Some very interesting stats …
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2007.
Christopher Millard, host of the NACOcast, is this week’s guest diarist in the National Post and today’s entry is on orchestras using new media, with a nice plug for the NACOcast.
Musicians are thinking about how to reach audiences with new technologies. As orchestras bring archival recordings to their web sites, the choices for music lovers will explode. Serving listeners good content at their convenience is central to the concept. But listener- controlled programming should not be a duplication of content available elsewhere. We need to offer performances that touch people more intimately. For example, my podcast this week (www.nac.ca/nacocast) features a chat with violinist James Ehnes about his Stradivarius.
‘Cheque’s in the mail, Chris.
link: full article
TVShows is a Mac OS X app that allows you to subscribe to torrent streams of your favourite TV shows. The application runs in the background. Whenever a new episode of one of your “subscriptions” appears, TVShow starts a download in your default BitTorrent application.
Pretty cool and it’s dead simple to use.
link: TVShows
Warning: the legality of downloading TV shows is sketchy at best
Caution: Shameless NAC New Media plug …
We’re producing the last in our series of four broadband videoconference jazz masterclasses tomorrow at Noon at the NAC’s Fourth Stage. Famed jazz pianist Kenny Barron will be at Manhattan School of Music in New York City and four talented piano students (from Humber College, the University of Toronto, Carleton University and McGill University) will be here in Ottawa.
The session will explore advanced jazz piano technique with one of the truly great jazz pianists and educators of our time. The connected session should be of interest to seasoned jazz enthusiasts, music students as well music lovers in general.
This final edition of the 2006/2007 Manhattan on the Rideau series will employ the very latest in broadband video conference technology to connect Mr Barron with the students at the NAC. The connection will be made using next-generation Internet: Internet2 in the US and CA*net4 in Canada.
If you’ve got some free time tomorrow over the lunch hour, swing by the NAC’s Fourth Stage to hear this giant of jazz piano mentor up-and-coming talents from across Ontario and Quebec.
Hello, Apple?
Please, please, please let iTunes use .Mac sync services (formerly iSync) to synchronize podcast subscriptions across multiple machines. Individual podcast episode’s “new/not new” status should also be synced.
Isn’t this a no-brainer?
I’m flying between Winnipeg and Ottawa, listening to a favourite Coltrane recording. I thought I’d get down a few musings (laments?) on digital music and audio fidelity prompted by the EMI/Apple announcement.
Dynamic range, warmth and depth have all but disappeared it seems in today’s music recordings. Music is compressed in recording, in mastering, in broadcast; often at all three stages. The loudness effect is ubiquitous. Broadcast audio is so pumped that it never seems to vary more than a few db. What results is music that is shallow, cold, harsh and without any kind of imaging or space.
Our new formats don’t help things. We have gone from vinyl (with its many short-comings, granted), to cassette tape, to Compact Disc, to MP3. Even though CDs have potentially more bandwidth than vinyl, it’s not used.
For most people MP3 and AAC files compressed at 128k have become the way they listen to music. Add to the mix iTunes EQ settings (which usually counter, or undo, any ‘psycho-acoustic’ EQ inherent in the MP3 and AAC file compression) and the result is unlistenable.
Do our ears not know any better anymore?
Has the convenience of iPods, iTunes Music libraries and huge hard drives won out over sound fidelity?
Has the requirement to sell music on the radio, in movies, in video games and on the web over crappy computer speakers made the dumbing down of recordings necessary?
Has the focus on computer rigs done away with the concept of home audio systems?
Maybe the music that’s being consumed as 128k MP3 files doesn’t need — or deserve — better engineering or more bandwidth.
Is anything likely to reverse this trend, or will high quality audio become even more of a niche interest?
ps. It’s often said that we are now more discerning with video than we are with audio, what with the prevalence of gigantic plasma and LCD displays and “surround sound” in home theatre systems.
I don’t think so. Check out a TV retailer, where the colour on the display models is so saturated and overblown the reds almost make your eyes bleed. Or what about the stretching of a 4:3 aspect ratio image to cover a wide panel display? Every bar’s got’em. And what about the compression artifacts in a digital cable or satellite-to-home? A fast-moving image sequence is horribly chunky. People don’t seem to mind watching the ridiculously distorted images, over-saturated colours, and overly compressed video. I can’t bare it.
As with music, it probably doesn’t help that most of the broadcast “content” is shite.
LibriVox.org is public domain for your ears:
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.
LibrVox founder, Hugh McGuire has posted some of his personal Librivox recommendations to his blog. The list which includes works such as Machiavelli’s The Prince, Heart of Darkness and War of The Worlds, makes a great place to start discovering LibriVox audio.
[link]
Sound Opinions this week looks at the recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board in the US that would dramatically increased royalty rates for streaming music on the web, a decision which may in fact put many internet radio stations out of business. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot explore the issue with John Simson, the Executive Director of SoundExchange, artist Jonatha Brooke, and owner/operator of Radio Paradise, Bill Goldsmith.
In today’s Big News™, EMI announced that it will make high-quality, DRM-free music available in the iTunes Store.
From MacNN:
The Cupertino-based company will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads and without any digital right management (DRM technology). Pricing will be $1.29/€1.29/£0.99; however, iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied. Complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price. The new higher-quality, DRM-free songs will be available in May.
I haven’t bought much music from the iTunes Store lately because in my opinion tracks encoded at 128k sound awful. The fact that EMI/Apple are keeping the per-album cost of the higher-fidelity, DRM-free music the same as the lower-quality DRM version, means they probably just got a customer back.
As for people who buy single tracks here and there, will they be motivated to buy a higher-priced version of the same song to get higher-fidelity without DRM? I don’t think so. They’ll likely be happy buying the cheaper, standard-quality DRM version.
So, on the one hand Apple can offer listeners like me higher quality, DRM-free music without a price hike (for full albums), while on the other hand, they can continue to offer the single track buyer songs at the same 99¢ (which the major labels have been pressuring Apple to raise for some time).
All ’round, probably a smart move for Apple.
Knowing that other major labels and indies are likely to follow suit, what are you thinking today if you manage the Zune Store?
UPDATE: Post and comments from Michael Geist