tech
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freesound’s bandwidth
Posted on March 12th, 2008 by Joshua Mostafa.
Categories: tech.
The Freesound blog has a discussion on audio codecs and the high bandwidth problems they’re facing.
The most sensible solution seems to be use of flac instead of wav format. FLAC is lossless, unlike MP3; and it’s specially designed for compression of audio files, unlike zip or bz2 or other general-purpose compression formats.
The problem is lack of user-friendly tools. The ones that are available have various drawbacks …
Surely it can’t be that hard to write a thin GUI wrapper for the command line that can convert back and forth?
shut your precious whining analogue mouth
Posted on August 20th, 2007 by Joshua Mostafa.
Categories: tech.
People who complain about digital media, who moan on about the difference between the “warm” sound of vinyl versus digitally encoded music, really piss me off. I could understand if they were fully committed Luddites, playing ancient madrigals on harpsichords, and condemning all forms of audio recording as sterilising music, that it should be a moment shared between musician and listener. I would disagree, but I would respect their point of view.
But people who claim to prefer the sound of digitally produced music when it has been recorded onto vinyl? Stupid. Peter Kain’s post on CDM sums it up:
If “new records have sound all over them”, and MP3s “take out some of the music,” does that mean the resulting record has the right amount of sound on it? You know, like taking your finger and wiping extra jam off of toast?
The flipside to this is the crappy sound quality that’s being accepted as OK in consumer devices and software. The default import bitrate for iTunes is a measly 128kbps, which means that a lot of the music I’ve imported (and thrown away the CDs, probably) is now way too low quality to play out. I will have to find these tunes and again and import them. But that was my bad for trusting Apple, or at least not thinking enough to distrust them.
320 MP3 is fine for most uses, or use FLAC if it really matters … the difference between the best and the worst in either digital or analogue is way more (to human ears) than the difference between the two. JA 7″ singles, for instance, are often of crap quality - way worse than even a low bitrate MP3. If you really object to digital encording, I have some overdue news for you:
Curse! This means the end of the horned phonograph and the little doggie that looks in to it!
kontakt script language
Posted on July 31st, 2007 by Joshua Mostafa.
Categories: tech.
I just bought Kontakt, and its script language looks interesting, but I can’t find a full API … anyone know where I should look?
wii remote as virtual theramin
Posted on April 12th, 2007 by Joshua Mostafa.
Categories: tech.
CreateDigitalMusic has a little article on using the Wii remote as a virtual theramin, among other uses … weird.
bpm counter
Posted on April 11th, 2007 by Joshua Mostafa.
Categories: music, tech.
Scratch Live is a beautiful thang (to misquote Spike Lee). Apart from the convenience of carrying around thousands of tunes in a laptop rather than lugging record boxes (and having doubles of every tune, and being able to treat any digital recording as if it were vinyl), you are also able to sort by BPM and quickly find tracks on a similar tempo - which gives rise to some combinations you might not otherwise think of.
This does mean, however, that you have to go through the laborious task of checking and saving the BPM of each of your tracks. There are some programs out there that claim to be able to do this automatically and in bulk, but don’t trust em. Maybe it works for house or techno, but if you’re playing proper music with a breakbeat or a broken beat or a one drop or a two step - or anything but the dumb rigid beat known popularly known as “4/4″ (technically, pretty much everything mixable is 4/4, even the most hectic out-there drumfunk, but that’s beside the point) - you’re stuffed.
So you have to do it the hard way, tapping out the beat while you listen to the tune on some kind of BPM counter. I used to use this one, but it’s buggy as, and I don’t think it works on Intel. I just found out about ltjBPM (nothing to do with Bukem, as far as I can tell). It works much better, you use the keyboard instead of the mouse, and it has a chimpanzee as the icon. What more could you want. Well done that monkey.
