I've change a few things about the site layout today.
It has been far too long since I last posted -- Life gets in the way of your hobbies sometimes. ;-)
Lots to talk about so let's get to it.
It has been far too long since I last posted -- Life gets in the way of your hobbies sometimes. ;-)
Lots to talk about so let's get to it.
Today I’ve updated much of the software that runs the site; fingers crossed that I haven’t broken anything.
No snappy headline this time…
I’ve got a list… a list of legends that I want to see perform before they pass from this reality. I’ve recently taken inventor of the electric guitar and modern recording techniques Les Paul — it was in a word, amazing. I think I’m still grinning from that show.
In the summer of 2007 I saw Koko Taylor perform at the Lowell Summer Music Series. Even at the ripe old age of 78 she could still belt out a tune. Her band was tight and the lead guitar even managed to take the term ‘lick’ literally as he managed to ‘play’ his axe with his tongue!
I don’t think there is any doubt that Koko qualifies as a legend; her trademark song Wang Dang Doodle (written by Willie Dixion — yet another legend) has been covered by a diverse array of artists from Ted Nugent to Grateful Dead and PJ Harvey.
Her gravelly voice and powerful style were unmistakeable. I’m very glad to have seen her before she shuffled off her mortal coil.
Time to update the list…
You can see my photos from this show on Flickr.
Well, it seems that the folks at Thompson have been busy little engineers. They have released a ‘lossless’ version of the ubiquitous MP3 codec. The greatest benefit of the MP3 codec has been it’s role as lowest-common-demonator when it comes to compressed music formats. It is supported on every PC, Mac and most every linux computer on the planet not to mention every portable music player and most modern phones.
However, audio quality has never been a hallmark of MP3 compression; several other encoding schemes produce ‘better’ audio reproduction at the same, or lower, bitrates/filesize; Windows Media, Ogg/Vorbis and AAC are prime examples. At the high end of the scale have been the lossless codecs such as FLAC , APE and SHN that regenerate exact copies of the original audio waveform at the cost of greatly increased file sizes. However, all these lack broad support across platforms (PC, Mac, Linux) and devices.
So what’s a listener to do? Do you trade broad device/software support for reduced audio quality or high quality but limited playback options?
You could take the approach that nutjobs like me take is to do both. When I buy a new CD I encode it to both MP3 and FLAC. I use the MP3 version for playback on iTunes and the higher quality FLAC version on my lLinux based entertainment system. Yes, it takes up lots of disk space and can be a pain to manage (applying metadata for example is a major PITA). Enter MP3HD.
At first glance MP3HD looks like just another lossless codec but the slipped in a little surprise. When an MP3HD encoder processes a file it generates a lossless version and a high bitrate standard MP3 in the same file. The result is a file that plays both on iTunes and portable players (standard MP3) as well as high-end playback devices in lossless format. Nice.
They have adopted the ‘gracefully degrade’ design philosophy. If a playback device/software is capable of lossless playback it does it. However, if it is not it will play the standard MP3 instead. The other lossless formats are not backwards compatable; FLAC and Apple Lossless require specific support for those formats or they don’t play at all.
The gotcha (there’s always a ‘gotcha’) is that the files are much bigger than a standard MP3 but less than an standard MP3 + a FLAC file.
I’m going to give it a go in my encoding workflow. I’m not going to bother re-encoding my existing tracks but baring anything nasty I’ll may use it in place of FLAC for future encodes.
Of course, this assumes there is support for it within the OSS tools/players I use — more on that later I guess.
For more info. and software downloads visit Thompson’s site.