Peter's Pro Audio Link Blog

Oh the irony

petercook — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:01:57 +0000

Tivoli Audio have announced a groovy little device which you can plug a ethernet cable into and stream Internet Radio. You don’t need a computer. They link to a Boston Globe video feature which, ironically, has mono audio with the polarity flipped. Ouch!

Site News – Tivoli Audio, LLC: “Watch The Boston Globe video featuring the NetWorks”

Bryan Adams asks fans to listen up

petercook — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:47:39 +0000

In his 1984 arena shaking B-side Kids Wanna Rock, Bryan Adams exhorted his fans to ”Turn it Up! Turn it up!” But now, faced with a measure of hearing loss from decades of playing at eardrum-piercing decibel levels, the British Columbia-born rocker is the public face of a global campaign suggesting that listeners might want to turn the music down a tad.

Link to Story

Next step would be to turn people on to good quality sound and an appreciation for dynamic range.

Korg MR-1000

petercook — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:25:25 +0000

With the pristine fidelity and ultimate flexibility of 1-bit technology, the new, surprisingly affordable MR-1000 ensures that your final mixes and location recordings are never obsolete.

Korg MR-1000

A friend pointed this out, said it was getting raves from mastering places. Know nothing else about it myself but it looks interesting.

smear them to heaven

petercook — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:01:02 +0000

Every once in a while I peak into the ProSoundWeb mastering forum. Today I spotted this delicious quote from a post by Jeff Dinces talking about the problem of poor sound quality in mixes.

some braniac marketeers proffer the notion that one could take tizzy aliased little square waves and smear them to heaven by sticking a tube on the end.
Link to Full Post

Exploiting Sound, Exploring Silence

petercook — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:19:53 +0000

By compelling audiences to listen more closely, “No Country for Old Men” has had the effect of calling attention to an underappreciated aspect of filmmaking: the use of sound.

Link to Story

The article makes note of the lack of music in the sound design. Years of being manipulated by music have left us ready for this trend. I first noted it in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days when I saw it this past summer at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Rip enhanced CDs with help from Disk Utility

petercook — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:07:45 +0000

I recently tried to rip an “enhanced” CD (Andrea Bocelli – Sentimento) in iTunes, but it didn’t see the CD since it mounted as a data CD and wanted to show me the content through a controlled player. However, I discovered that I could go into Disk Utility and mount just the Audio CD part of the CD, and iTunes saw it instantly and could rip it …
Link to Story

Visit Mac OS X Hints for more. Now since we’re pros here you’ll know that we’re ripping using Apple Lossless or Wave. ;-]

The Death of High Fidelity : Rolling Stone

petercook — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:24:10 +0000

The Death of High Fidelity
In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever

Link to Story

It’s always good to see mainstream press on this topic and Rolling Stone speaks directly to an audience that cares about music.

You Know You’ve Made it When . . .

petercook — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 05:54:51 +0000

Of course Richard “made it” quite a few years ago.

Engineer Richard King Chooses Genelec 8050A Monitors

Richard King, a former Sony Studios engineer who is noted for his work on film scores, classical and jazz recordings, recently set up his own high-end editing suite, RK Recording LLC, at his home just outside New York City. King reports that he relies heavily on Genelec 8050A bi-amplified active monitors in his new facility.

Getting your metadata into Windows Media Player

petercook — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:27:06 +0000

Some people are confused about CD-Text. They think a disc has to be mastered with CD-Text in order for the information to show up in a consumer’s iTunes when they put the CD in their computer. Not at all. You only need to submit the data to CDDB (using iTunes) and in a day or less the info is there for everyone. This is a service a good mastering house will supply to their clients.

So what about the poor sap who needs to have the data show up in Windows Media Player? It turns out the WMP looks up data from All Music Guide. So you’d figure there’d be a mechanism for doing this sort of thing for WMP.

You’d figure wrong.

AMG will add any product submissions we receive to the database as long as they are commercially available in their country of release. The best way to ensure that your title receives full coverage is for you to send us one copy of the product along with any relevant promotional materials, such as press releases and artist photos.
Link to more information

Remarkable, no? One more reason iTunes owns this market.

Maximize Your Inputs with Aggregate Audio

petercook — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:26:57 +0000

It’s easy to do this with a third-party digital audio interface that connects to your computer via a USB or FireWire cable. And thanks to your Mac’s Aggregate Audio feature, you can maximize your input track count by recording through several such devices simultaneously. This tutorial shows you how.

Link to Story

A Pro Techniques tip from Apple.