4 posts tagged “mp3”

I think this tune still needs some more work with regard to the levels of the individual parts but here's a little sample of what I've been working on lately.  This is an MP3 converted from Reason after exporting it directly as a 24-Bit, 96K stereo AIFF file.  I then custom tuned the Ozone 3 Mastering Plug-in with the tape saturation simulation effect to get a warmer sound in Peak before I bounced the file with the plug-ins to disk.  After the bounce, I encoded the file with Peak to a 320K MP3 file at the highest and slowest encoding speed just prior to exporting the file from Peak. 

I think some of the sounds could stand to be a bit louder in the mix but this is yet another sonic experiment.  I think I might need to subdue some of the drum parts in the upper mid range of the frequency spectrum and accentuate some mids in the sound clouds that occur here and there during this under six minute song.

All of the drums sounds are Roland TR-808 samples taken from a collection that a friend of mine and I created at Naut Humon's recording studio in San Francisco many years ago for some synthesizer/sampler project.  I think they sound pretty nice but I wish I could get my mixes a bit louder without introducing a lot of breathing or pumping like I hear on so many rock/pop style records.  Oh well.

Here's the link to the file in case you missed it above:

http://www.belief-systems.com/music/SibilanceDraft4.mp3

Check out the site sampleswap.org, a sample sharing website that is an Ontology project.  Samples can be browsed, auditioned and tossed in a virtual "basket" that is up to 20MB.  After the files in the basket are compressed, an email with a link to the file is sent to you and the .zip file is downloaded.  There's no limit to the amount of audio you can download either and the cost is absolutely zilch.

There's no guarantee that the uploaded samples are "cleared" samples but the service is a great idea.  I've already downloaded a basket of sounds that I found there.  I guess I should also upload some of the sounds that I've made that I've contributed to many of my friends but never to a public forum like this.

The new Darkel album is due out the 18th of September, 2006.  Darkel is Jean-Benoît Dunckel, one half of the French space-rock/electronica duo Air.  For this project, JB sheds his Air band mate Nicolas Godin and strikes out on his own with Laurent Griffon on guitars and bass and Earl Harvin picking up the drumsticks for a couple of the album's songs.  Check out the Darkel myspace site for more tunes from the new album.

Air's 2004 release Talkie Walkie [shown below] is a fabulous record and the new offering from one half of the duo looks to be interesting and similar on some songs to the Air sound and a departure from the norm on other cuts such as At the End of the Sky, available for preview via the official Darkel site and with the spunky TV Destroy which is a bit more rockin' and rollin' than drum machine programmin' style of music Air fans have become accustomed to.

The Air myspace.com site has a blog news blurb about the Charlotte Gainsbourg album that the duo contributed to as well as the release info for the new Darkel album scheduled for this month.  The blurb also mentions that the finishing touches are being applied to songs for the next Air album scheduled currently for release in the Winter of 2007.  Michel Gondry's new movie "The Science of Sleep" that Charlotte Gainsbourg stars in is also mentioned in the blurb along with a link to the movie soundtrack's myspace page.

I can't wait for the new Air album but the Darkel release will quench the thirst for now.  The complete MP3 of the song At the End of the Sky and a video for it are available at the myspace.com Darkel site.

There has been a tremendous amount of news and discussion in online print news articles and on technology blogs for many months about Apple's closed DRM [Digital Rights Management for the uneducated] "FairPlay" and the efforts to disable it via the JHymn Project, how the technology limits the user to a specific number of copies of playlists that can be made, computers that the encrypted files can be played on, and the iPod-only playback restriction and other associated Apple DRM details. 

I'm a big fan of Apple and have been a Macintosh user for most of my computer using life.  I spent a short stint while at Topica, the web 1.0 mailing list creation and management website, running a Windows NT box using programs like Outlook and IE but I had a Mac at home that was my main personal use computer. 

I have to say that I'm a staunch Apple guy due to the slick design and closed loop hardware integration that is not found in most PC offerings.  All this despite the fact that many software applications are released for the PC before the Mac and sometimes not at all for the BSD-based operating system.

Despite my support for the Cupertino-based company, I am not at all a fan of the concept of copy protection for software, music or movies but I do understand why it's there and why record companies and movie studios are so freaked about piracy.  Clandestine piracy groups in countries like China and Russia are unbelievably efficient at releasing bootlegs of music just after a disc has been released, or in the case of movies, while they're still in theaters.

What I do like about iTunes is the fact that I can use it for research on artists I like, see the new releases as they come out and get a sampling of what the music sounds like before I go to an actual store and purchase the music in it's pristine, albeit somewhat bit limited 16-bit 44.1kHz glory [I won't get into the 16-Bit vs. 24 bit debate here]. 

There's also an RSS feed generator for the the iTunes music store that can be customized to return a feed that will serialize or syndicate various genres of iTunes music based upon criteria such as Just Added, New Releases [not sure what the difference between the two is], Top Songs, Top Albums, Featured Albums & iTunes Exclusives [it really sucks that some artist's songs are only released in Apple's lossy, encrypted low-bit rate format and there's no way to get those tunes in a high-quality format, yet], as well as controls for determining which iTunes Music store to retrieve the list from [the US, and 20 other countries] and how many feed items are retrieved.

What I don't like about iTunes Music Store is the lack of a bookmarking feature.  While I search for gainful employment, I am subscribed to the New Releases feed and I regularly find music that I would like to buy but there's no way to add an album or song to a favorites list like I can on the popular alternative to iTunes, Pandora.  Because of the lack of a bookmarking feature in iTunes, I've been forced to keep a text file with all of the albums and artists that I find that I'm interested in saved locally on my computer for later purchase.

Another thing that I don't like about the iTunes Music Store is its lackluster cooperation with the web browser Safari.  Albums and artists on the iTunes Music store have web URLs but you'd have to know what you're looking for to find them.  If you Control + Click [on the Mac of course, possibly Right-click on the PC] an artist or album name in the upper section of the store where the album thumbnail is located, a pop-up appears that allows you to copy the URL of the item that was clicked on to the clipboard so that you can send that link to someone else that also has the iTunes Music Store installed, or paste the link into a text file for later retrieval.

Another aspect of the store that I find lacking in this social networking age is a social reputation functionality.  It might be useful to see what some of my friends or favorite music taste makers on iTunes were listening to.  It would also be a really kewl feature to be able to see what some of my myspace.com, Tribe.net, Live Journal or friendster friends were listening to as well;  The ones that I thought actually had good taste in music of course.

While I hope that things on the DRM front change someday and Apple decides to license the DRM technology to the myriad of MP3 player companies that seem to be endlessly appearing these days, I serious doubt that will occur anytime soon.  The reason for this is that Apple doesn't make much money on the songs themselves.  The money for Apple is in the sale of iPods themselves and so it's not in their business interests to do so, even though licensing fees for third party players could certainly argue against that pespective too.

I am a freak when it comes to audio quality and the iTunes Music Store's 128-bit encoded AAC files just don't cut it sonically for me.  Many people don't care as much as I do about quality and the iTunes Music Store files are just fine for them.  I normally buy a CD and rip it from the CD at the pristine 16-Bit, 44.1kHz rate and then from there, dither the songs down to a 256K encoding rate for later playback on my car's Alpine CD palyer that also features an iPod connector.   Every car CD player should have this option or something similar to it.

I have a few songs that I previously purchased via the iTunes Music Store and honestly the quality of the audio during dense sections of specific songs is painful to listen to.  A lot of the punch in the music is lost at low bit rates.  I find this is most obvious when music is listened to in headphones where the artifacts are most noticeable. 

While I mentioned that I'm a huge fan of Apple Computer and have a few friends that actually work there, I seriously doubt that I will ever buy an iTunes Music Store song again.  There have been rumors that Apple might someday release lossless audio versions of the tunes on the site but I can't imagine how long it would take to replace all of the albums on the site and how much they would cost if they did.  Even Apple's lossless audio codec introduces sonic artifacts, or distortions to the original audio stream that are audible to the discerning ear and I just can't listen to craptacular audio inhibited by the restrictive FairPlay DRM any more.

So, for now I will use the iTunes Music Store to help me create a list of albums and artists I want to purchase to avoid entering a store like Amoeba Music where I am overloaded with marketing and end isle displays and I completely forget what I came in for. 

Just as a side note, it's very easy to remove the DRM from an iTunes Music Store purchased file.  Simply burn it to a CD and re-rip the disc.  Unfortunately, the re-encoding process will add additional artifacts to the file so the quality will be even worse after the re-ripping.  Ever since the iTunes Music Store hit version 6, the JHym project app that I linked to earlier in this entry has not been updated to work with the new version of the site.  Any music downloaded from iTMS6 cannot be de-DRM'd using the JHymn app.  Oh well...

The list of FairPlay restrictions from wikipedia.org's FairPlay page...

FairPlay will allow a protected track to be used in the following ways:

• The protected track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players.
• The protected track may be played on up to five (originally three) authorized computers simultaneously.
• The protected track may be copied to a standard Audio CD any number of times.
  • The resulting CD has no DRM and may be ripped, encoded and distributed like any other CD. However, as the CD audio still bears the artifacts of compression, converting it back into a lossy format such as MP3 may aggravate the sound artifacts of encoding (see transcoding).
    
• A particular playlist within iTunes containing a protected track can be copied to a CD only up to seven times (originally ten times) before the playlist must be changed.

FairPlay does not affect the ability of the file itself to be copied. It only manages the decryption of the audio content.

An intentional limitation of Fairplay is that it prevents iTunes customers from using the purchased music on any portable digital music player other than the Apple iPod.