and different collabs (and some legendary ones at that).
Playback for these files has been tested with the latest versions of VLC Media Player and MPV as of 12/13/23.
As always, please seed! Hit and runs only hurt others those who come after you.
Get it here!