Didgeri-dazzle

The famous Mills Didjeridu List brought me this video. Sound is a must, as is spending the 3.5 minutes to listen.


(direct link to YouTube video for my RSS friends)

I've got to play more.

Audio pleasure

For a few years now, I've taken opportunities to listen to the demos of Bose headphones whenever possible.

Realizing that we do not have a boom box, radio, or speakers of any sort for music while we work on the house, I snapped; I drove to Worst Buy to acquire a stereo dock for Cat's iPod. I looked over the various brands and models and colors, waffled... then said to hell with it, I'll buy the Bose.

I brought it home; to the new house. It's the first major purchase that doesn't count as a fix-up tool. It is shamelessly a luxury item for aural pleasure. It reminds me of the saying: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

The new Bose is useful as well as beautiful; a fine start.

TOMMY at NOCCA

NOCCA's doing The Who's Tommy next weekend, April 9th through the 12th. You should go.

We've got a genuine The Who's Tommy Pinball Wizard pinball machine, too. Yes, actual and real physics-loving pinball.

Blue men in my ears

Last week, I caught a show of the Blue Man Group.

The opening act was a one-man show: VJ Mike Relm. If you haven't seen his act, he does on-the-fly video mixing and deejay shenanigans. I should get the DVD, since a mere audio cd forces you to miss half the show, to paraphrase George Lucas.

I didn't know very much about the Blue Man Group going in; I know they do music, I've heard people say they enjoyed the shows, I'm aware that the performers paint themselves blue. but I can't say for certain that I heard any of their music before that night.

What an incredible experience. The concert was pretty interactive and very technical, full of eye candy and LEDs and neon. The Blue Men themselves don't really play anything like a traditional instrument: A maze of PVC acting like tubular bells; ten-foot thin plastic whip sticks; a full grand piano struck with a mallet on its strings; 55-gallon drums lined with streaming LED signs, covered in water and lit with strobes.

I saw only one instrument that you could buy off-the-shelf, and even then, they had modified it: a meter-wide bass drum held up by springs and rigged to blast like an enormous spotlight when struck.

I watched them cover The Who's "Baba O'Riley" (aka Teenage Wasteland); this video will give you an idea of the intensity, the interactivity, the technology, and the downright weirdness that is the Blue Man Group. Feel free to check out some of the other videos, and I'll see you back here in a moment.
(Direct YouTube link)

Three drum kits with standing drummers. Three guitarists. The occasional singer or two. Dudes on zithers. Video cameras brought into the audience happened several times, and they brought a few people up on stage a few times: one fellow read the credits at the end of the concert (the Blue Men never speak), and two people came up on stage for custom, er, wearable souvenirs including a baseball cap with a marshmallow tower and spit-airbrushed concert shirts.

Their primal percussion and fourth-wall breaking really drew me in, and I really enjoyed the entire concert — this from a man who usually won't admit to liking live music in general. Plus the genuinely funny physical gags served to make the entire experience somehow more personal and intimate.

Megastar.


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Now playing: Blue Man Group - I feel love (feat. Venus Hum)
via FoxyTunes

And speaking of music

First, A great big shout to fellow geek Peggy for pointing at Plopbox, a repository of eight-bit music, covering some 4400 tunes as of this writing. When you hit that site, grab your headphones or crank up the volume and yank off the knob! The in-browser player is very handy.

I also came across C64music, a label devoted to preserving the vintage sound of that era. Buy their stuff, or obtain it illegally. I sure wish they did another live show.



Finally, yay for Firefox extensions.
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Now playing: Martin Galway - Comic Bakery (Danko mix by Tomas Danko)
via FoxyTunes

Music management step three

11390 songs imported (37.8 days, 46.94 GB).

Approximately 33000 files (roughly 140GB) left to process.

Music management step two

A few bits of handy knowledge that might save someone time in the future. Obviously, the software is Mac-, Leopard 10.5.2- and iTunes-centric, but the underlying knowledge can easily be transferred.

Whenever you plan to do a lot of automated processing, I find it helpful to make sure that you've got good data to begin with. You've heard the expression "Garbage In, Garbage Out?" It comes from computer science, baby: you give a system nonsense, and you'll get bad results. You can't magically expect a computer to read your mind, no matter how nice it would be.

So, little tip one: I want to delete empty directories in my source music data. Very important to not delete anything that a program's expecting. I found a recent instance of Photoshop crashing and burning — silently, natch — if the /tmp folder was missing. (Repair Permissions fixed this for me.) In Finder, hit Command-F to bring up a find Finder window. First, make a search option for "Kind" is "Folders", then add a second option. Pull down the first choice to "Other..." and pick "Number of Items", then "equals", then type 0. Bam, empty folders for deletion. There's a staggering number of options to use in a query, including an image's F-stop setting, which makes for some interesting implications.

I do have a pretty high Geek factor, but I still sometimes find myself embarrassingly behind the curve; Adding cover art to digital music is a wonderful idea. There's a fellow who's written a handy Dashboard widget to grab album art from Amazon called, imaginatively enough, the Amazon Art Widget. If you don't have tons of music, Fetch Art will go through a grab any needed art as a batch operation. It's not quite set-it-and-forget-it, but it's a good step to take.

Speaking of craaaazy filesystem eccentricities, the Mac OS filesystem is not case-sensitive; it's case-PRESERVING. So it doesn't know the difference between "FRiED WeaSELS" and "frieD WeaseLs" but it will make sure to remember that you typed it funny. This is a problem when you're copying over from Linux ext3. Solution? Format your Mac drive as HFS, case-sensitive. NB: Sloppy programming will make your life hell, so don't do this for a non-data-only drive.

Some ripping programs use something called VBR (Variable bit rate) to rip music- instead of sampling the entire track at a single rate, you vary it- a smaller bitrate for the simple parts of the track, a higher bitrate for the complex bits. This is all well and good, but some programs get confused and wind up reporting a wildly inaccurate time- I'm talking songs that appeared to be twenty or thirty minutes long, when they actually were only three or four minutes long. As I understand it, this came about after a series of Ogg Vorbis tracks were converted to MP3 without re-ripping. iTunes evidently freaks out with some of the VBR tracks and reports the incorrect length. The solution? A (ironically Window-only) program called Vbrfix. It works, but takes time.

If you're wanting to do a large amount of tagging and organizing, Mediarage has more than a dozen little mini-tools that are up your alley. Definitely a tool for the power user.

Finally, Musicbrainz is saving me a lot of time. It identifies music via an audio fingerprint of sorts- regardless of source or bitrate, it actually identifies music by how it sounds. Definitely very neat when it magically works to get rid of that "unknown artist, unknown track." I'm using software called Jaikoz to query and hit their database.

Music management step one

I bought a half-terabyte Western Digital "My Book" external drive today for use in sorting music.

Stay on target... almost there...

Music, Music

I have a drive chock full of music. About 120GB, all told. The twist is that I don't have a dedicated machine to play it with.

I've wanted a personal music box, set up to stream or broadcast or share or hoover or whatever the buzzword 2.0 is these days. I just need to spend the time to set it up... and go through the data. Too much of my digital music is untagged, and that fact makes me wince.

Maybe I'll start carrying around a fat USB drive so I can start making archival backups of music as I travel. I think a Mac Mini might be the best smartest roving ripping device, but that assumes people still have CDs. Any suggestions? MY USB jumpdrive is only a gig.