Prince’s Corollary: Music Wants to Be Heard

“Where the Internet truism is that information wants to be free, Prince’s corollary is that music wants to be heard.”

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I think he likes it

If the tech was not enough to turn a music fanatic’s head, the binaural recordings specifically made for headphones should. I have listened to the binaural tracks on my computer via my headphone setup and the results are miraculous.

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Blog post re the Gould/Zenph disc.

More sB 1.2 Goodies

Am I out to lunch or is this the first time since pre-HD days that PQ marks move from EDL to EDL? Perhaps that came with the change in how PQ marks are handled between DDP and sB. Whatever. Nice to have it working.

That thing I said earlier about using sB to create waveforms for use in HD? Gotta remember to start that off before going for lunch or perhaps overnight! (With lots of long files it takes a long time and ties up the machine.)

The Rebuild Waveform bug also works around the “name to long” issue as well. It truncates the name of the waveform file but stays associated wtih the correct audio file. Sweet.

I’m getting lots of crashes. I’ve probably corrupted a pref and keep stepping on the same time bomb. Compiling a list of reports.

Saving a project seems to take an inordinate amount of time.

Hey, how do you move PQ marks. Used to be you could option-click and drag in the EDL or select the time field in the Mark Info window and type in new text. Now I can’t do either. Hmmm, looks like I’ll have to crack the manual. [later] OK, turns out it’s easier than before. You just click on it and drag. BUT this does not seem to work on the final EOT mark and the fact that you can’t edit in the Mark Info window is a big problem for me. I always place my final EOT 2 seconds after any audio in the EDL.

Build Waveform … in soundBlade 1.2

Changes at work mean I’ve had very little time to play with the new version of soundBlade (1.2). But I’m poking at it today.

I see that the Build Waveform command no longer pops up a dialogue box to prevent you from working in the EDL. It does slow down the app considerably but it’s better than what we had.

More importantly I’ve just watched it build the waveform for two channels of a non-interleaved set of files! Have we finally done away with the bug in which only the waveform for channel 1 was built? [pause] Yes. I just dropped a 20 channel set of files into a four channel (that’s a big as I can go as I don’t have the multichannel version of sB) and it immediately starting writing waveforms for all 20 channels simultaneously. Very nice. Mind you, when the process began I had loud pops from my audio output. sB was peaking at using 52% of my old 933 MHz G4’s CPU.

I still need to edit multi-channel stuff in Sonic HD where the channel 1 only bug still lives. What I can do now is open all my sound files in soundBlade 1.2 or higher so that the waveforms are all built and then return to HD for the editing.

Of course if you were working on another platform you’d probably be alarmed that something as simple as this would generate excitement. Sigh.

Listening to MP3s in a storm could blow your mind

A man in Vancouver, Canada, has discovered the hard way that listening to earphones in a thunderstorm can be a very bad idea. He was jogging while listening to an iPod, when he was struck by lightning. The earphones conducted the electricity through his head, bursting his eardrums and fracturing his jaw.

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Freak accident.

Automatic Volume Settings for Headphones and Speakers (Mac)

If you use a Mac, you may not know that it automatically defaults to two different volume settings, based on whether your headphones are plugged in or not.

Creating separate volume settings for when headphones is a
mere matter of plugging in headphones and altering the system volume,
then unplugging the headphones and dragging the volume slider to a new
spot.

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Why New Music Doesn’t Sound As Good As It Did Why New Music Doesn’t Sound As Good As It Did : Christopher Null : Yahoo! Tech

Why New Music Doesn’t Sound As Good As It Did

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The loudness war. My wife spotted this article. Nice to see this topic get a bit of “mainstream” attention and as of this writing there are 333 comments.

KEF Wireless system eliminates speaker cable headaches

Wireless rear speakers have long been viewed as the ideal way to popularize multi-channel sound, but performance issues have always held the concept back. Now KEF believes it has the ideal solution: KEF Wireless, a 400 quid transmitter/receiver package (pictures) which enables any speaker configuration to be upgraded to wireless.The brand’s so-called “Universal Wireless” system [...]

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ITunes Music Festival Points to Possible Apple Record Label

Apple’s foray into the live music scene with its iTunes Music Festival is about much more than just putting on a show.  Apple is recording every show in this festival, meaning that it will own the Sound Recording rights to those songs.  ITunes will then sell the live recordings — perhaps the first indication that Apple could itself become a record label now that the pesky lawsuit with the Beatles’ similarly-named label, which had previously barred Apple from acting as a record label, has been resolved.

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Optical media longevity

I stumbled upon this article today and thought I’d post this tidbit here.

An unpublished report of the recently-terminated “NIST/LoC Optical Media Longevity Study” of recordable optical media stated that, after 11 months of testing:

• Virtually all CD-Rs tested indicated an estimated life expectancy beyond 15 years.

• Only 47 percent of the recordable DVDs tested indicated an estimated life expectancy beyond 15 years. Some had a predicted life expectancy as short as 1.9 years.

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