Glitch

Indescribably beautiful glitch on my music server tonight, randomly time- and pitch-shifting parts of tracks as they playback. A reboot cured it, but seemed completely appropriate for a day when that idiot and by extension his wranglers ended up still in place, perverting the world…

Vivid

Busy week. Have been in Amsterdam (lovely) and South of France (also lovely). On Sunday we went to a hifi show in the wasteland hotels near Heathrow airport. Many average or averagely good things, and we ended up short of time, so didn’t get to see everything. But the standouts, by far were the Avantgarde Duo and Vivid speakers. The Duos demonstrated (at least from vinyl, through decent valve amplification) the most transparent sound I’ve ever heard. The Vivids, on the other hand, seemed ready for absolutely anything — not as ætherial as the Duos, but as happy with every …

With Nude Media, All You Hold is But A Cache of What You Own

That’s the crucial fork between my view of digital media and the more traditional one (wherein MP3s, for example, replace vinyl as object in one’s possession). If your local copies are simply expedient cacheings of that to which what you’ve purchased rights, then restrictions on formats, limited freedoms of transcoding, and the other restrictions that are currently being wrapped into DRM, are obviously inappropriate, arbitrary restrictions the only benefit of which is to support particular business models. This isn’t new news. But…

Putting Digital Music to Rights

Music, through the imminent DRM format wars, will become increasingly ghettoised through branded delivery mechanisms — already iTunes and Sony software insist on transcoding from one expedient but lossy format to another if you want to play tracks on competing players. And there seems to be a lot of pressure from all involved to pass off such low-quality formats as worthy of purchase and collection, presumably to create a profitable market of low-res, ‘throw-away’ copy-protected music, and to encourage ongoing waves of repurchase as listeners demand better quality or support of later playback technologies. I think these effects result from …

Dearth

Such dearth. Bus[i|y]ness prevails. Rummaging through the old things, an old favourite: a Quicktime implementation of Music for Airports 2/1.

Early Musics

Couple of things from yesterday. Laurie Spiegel posted a comment to an earlier posting, to let us know that her Harmonices Mundi is now avalaible on limited edition transparent vinyl. You can get it at (amongst other places) Forced Exposure. While elsewhere in the musical past, Jerry Nilson has posted tantilising excerpts of some live early performances by Eyeless in Gaza. Play loud.

Decasia Sub

My DVD of Decasia arrived today. I’m watching it tonight with the sound off (I haven’t bothered repatching since the Bryston went back). Very nice, although the print has quite a few transfer artifacts, which is a little ironic. I had forgotten that I still had my active subwoofer connected, which adds a certain something a few minutes after the nuns…

Degraded Audio and Its Promotion

Compressed digital formats (mp3 and its ilk) are expedient: they save storage space and download time. But there’s something rather disingenuous about MusicMatch — the software accompanying iPod on the Windows platform — misrepresenting 128kbps mp3 as ‘cd quality’! There is a certain aesthetic to degraded digital audio — classic 12-bit samplers sell at inflated prices on eBay for their ‘authentic hip hop sound’ — but the post-Napster generation is being sold a lie by the music industry about the quality of the music they’re being offered by the ‘legal online music revolution’. It’s certainly quicker to download a compressed …