With the digital music explosion, the issues of copyright, authorship and ownership have never been so important. Tune in to hear a re-broadcast of Jim and Greg’s interview with legal expert Lawrence Lessig. Listen
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While I’m at it, here’s a link to the Podcast 101 piece done by Kevin Rose and Dan Huard of Systm. Take notes, there’ll be a quiz tomorrow.
Prompted by the release of Apple’s iPhone in the UK, yesterday the BBC announced an optimized download directory of BBC podcasts for the iPhone (and iPod Touch).
Now, that’s moving fast.
The BBC also say they plan to release versions for other mobile devices soon.
For now, point your iPhone or iPod Touch to:
bbc.co.uk/podcasts
This just in from our friend Hugh at Librivox:
LibriVox makes it to 1,000!
LibriVox, the free audio book project has just cataloged it’s 1,000th
book: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” by Edgar Allan Poe (read by
Reynard T. Fox).LibriVox.org started in August 2005 with a simple objective: “to make
all public domain books available as free audio books.” Thirteen
people collaborated to make the first recording, Joseph Conrad’s
“Secret Agent.”Two years later, LibriVox has become the most prolific audiobook
publisher in the world - we are now putting out 60-70 books a month,
we have a catalog of 1,000 works, which represents a little over 6
months of *continuous* audio; we have some 1,500 volunteers who have
contributed audio to the project; and a catalog that includes Jane
Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice,” “Moby Dick,” Darwin’s “Origin of the
Species,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Einstein’s “Relativity:
The Special and General Theory,” Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” and
other less well-known gems such as “Romance of Rubber” edited by John
Martin. We have recordings in 21 languages, and about half of our
recordings are solo efforts by one reader, while the other half are
collaborations among many readers.We are always looking for new volunteers! Come join us.
Best,
Hugh McGuire
http://librivox.org
info@librivox.org
Congratulations, Hugh, and everyone involved with Librivox. You’re what the interwebs is all about.
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.
‘Back in Ottawa after a quick trip West, and I feel oddly compelled to to keep postings here going, so here’s a ‘content quickie’:
ArtsJournal.com maintains a page of arts and culture videos culled from YouTube. Clips rotate through the page over the course of a couple of weeks and you can find some really great stuff. And those videos will lead you to other videos in the same vein, and, can you say, “where did the afternoon go?”
Currently featured are a wide range of clips; from Donald Byrd and Stan Getz in 1957 to David Sedaris on Letterman. Check out the hilarious Rachmaninov Had Big Hands clip.
Link: artsJournalvideo
Don’t forget about TubeSock if you want to move some of this video to iTunes, your iPod, or simply save them to your computer.
As part of our continuing discussion on media tools for the Mac, Martin Jones, MiFi.ca’s resident Über Geek, offers the following report on HandBrake-MediaFork (ed).
While there are many DVD rippers out there, for a long while HandBrake was the best of the lot for the Mac. HandBrake was more-or-less a front end for a set of command line tools that decrypted the DVD stream and then compressed it into MPEG4 or MPEG4-AVC (advanced video codec, AKA h.264) format in a single shot, ready for playback on a portable device (read iPod).
That was the good part. The bad part was the relatively ancient encoding library it was based on. This made MPEG4 encoding pretty slow and h.264 encoding unbearably slow. The settings were ambiguous, even cryptic, and it took much trial and error to get the desired results. HandBrake’s development stagnated about a year ago and it seemed like there would be no more updates forthcoming.
Then, new developers took it upon themselves to build an application heavily based on HandBrake. They called it MediaFork, and it was Good. MediaFork brought many bug fixes, and leveraged updated libraries. Encoding became reliable and fast. The interface is still ambiguous, even cryptic, but now you can tab through the video preview to see the effect of your settings on the media, and the program won’t crash. Overall, MediaFork is a welcome improvement on the work begun with HandBrake.
Last week the HandBrake developers posted that they had joined forces with the MediaFork development team and that a soon-to-be-released version of the software, the result of their combined effort, will be released as HandBrake 0.9.0.
HandBrake is dead! Long live HandBrake!
– Martin Jones
I was thinking about the iPod’s fifth anniversary, and how the iPod and the MP3 have revolutionized how we interact with recorded music. I thought I’d offer up 5 things I’ve learned about keeping a digital music library in the last 5 years or so. (I’m told that numbered lists make great blog entries.)
- Use MP3. Although file formats like OGG and AAC/MP4 offer some advantages in quality (OGG) and features (AAC/MP4), nothing is as portable as the MP3 file format. I can play the same MP3 file on any computer, in the car, on my iPod, and on almost any mobile device. Other file formats don’t offer the same “encode once and forget it” possibility.
- Go big. While on the “encode once” theme: Encode at the highest possible bit rate you can afford in terms of storage space. For the longest time I encoded at 192k out of concern for file size and drive space. I now encode at 320k knowing that hard drive prices continue to drop dramatically. More importantly, at 320k the audio fidelity of a well encoded MP3 file is absolutely indistinguishable from CD audio. At 320k I’ll never rip that same file to MP3 again.
- The MP3 encoder in iTunes is not great. Use LAME instead. It’s open source and free. Blacktree (maker of Quicksilver) even makes an iTunes interface for LAME (iTunes-LAME Encoder) so you can encode with LAME from within iTunes. Couldn’t be easier.
- It can be a real housekeeping chore, but it’s crucial to be meticulous with your files’ ID3 tags. Meta data is your friend. Make sure you fill in the ID3 info religiously. ID3 tags will help tame the largest of digital libraries and they’ll make perusing your MP3 collection a pleasure. Use an application like Media Rage to get your meta data in ship shape. Once your ID3 tags are in order set iTunes to “Keep iTunes music folder organized” and “Copy files into iTunes folder when adding to library” (preferences/advanced) and your iTunes library will look a thing of beauty.
- Back up.
As a follow-up to a recent post on how to get video, specifically DVDs, onto your iPod, here’s a tutorial on how to use Handbrake in a one-step process.
HandBrake is a GPL software that can decrypt and convert a DVD into a MPEG-4 video file in .mp4, .avi, or .ogm containers. Originally created for BeOS, it has been created for Mac OS X and Linux. It is very popular for its ease of use, fast encoding, and excellent layout and set of features.
A Windows port was created, but the project was abandoned as the creator, titer, has begun to devote more time to his other project, Transmission. However, a new project has been started to create a real GUI for a Windows version of HandBrake in the official HandBrake for Windows forums. The current working GUI (as of January 2007, version 2.0) converts DVDs well and as it should, but the project is far from the completeness of the Mac OS X or BeOS versions. (wikipedia)
In an open letter titled “Thoughts on Music”, Steve Jobs challenges the major labels on iTunes Store DRM and gives Bill Gates the finger. Strategically, it’s a very interesting volley. Here’s John Gruber reading between the lines.