Audio

Related to my musical interests, obviously, but more focused on the tech.

Metadata goodies

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Not useable metadata goodies, unfortunately, but still, this is good to hear. Apparently, Gracenote — maintainers of the CDDB (which iTunes and many other audio players use to provide track information upon insertion of a CD) have many additional possible data fields that can be used, according to this comment sent to Macintouch (emphasis mine):

Classical music is a difficult problem for almost all digital media players. The rock & pop music world is much different than the Classical world – the data fields are not sufficient for describing Classical music. The Gracenote database has support for Composer, Ensemble, Orchestra, Conductor, and many other fields, but many applications choose not to support these fields. So over the years, the fields have been overloaded in meaning and in data. We recently re-wrote our Classical music standards so that existing applications can begin to be more consistent. But more importantly, Gracenote’s next generation database will fully support Classical music metadata like no other database. We are working to spread these changes out to our application developers, including Apple. Our editorial team is working hard to standardize the existing Classical data as well, partnering with experts in the industry. Look for big changes in 2004 and 2005.

Hopefully these extra fields trickle down to iTunes in a (near) future release!

iTunes: “1st Premonition (DBX)” by Giannelli, Fred from the album Sound of Superstition, The Vol. 5 (1997, 6:08).

Sample-liscious!

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Feel like having some sampling fun with George W. Bush? Head on over to the George W. Bush Public Domain Audio Archive.

The George W Bush Public Domain Audio Archive is a public domain database of the speeches of George W. Bush. Every phrase from each major speech has been made into an individual audio file, where the filename is, in most cases, the exact text content of the sample. This allows you to search the entire database for individual keywords. […] What you do with the database is up to you. Musicians, linguists, historians, media professionals, students and activists may all find this database to be of use. You are free to download and use these samples for any purpose, both non-commercial and commercial.

(via BOP)

iTunes: “Fuzzy Math” by Bots, The (2004, 3:27).

iTunes supports AC3 and DTS?

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I was just reading this Macworld article on how AirTunes works (the new audio streaming technology built into Airport Express), when I noticed this paragraph…

If iTunes is playing back a digital multichannel file format like AC3 (Dolby Digital) or DTS, those bitstreams are wrapped in Apple’s compression and encryption, and then decoded at the other end. In those cases, AirPort Express would end up streaming the raw AC3 or DTS stream via an optical cable to your home theater receiver for decoding.

blink

iTunes can play and output AC3 and DTS? How does that work — and from what source? Are there standalone AC3/DTS audio tracks out there somewhere? I’ve generally only seen them used on DVDs, though I know that there are some audio CDs made that use DTS, and probably some that use AC3. If I had such a CD, how would I put an AC3/DTS audio track into iTunes?

I don’t have a use for this information right now, I’m just really curious. It’s news to me.

iTunes: “Sweet Surrender (Roni Size v2)” by McLachlan, Sarah from the album Plastic Compilation Vol. II (1998, 4:00).

Tori Amos: Tales of a Librarian

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Tori Amos has a new “greatest hits” collection available at the iTunes Music Store called ‘A Tori Amos Collection — Tales of a Librarian‘. Normally, this wouldn’t be terribly interesting to me, as I already have a very large Tori collection, and therefore wouldn’t have much need for a compilation album. However, this one caught my eye for two reasons.

Firstly, there are two exclusive tracks included only if you purchase the full album through the iTMS: Putting the Damage On (Reconditioned) and Pretty Good Year (Live from Sound Check). Secondly, all of the songs have been ‘reworked’ or ‘reconditioned’, which made me curious.

So far, I’m fairly impressed with what I’ve heard. None of the new versions are entirely new — in fact, on some of them, the changes are so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable, and I was initially starting to wonder if they had simply used ‘reworked’ rather than ‘remastered’ as a term and had just re-issued the original tracks. However, there are some definite changes to the tracks, usually in the form of a few extra instruments here and there, an extra vocal track or harmony line…slight edits and additions that flesh out the tracks a bit more.

One noticeable exception to the rule is the ‘reworked’ version of Professional Widow, which actually appears to be an edit of Armand van Helden’s dance remix of the track!

Overall, it’s not a must-buy for most people, but for a collector or for someone (like me) who gets a kick out of listening to a track’s production, trying to identify how it was all assembled, the collection is definitely worth the download.

iTunes: “Professional Widow (Reworked)” by Amos, Tori from the album A Tori Amos Collection – Tales of a Librarian (2003, 3:47).

GarageBand is evil

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I’ve poked around with GarageBand a bit since I got it, but haven’t created anything major yet. However, it is way too much fun.

It’s also far too easy for me to put together something really, really stupid with it. This is dangerous. Fun — but dangerous.

And here’s the evidence: countrybounce — 71 seconds of banjo and drum loops.

I’m sure I can come up with something better than that given time. But for the moment, this stupid little ditty is it.

Enjoy.

Or don’t.

;)

iTunes: “Must I” by Lizette & from the album This Is (2003, 3:32).

Announcing the…iHPod?

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In an unexpected (and potentially extremely lucrative) partnership, Apple and HP announced today that HP will be re-branding and selling Apple iPods and including iTunes pre-installed on HP branded desktop computers.

Working to provide consumers with the most compelling digital content whenever and wherever they desire, HP and Apple® today announced a strategic alliance to deliver an HP-branded digital music player based on Apple’s iPod™, the number one digital music player in the world, and Apple’s award-winning iTunes digital music jukebox and pioneering online music store to HP’s customers.

As part of the alliance, HP consumer PCs and notebooks will come preinstalled with Apple’s iTunes® jukebox software and an easy-reference desktop icon to point consumers directly to the iTunes Music Store, ensuring a simple, seamless music experience.

ZDNet provided more details:

Apple will manufacture the player, which will not have the iPod name but will have the same design and features as Apple’s third-generation iPod players, Phil Schiller, senior vice president at Apple, said in an interview. Also, the HP music player will come in “HP Blue,” he said.

“The way we look at it, HP will be reselling an iPod device,” said Schiller, who noted that the device will display the Apple logo at start-up and will work with all of the accessories made for the white-hued Apple varieties.

I can’t see this as being anything but an incredibly good deal all around. Apple, iTunes, and the iTunes Music Store get a lot more exposure than they had previously with the bundling agreement, Apple also has a far greater potential sales base for the iPod from customers who might not look at something obviously from Apple but won’t mind looking at something with the HP logo on it, sales of both iPods and iTMS songs rocket upwards, and even more people get to experience Apple’s high standards of quality and ease of use. Talk about a win-win scenario!

(via MacRumors)

This GarageBand is a hit

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Analysts said they expect Apple’s new GarageBand music creation software to greatly benefit sales of Macs in the coming year. “You look at an application like GarageBand — you can’t get that on another platform at any price,” said Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Media. “People will buy Macs on the basis of GarageBand.” Tim Bajarin, an analyst with market research firm Creative Strategies, also thinks the same. “GarageBand might even have more long-term effect on Apple’s sales [than the new iPod mini],” Bajarin said. “Steve has taken the consumer application layer to its next level from playing music to allowing you to be part of making music.”

(ripped shamelessly from MacMinute)

Madacy != metadata

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I’ve babbled before about my anal-retentive obsession with metadata when it comes to my music collection. Today, I remembered one of my major frustrations: the Madacy Music Group.

I’ve been slowly working my way through re-encoding my music collection. I’d had it all ripped to my old computer as .mp3s, but now that I have my G5 with the extra storage space and processing speed, I decided to re-encode everything as .m4a. Less space, better quality, and all that. While I could have just pulled all the .mp3 files over and done a mass convert to .m4a, I wanted to get the best quality possible, which necessitates encoding from the original CDs. No problem — it’s a big project (with upwards of 1200 CDs to go through), but worth it in the long run.

As I’m going through, I’m ensuring that each imported CD has all the correct metadata for each track — title, artist, composer, and year of release — which most of the time isn’t a problem, as all this is generally listed in the CD booklet that comes with each album. However, over the years I’ve occasionally ended up with albums from Madacy, who seem to specialize in ultra-low cost compliations. I’m not sure how I end up with them, as they’re generally not something I’d go for (cheap in more than just price), but I’ve got a few.

The thing is, apparently one of the many cost-cutting measures that Madacy employs is simply giving as little information as possible about the songs included on their compilations. I just ripped a 3-disc set of Irish folk music where the only information given for any of the 44 tracks was the title — no performing artist, no composer, nada. Grrrrrr.

I know this kind of stuff (especially to this extreme) matters not a whit to most people, but dammit, it matters to me, and having to deal with a company this shoddy about their releases is just frustrating.

From vinyl to .mp3

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The New York Times has a decent overview of how to transfer vinyl recordings to .mp3 (or AAC, or whatever your digital format of choice may be). This could come in very handy at some undetermined point in the future, whenever the family record collection swings my way again (currently I believe it’s in Fairbanks somewhere with Kevin’s stuff, though I’m not entirely sure).

(via Paul Beard and Cory Doctorow)

Update: MetaFilter links to another site looking at the same process: Converting Tapes and Records to CD.