Free Dream Theater Bootlegs And Rare Items

  If people asked me what my favorite Dream Theater show with Mike Mangini would be, I would say this one! It has some of the curveballs in the setlist which have been sorely lacking since Portnoy left the band: a version of Paradigm Shift with a guest appearance from Tony Levin, the only performance of To Live Forever after 2004, and a cover of the King Crimson song 21st Century Schizoid Man with Crimson ProjeKCt. Why this show was selected to be so eventful, I'm not sure. Mangini is also brimming with energy and passion here, especially on Breaking All Illusions. People who think he is robotic and soulless need to watch this. Also, This Is The Life and Lost Not Forgotten (two of the best songs from A Dramatic Turn Of Events in my opinion) were not played a great deal live. Unfortunately, these DVDs suffer from some big gaps in the audio between the .VOB files that interrupt the flow of these songs a bit. Download link: https://mega.nz/#F!h6RyECyR!JtV7aGqXw-kgPJdhjtMICw

This is a special post I've been planning for a long time. It got delayed because I did not receive the "Vive La France" bootleg from someone on schedule as predicted. Anyway, there's a very bad quality audience video of the show in Paris at Le Bataclan which is featured on the Once In A LIVEtime CD. Here are some thumbnails and a download link for the DVD: https://mega.nz/#F!BbQSFDbQ!MIFPoe7UBIoCncj5Vs-PGQ The main problems with this video (on top of the picture and sound quality simply being bad) is that the speed keeps changing, and it's also missing chunks of footage. There are numerous audio recordings of this show someone could use to combine with the video and make it watchable, as my friend Robo4900 did for Under A Glass Moon , and I've done so far for Hey You and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road . You have, of course, the Once In A LIVEtime CD itself, but I cannot legally share that. The things I can legally share are:   • The Once In A LIVEtime Ou...

  I recently got a bunch of rare bootlegs from the Six Degrees tour and this one stood out slightly  in terms of sound quality (which really says something about the others, since I would still only rate this one a B+).  Somebody may have requested this show of me too. I can't remember. The name of this venue is listed as either the The Rave or Eagles Ballroom. I think they're basically two different rooms inside the same building complex, but I'm not sure which room DT played in. Download link: https://mega.nz/#F!ECQygaLI!5SY1irq0u7gYufaXFo2k1g

  I posted a version of this show (the one with the mobius strip artwork ) on my YouTube channel earlier this year, but ended up removing it, because I later noticed the cymbal sound was super messed up, I probably did not notice at the time because I had a cold and my ears were sort of plugged up. That led me to seeking out some other versions of this show. This one, released on the Bondage Music label in Japan, does not have the messed up cymbal issue, but has some crackling (as if it was transferred from a vinyl) and tape hiss. The tapes might also be too slow - I'm not sure. I was planning on creating an improved version but I was not happy with my initial attempts at removing the noise, and so I this will have to be another project I leave up to someone else if they're up for doing it. Download link: https://mega.nz/#F!xOBmCBQa!O1fhICIa3nBGYyZwXPY5jw

    This is a rare-ish bootleg from Sylph Records in Japan (though I actually purchased one of the copies from a Korean website). I give the sound quality a B. Not bad at all for an audience recording, but maybe a little excessive around 2 kHz. Download link: https://mega.nz/#F!dO5HQLCb!vAyzrwURULDp2RC7FPg-8w

   DVD Specs: As some "Dreamers" know, there is a low quality webstream of the band's March 3rd, 2000 show at the Orlando HOB (I have sometimes seen audio bootlegs from this show labeled as Buena Vista or Lake Buena Vista). This is an extremely rare version of the stream which is "hi-gen" (meaning distortions introduced to the tape through multiple transfers) but free of the periodic freezing which afflicts the other two versions I've seen. The sound on this version is bad. Full of crackling noises and suddenly gets LOUD at times. So, what I would really like to see is for someone to combine the video in part or in full with the high quality soundboard audio from this show. I'm giving away a version called "Metropolis 1928: Scenes From Echo's Hill" which is better than others I've heard: CD 1: 01. Regression 02. Overture 1928 03. Strange Deja Vu 04. Through My Words 05. Fatal Tragedy 06. Beyond This Life 07. Amazing Grac...

    Although I previously was not intending on sharing any Dream Theater bootlegs after 2012 because I don’t like the direction the band’s sound has gone in (especially with LaBrie’s voice hitting the skids), I got the idea of sharing these bootlegs because they both stem back to the same record company (Doolin Records), and I don’t believe they justify the prices which have been asked for them on Discogs. The Barcelona one has a lot of crowd noise and phasing problems, probably from the wind blowing in an open air venue. The Astonishing one received the following nasty review: I don't feel quite that strongly about it, but it is sort of muddy and reverbated, and on the version of the album I got, "The Ashtonishing [sic]" is clearly misspelled, which isn't exactly a confidence builder: Anyway, here are the bootlegs so people can form their own opinions: Barcelona 2015: https://mega.nz/#F!YCwEmCib!joeAQwEhUKQMqcndSGfKgg The Astonishing Brussels: https://m...