Denis Crowdy - news and thoughts

A Goretex test for Guy the snake charmer

2009-06-21T20:31:00.003+10:00

Solid ride on saturday - probably the last decent trail ride before heading off for the Mawson experience in July. Umina-Pt
clare-Staples Blackwall-Gosford-Umina. Met up with Guy at Staples, and we gave his new Goretex jacket a solid test (rained solidly for a fair bit of the ride). Headed down Thommo's loop to Tunnel track, to Rocky Ponds then the crazy hill down to Woy Woy tip and back to Blackwall. Came across a decent sized snake (python?) - actually Guy almost rode over it - that we think must have had its sleep disturbed by some serious rain and was trying to warm up again. Dropped Guy off at Staples then climbed back into the wet gear for a spin to Gosford and back. Total of 90ks in the end, and five hours on the bike in total. Now to work on doing that (or 70ks at least) loaded for day after day...

Routing stems from Ardour to MIO and back

2009-06-19T08:09:00.002+10:00

The only real reason I keep a mac os x box running at all is so I can use one of the Metric Halo 2882 our Dept has. The flexibility of routing, quality of the pre-amps, and the sound of the various pre-amp and desk modelling adds a polish to a mix that I can't get any other way at the moment. Yesterday I set up a useful way of routing stems from Ardour to the MIO and back, and was really pleased with the results. I set up a series of stems (drums, brass and rhythm) on separate busses, then added an insert in each routing through the MIO via the RME optical outs (appearing in the MIO as ADAT ins). The results have to be recorded back into a separate track (you can't render a wav file for export when routing through an outboard processor obviously), but the results are worth it.

The flexibility of Jack and the Ardour system of inserts makes the audio routing in OSX (even if soundflower or rewire are used) look positively ancient (jack is available for OSX though I think). On another note, my new 64Studio box has been running for a week or so, working with audio almost daily and I has yet to register an xrun.

Some media sense in the downloads and economy debate

2009-06-12T11:51:00.002+10:00

Charles Arthur in a Guardian blog provides some useful perspective on the ludicrous figures often quoted by the music industry in relation to file sharing and lost income. Also led me to a link to the Guardian datastore which looks really useful.

From Ubuntustudio to 64studio

2009-06-11T13:05:00.007+10:00

A couple of months back I decided to upgrade my main desktop and audio machine to the latest version of Ubuntustudio (9.04). Installation from the DVD was a breeze, and rebooted smoothly into the new look. Basic desktop stuff was great, but setting up my audio ran into the first of two main problems. I have two soundcards, the onboard Intel HDA, and an RME card. I like the Intel to be picked up as hw:0, and take the optical out of this into the optical in of the rme card, which I have running jack. That way I can play things from firefox or other standard apps that only look for the first card, and can route it through jack. I couldn't get this sorted at all, and concluded that pulseaudio was part of the problem. Tried various suggestions gleaned from the net to no avail. Solution - take an analog out and feed it to the MIO2882 that I use for recording under osx (I also use it to mix - amazing box with insane onboard DSP).

I managed with this setup for a while, until I came to use ardour to mark some drum stem mixes from class. Good old alt-m to bring up the mixer didn't work (well - I had to type it twice). The killer for me though was the fact that the transport shortcuts no longer worked when the mixer was in the foreground. This is an absolute showstopper for me - anyone using a DAW hits the space bar alot and it needs to happen in whatever context (setting levels in my case) one is working in. Found others with the same problem but no solution, so thought I'd try 64studio instead - surely no regular ardour users could stand the transport drama?! I was also getting regular xruns, but I was running things like google desktop and gnome-do so this was my fault really! Didn't care too much as I don't record on this machine. Time to separate audio from office things anyway, and another box (identical specs) became available.

Tried the stable 2.1 iso, but it kept failing with a stupid config error regarding tetex-bin. Perhaps my DVD had errors, but the installer couldn't move on, so downloaded the beta 3.0 iso and installed. Very smooth installation and jack setup instant. Optical out from hda card all good... alt-m in ardour is good and my transport shortcuts work again - yay! No xruns so far either so I'll be sticking with this solution for a while.

Lesson - once an audio machine is working and stable, I will avoid upgrading until knowing for certain that the things I use regularly are working as expected. No more mixing everyday office and network stuff with serious audio apps as well. I think ubuntustudio is fantastic, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in audio work, but the latest version needs a bit of tweaking. I feel a bit guilty that I'm not helping the ubuntustudio community in a real way (although this sort of testing is useful I guess) but I do a lot of other open source work so horses for courses.

Here's the setup - I use the macbook as a glorified mixer to control the MIO, and use synergy to share the same keyboard and mouse between machines.

Do the test - looking out for cyclists

2009-03-27T21:25:00.002+11:00

Have been doing a fair bit of cycling lately, and although I avoid busy roads as much as possible, there are motorists who appear to get eye contact with me, then pull out anyway. This video relates to that:

Compiling the MusicKit

2009-03-27T10:52:00.002+11:00

It's back to the MusicKit after a break for a few years, and getting it to compile against developments that have taken place in GNUstep requires a bit of work. These notes refer to the trunk of MusicKit as of March 27, 2009.

Errors about common.make require this file to be run to get the environment set up correctly:
. /usr/share/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh

portmidi.h: no such file or directory

so need the development librarires for portmidi. On ubuntu:

sudo aptitude install libportmidi-dev

Then we come up against the following warnings which could well be causing bigger problems:

GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DIR is deprecated. Please use GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DOMAIN instead

Nicola pero has some notes on this.

So in the GNUmakefile in trunk/MusicKit/Frameworks/PlatformDependent/MKPerformSndMIDI_portaudio I changed:
GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DIR = $(GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT)
to:
GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DOMAIN = LOCAL

Tried SYSTEM in place of LOCAL too, but still getting problems with the header files of MKPerformSndMIDI not being recognised when the SndKit starts to build. Anyway, that's where I am for the moment and will try more later...

NZ Govt scraps controversial changes to copyright act

2009-03-24T07:52:00.005+11:00

New media manager at Radio New Zealand, Richard Hulse, has an excellent page on his blog marking out a timeline of events in relation to copyright in NZ. Yesterday the controversial amendments to the NZ copyright act were scrapped so it appears as though sense has prevailed. I discussed this briefly in a previous post.

Live music overtakes recorded music in UK

2009-03-20T07:15:00.004+11:00

This Guardian article points out an estimate that live music was worth more than recorded music in 2008. Also some links to a discussion about the "long tail" phenomenon. Two economists have estimated that of 13 million songs available for purchase on the Internet, only 3 million actually sold (see article). Emusic have disputed this here. Strikes me as a tricky thing to be able to measure, and I wonder whether emusic were considered in the original study as they have quite a different focus than more mainstream sellers like iTunes.

APRA lead the way copyright in self-education

2009-02-21T08:44:00.006+11:00

The proposed changes to the law in NZ to make ISPs police the Internet has always held a self-defeating potential for those advocating it (APRA, for example here).

I came across this blog describing how APRA actually had material on their site that might well have generated strike one for them!

"Big music" is way behind the technological eight ball as far as digital distribution is concerned - that is pretty well known. That they continue to pursue such ultimately self-defeating policies (hiding behind the human shield of the poor individual creator) I guess might be seen in a positive light, however. The last gasps from the dinosaurs will see interesting places for young musical entrepeneurs and innovators with a more flexible view of how technology will be used in the future. Score 1 CC/remix culture et al.
The site advocating resistance to this new law is worth checking out.

Number of downloads does not equal number of lost sales

2009-01-21T10:39:00.005+11:00

There is a good summary of a recent decision by a US judge here stating that the number of downloads can not be equated with the same number of lost sales. The music and film industries quote ridiculous figures regarding lost sales, so ridiculous that their advertising ends up being ineffective. There's an ad before movies here that quotes a number that may as well be 4 bazillion for all the relevance it has.

The shift from music as a product, to being an activity or service, and the concomitant changes in how money is earned from music is a slow process, but the sooner people grasp this, the better their chances of survival, I think. Access to the Internet is crucial in this change, so that places where physical media still dominate (like Melanesia, for example) will still hold on to the old approach for longer. The speed with which I saw a track circulated via bluetooth in Honiara recently, however, indicates that any sort of digital transfer can be effective, so other networks might work in conjunction with the web where access is less widespread.

2009-01-15T15:54:00.001+11:00

A colleague (Karl Neuenfeldt) pointed me to this great video clip of a recording of various musicians. Probably best to go straight to the source site which is here.

Papua New Guinea Association of Australia

2008-12-09T05:41:00.010+11:00

On Sunday I accompanied my wife Gima to a lunch of the PNGAA, an association consisting largely of people who used to work in Papua New Guinea (and most from before Independence as far as I could gather). Gima was representing the Wantok club - a community group for Papua New Guineans in Sydney. The Papua New Guinea flag was prominent, but we were both a bit stunned by the fact that Gima was the only Papua New Guinean there in a crowd of over 200! As a musician having taught music in PNG throughout the 1990s, I was even more stunned after the PNG national anthem was played, and I overheard a long time member say that was the first time they'd heard the song. PNG has been independent for 33 years now so I was perplexed by this.

A quick look into the history of the organisation perhaps shows why though, with Keith Jackson, the current President, pointing out that the mean age is about 70 now (see this post on Keith's blog), and that the organisation started as a gathering for retired public servants. There is an interesting range of views here as well.

Only recently has the association refined its objectives and priorities with this as namba wan:

to strengthen the civil relationship between the peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea;

We had lunch with a friendly group having an amazing collective wealth of experience and knowledge. When we drove home we went straight to a friend's place to pick up our daughter, and spoke about the event. I slipped into the mistake of characterising the group as a wonderful collection of people who had perhaps lost touch a bit with modern PNG, and who were gathering to share nostalgic tales of the good old days. It later occurred to me that the Wantok club could certainly be involved to help here given the groups have some shared aims.

Our daughter had been staying with wantoks, of course, in this case at the house of a petroleum engineer who works in PNG for Oilsearch. He was educated at UPNG, gained a further degree in the US, has worked in Perth and Sydney. The day before the lunch some other friends who live nearby dropped in; one is a telecommunications engineer (again working in both Australia and PNG) and the other a pediatrician. Next Saturday we'll have a barbecue to mark the economic investment members of our community are making in Australia when they buy a house nearby, and present there will be engineers, doctors, nurses, geologists, teachers, academics and so on - all Papua New Guineans now working and living in Australia and contributing healthily to both economies and cultures. A not dissimilar range of professionals that travelled to Papua and New Guinea fifty years ago perhaps?

Amongst all the doom and gloom that no doubt circulates about modern PNG amongst PNGAA members (as it does amongst Wantok members at times too of course) surely here is a fantastic example of just how effective the contributions of the work of PNGAA members in PNG has been? in my experience no group recognises the problems PNG faces more acutely than Papua New Guineans (I heard a reference to the PM the other day as "Grand Thief"!), but there is a space for optimism too. I watched Fred Kaad's interview on the Journey into Paradise DVD last night, and was moved and humbled by his words. I don't agree with him that comparisons between then and now shouldn't be made, however, as I see this process as a particularly positive and healthy one. I believe that the Port Moresby I travel to now is a better place than the one I was born in (1967), and there are numerous political, social, cultural and economic reasons why this is so. The rural picture may well be seen differently, and this represents a major challenge for the immediate future.

I hope we can play a role in cementing some longer term contact between the groups, because as long as the PNGAA gatherings are almost exclusively white Australian, and Wantok gatherings largely indigenous Papua New Guinean, the similar aims of promoting civil relations between Australia and PNG will be impossible to meet (and the comments by Tavurvur at the end of this blog post are interesting in this regard). Anyway, we're going to to join up if PNGAA will have us!

Budget studio monitor comparison

2008-11-19T12:11:00.012+11:00

This morning I bought a pair of Tascam VL-A4 powered studio monitors for a friend who runs a studio in the Solomon Islands, so before I sent them I thought I'd test them out and compare them with the monitors I use daily - Yamaha MSP 5s. Test conditions are by no means ideal, but this is a quick comparison not a serious review. Why bother? Well in places like the Solomons, people have to very budget conscious, and a lot of music is recorded, mixed and mastered on equipment from the lower cost end of the market. When I tried to search for a review and independent opinion I couldn't find one, so here goes!

My setup consists of a macbook connected to a Metric Halo 2882. I then connect separate outputs to the different pairs of speakers.

First impressions of the VL-A4s are that they are reasonably solid, bar the fact that there is no grill over the speaker cones... Why? For looks? Certainly not for performance so maybe cost. Take care with 'em then.

I ran some of my standard reference tracks (a combination music which I think is useful in terms of specific features of mixing and material I know very well) and kept switching between the different speakers, while adjusting my head position to get my ears level with the upper drivers.

The most obvious difference is that the Tascam's lack the crispness in the high end that the Yamaha's have. They can also sound a little muddy, although I did have them too close to the wall so that would most likely have made a difference. The bass on the Yamahas is a lot clearer and extends further back than the Tascams too - fairly obviously given the Yamaha's have 5 inch drivers as opposed to the 4inch Tascams.

In terms of the stereo field, jumping back and forth between the speaker pairs at first gives the impression that the Tascams have a narrower field. A more detailed listen shows that the definition and location of instruments in the stereo field sounds much tighter and more accurate on the Yamahas.

Ultimately it is the reduced lack of clarity in the high mids and highs that would worry me most when mixing on the Tascams. The Yamahas don't always sound particularly pleasant, but they do give a much more accurate representation of what is there I think. I get the feeling I'd find it easier to locate problems in a mix with the Yamahas.

Price is a big issue here though - the MSP5s sell for about AUD$1000 a pair here, and the VL-A4s were about AUD$250.

I might try a mix on them at home tonight and see how it goes...

Workshops for recording musicians - Honiara and Port Vila

2008-11-04T20:32:00.003+11:00

In September and October I ran workshops for recording musicians in Port Vila and then Honiara. Placid Walekwate Jr (President of the Solomon Islands Music Federation) came up with the idea originally, and then Nigel Quai in Vanuatu thought it'd be good to get one going in Vila. In Vanuatu we had about 17 people turn up and spent three days working through the basics of audio signals, microphones, studio setup, mixing and mastering.

Things were on a very different scale in Honiara. Numbers started at 50, increasing at times to 70 people with about 20 computers and laptops for practical work. The minister from the Ministry of Women, Youth and Children's Affairs opened and closed the workshop which ran for five solid days.

I was amazed and elated by the response - a couple of people had even travelled from the provinces - and we covered a lot of ground. For practical purposes we recorded a song from scratch and presented the minister with a CD of different mixes at the end of the workshop. We did a version of the old Solomon Island classic "Wokabaut lon China taun" with Erin Gilbert singing, keyboard by Ronnie Paiwa and various other overdubs over a drum track programmed using Reason. A few of us went out on the Friday night and much to my surprise our song was played over the radio - now that is quick to market!

I'll post some photos when I get some as I didn't have a camera with me at the time. We spent the weekend relaxing at Hammock Beach, had an amazing "motu" (olsem mumu bilong PNG). The Honiara experience was a career highlight for me - there really is a great lokal music recording scene over there.

New Ubuntu blog

2008-08-18T11:57:00.004+10:00

Fellow ubuntu user and reclaimer of old computers John Scannell has started a blog about Linux experiences and help with getting things working on a HP Compaq Presario C700. Sites like this have been essential to me in the past and save hours of hassles and frustrations.

Solar powered, portable, multitrack recording

2008-07-04T17:09:00.008+10:00

Over the last couple of years I have been putting together a portable recording system that I can use in places without electricity as part of a project funded by Macquarie Uni to develop appropriate archiving tools for use in Melanesia. It was first used in a pretty remote village called Taramata on the island of Small Malaita (the southern bit of Malaita) in the Solomon Islands. I travelled there with Adriel Tahisi, a graduate of the music section at UPNG where I used to teach, and we recorded various panpipe, bamboo and vocal ensembles. We took some great video there but I lost the camera on a marathon trip back to Honiara so the following video shows the gear in use in a small village near Honiara called Ohiuola.

I use a Metric Halo 2882 (http://www.mhlabs.com) because it is an amazing piece of gear - great preamps, converters, and a really flexible matrix system for routing. The problem is it only works with Macs, and I like to use Linux and figure open source makes a lot of sense in places that can't afford expensive audio software (especially when apps like Ardour equal proprietary programs in quality)... I actually bought the box because Metric Halo had apparently been very positive about the idea of letting developers of ffado (http://www.ffado.org - firewire audio drivers for linux) get access to a box to write Linux drivers but that has turned out to be nothing but hype unfortunately. My ideal system would be a Linux box running Jack and Ardour with a firewire audio device that runs off the laptop for power (like the 2882).

It's great to be somewhere with no power, but decent sun, and set up 8 mics (with phantom power if necessary) with studio quality pre-amps. Redefines both field recording and the idea of studio as far as I am concerned.

Project Xonify - adding some bass

2008-05-30T09:20:00.004+10:00

After playing around with loopulator with my brother on the weekend a few things emerged - I need some bass action, and the files are too quiet. Both things were pretty easy to implement; with the bass idea I simply halved the starting frequency in my modified version of Victor Lazzarini's Step program; making stuff louder was simply a matter of amplifying. I originally had a compressor at the end of the chain, but removed it as the interface was getting too clunky. Might try a more dedicated mastering (a simple parametric EQ, compression and limiting chain) a bit later. Anyway, here's the latest track:

xo_4a mp3 ogg

There's some harmonic weirdness in there because of mismatches between the melodic content of the loops but it was a proof of concept thing late at night - the refinement will come!

2008-05-27T22:22:00.010+10:00

For a while I have been keen to test out the idea of creating and recording music entirely within the XO. I know the TamTam apps have some of these features (though I haven't been able to record my noodlings within TamTam Jam so far), but I thought I'd combine learning csound and sugar development by building a loop program. My early attempts were pretty shaky, but thanks to the wonders of Victor Lazzarini's csndsugui, things have been moving. I started out by modifying Step (a demo of csndsugui by Lazzarini) to allow adjustments to the kick and snare timbre, then recorded a bunch of loops. Here's a screenshot of the modified Step:

I then wrote something I am calling loopulator

This plays back a series of loops and allows them to be reversed and/or cut up. Performances can then be recorded. Here are some examples:

xo 1 mp3 ogg
xo 2 mp3 ogg
xo 3 mp3 ogg

Note that the entire chain of production has taken place within the xo (albeit using some command line tools like oggenc to encode the ogg files). Next step is to add tools to allow the addition of other parts - bass to start with I think.
Lots of fun!

One laptop per child XO - very green

2008-04-15T10:17:00.002+10:00

AS far as laptops go, there is nothing greener than the XO. Check out this video by engineer-extraordinaire Mary Lou Jepsen. In terms of design, recycling, maintenance, lifespan and power consumption nothing else even comes close.

Csound, loops and the XO

2008-03-26T06:51:00.008+11:00

Over the last few weeks I have toyed with a simple sample looping application for the XO. Largely written on the train, I had some time over the Easter weekend to iron out some of the problems. The idea is pretty simple - a panel of buttons are linked to samples, and they loop. Press buttons to turn samples on and off. Csound's score based system complicates this, however, so the solution is not as elegant as I had hoped - but it has been fun to write and is fun to play with. The documentation for the python csound module is, well, as slim as it gets, but this demo helped a great deal. I really like the suite of TamTam music programs on the XO, and have sought some inspiration/guidance there, but they have included their own interface to csound so it'll take a lot more poring over the source before I have a better idea of how they work.

There are some serious timing problems with my program so I need to work out how to get access to csound's clock, but there is something to play with here. I chose to include both a sugar and non-sugar version, largely so I could develop on the XO. Developing under sugar would be faster if I could work out how to post log entries from the code (logging.debug("log this")?).

Screenshot:

After quite a bit of mucking around to get this working, yesterday I came across the amazing csndsugui - a python module that simplifies connecting gui controls to csound elements. Also yesterday was the announcement of an amazing library of samples from the olpc project. Very heartening! No matter where the olpc and xo project goes, there is no doubt in my mind that it makes a fantastic musical instrument and the people that have developed csound, related activities (such as the Tamtam suite) and this library need serious congratulations.

Finally, there's another great source of xo, csound and music info here.

Somare slams Downer

2008-03-17T15:08:00.008+11:00

I've never been a fan of the ex-minister Alexander Downer and in particular his approach to politics in the region. I loved reading the following quote by PNG's PM, Sir Michael Somare in a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald last week (p8 SMH, Monday March 10 2008, p8, article titled "Somare appeals for return of Australian police"):

"Mr Rudd's two-day visit to PNG was an attempt to mend a relationship that had become heavily strained. Sir Michael blamed the decline in relations between the two countries on the former foreign minister Alexander Downer. "The guy is too arrogant and self-important. He looks down on the Pacific islander people. I'm glad that he has gone... Kevin Rudd understands our people better."

Politics needs more directness like that - easier once people are out of government though of course. To top off that reading experience, on the last page of that day's Herald was this:

Love it. The Australia/PNG relationship took a solid turn in the right direction without Downer and his insipid bleating. Good riddance!

OLPC XO assisting in the Vanuatu studio

2008-03-06T09:51:00.010+11:00

I took the olpc XO with me on a trip to Vanuatu as part of a research project with my colleague Phil Hayward. I engineered a recording of a stringband from Futuna using my standard portable studio rig (although didn't need the solar power system this time) - a metric halo 2882 connected to a macbook(=8 glorious preamps and flexible interface/routing). After reading a blog about the use of the xo as a webcam I wrote a simpler script to take photos, and ran it as a cron job during some of the recording sessions - some of the resulting photos posted here.

The xo generated immediate interest from the musicians - I think in general people were more impressed with the xo than the several thousand dollars worth of laptop, interface and microphones which made up the studio gear. During breaks from recording sessions I started work on getting to know how to develop sugar (the user interface of the xo) applications and getting my head around the python csound module. I'm thinking of building a very simple loop player/mixer/sequencer to learn more about developing for the machine.

Although I have read criticisms of Sugar, and have had some frustrating mmoments myself, I have come to really like the journal and tagging system, and can find material easily. For me it was a mistake to try and use the xo as I would any other computer - and I can always drop in to xfce if I want to do this - but if I simply write and take photos, record audio notes, read and so on, Sugar is great. I must admit I do like using a more featured browser for surfing and web work, and use opera for this. I tried firefox but it seemed to cause the browser activity to fail. Now to dive into some csound...

I am now an OLPC convert...

2008-02-05T21:37:00.000+11:00

I went to the big Australian Linux conference in Melbourne last week, gave a paper on "arkaiv" - a media annotation system I hae developed for music (mainly ethnomusicology) research purposes, gave a brief demo of surround sound in a 3d environment with Croquet, and listened to some great papers. Probably the best for me was Shane Stephens talk about using annodex for video remixing. At the end of Shane's talk I discovered I had been one of the lucky recipients of an OLPC XO computer. This completely blew me away - haven't been so excited for ages. The idea is to take it away and do something interesting with it to share with the growing community of users. I have spent the last week using it as my train and house machine - leaving my Macbook in the office. I love it. I am blogging from it now and will continue to do so. I have spent the first week (when I get a chance) reading about how to develop on it, and started playing with the amazing music activities it has.

IFPI get hammered

2008-01-26T09:11:00.000+11:00

The Guardian has a scathing piece about IFPI (the International Federation of Phonographic Industries) - a sarcastic suggestion that they get in line with other industries who have been affected (and adapted much more efficiently) to the online environment of content sharing. IFPI wants to get ISPs involved in prosecuting users. The opening paragraph of the article has this cutting remark:

The IFPI - the International Federation of Phonographic Industries - is the global music industry organisation whose very name tells you how long ago progress overtook it.

It's almost tragic that the experience, infrastructure and knowledge such organisations must have built up over the years (or have they simply been drowning their intelligence in Chardonnay?!) is breaking down so rapidly. Is this simply because of their size and subsequent momentum? Whatever the case, they are playing catch-up and need to adapt immediately before it's all over.

The state of digital music 2008

2008-01-25T09:28:00.000+11:00

There's a great article at Ars Technica on the state of play with relation to the recording industry and distribution of digital content. The article states a strong argument against the old plea of "you can't compete with free"; in summary that university and college students have never really forked out large amounts for recordings, but that better off consumers are far more likely to go for convenience (like emusic or itunes) over breaking the law. Some interesting graphs too. Slashdot also had something this morning on DRM following some comments by the editor of PC mag. Interesting times. Somewhere amongst all this I liked the comment that there is (and has been for the last 80 years or so) a music industry and a recording industry, and although the two are obviously linked, we are seeing big changes to the latter and maybe a resurgence or expansion of the former.

Lastfm's juke box deal

2008-01-24T07:14:00.000+11:00

this article describes a new feature for the music site Last.fm involving a deal with majors and independents in the music industry to allow streaming of content (three plays per track) for free before having the option of buying. Although it's probably close to a decade too late (the argument that the horse has bolted for the music industry and associated IP laws is a strong one I think) the act of making access to material easier rather than harder strikes me as a move in the right direction. I think DRM has largely failed as far as consumers are concerned and I'm glad about that. In a recent paper at a popular music conference I reinforced the idea when the gap between the law and public norms of use is so wide, something has to give. In the West, where net access is so ubiquitous, the law needs to give - more fair use provisions, drastic cuts to copyright terms and so on. I'm not sure that applies in the same way where the net is not so common (PNG - the subject of much of my research, for example) but that's the subject of a paper I'm writing and will link to at some stage...

1500-2000 to be sacked at EMI

2008-01-16T07:41:00.000+11:00

I guess this is the really ugly side of the changes in the music industry (or should that be "star industry"?) - job losses for thousands. It strikes me that one of the great weaknesses of the music industry as it is currently structured is that the large corporations at the centre move so slowly and, not surprisingly, tend to protect their current business model (through DRM, for example) rather than adapt more flexibly. There's an interesting piece on DRM here - perhaps most interesting in that the public comments are more insightful than those of the experts; score +1 for the public sphere.

Ubuntustudio video tutorials

2008-01-10T11:17:00.000+11:00

There are some great tutorials at http://tuxbeats.blogspot.com/ that deal with getting ubuntustudio, installing it, and getting audio working with Jack.

The Jack tutorial runs for 14 minutes and includes general info about Linux audio and the open source model, a detailed discussion of Jack settings using the qjackctl application, and how to set up connections and route audio between applications.

2008-01-10T10:30:00.000+11:00

This article in the Guardian discusses reactions to the proposed introduction of more sensible laws in relation to "format shifting" (moving material from a CD to an ipod, for example). I find it hard to believe how long it takes for the laws to change in this regard. Although it is a positive step towards bridging the public norm law gap - the reactions from the record industry are antediluvian. Check out this quote from the article:

Hamish Porter, a partner at law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse, said: "There is a danger that it will be interpreted by the young as a green light to burn CDs for their friends.

Wow - these guys are so far behind the pace it is frightening, and probably goes a good way to explaining exactly why the industry is flailing.

Lessig on ASCAP's FUD around Creative Commons

2008-01-03T08:17:00.001+11:00

An interesting post by Lawrence Lessig pointing out the inconsistencies,confusion and outright errors on ASCAP's "information" about Creative Commons licenses. In Australia, APRA and AMCOS have a brief discussion about Creative Commons licenses (here) but point to some UK articles rather than analyse the situation independently (slack!) to which some of Lessig's comments also apply I think.

Music Industry Excesses

2007-12-10T21:55:00.000+11:00

A good piece about the corporate excesses of parts of the music industry (well - EMI so a big part) in the Telegraph here
"What's the difference between EMI and the Titanic? The Titanic had a good band on board when it went down." Ouch.
Another recent article here discusses the problem the industry has had with technology. I love the "what would you do if someone asked you to remove your dog's kidney" metaphor - a bit OTT - how backwards were these guys?

Media annotation - annodex

2007-12-10T12:10:00.000+11:00

I have been working on a web based application for the storage, annotation and retrieval of audio and video material. The main idea is that data is stored in an open format (ogg) and marked up with annotations that are searchable. It is built on annodex technology - http://www.annodex.net - originally developed by the CSIRO in Australia. Media can then be searched and it is possible to jump from clip to clip in different media files very quickly. Annodex lets you leap straight in to the middle of long video clips, for example. So far things are still being tested, but the potential for analysis is amazing. It has been built using the pylons web framework - http://www.pylonshq.com. The project is open source and is available from http://svn.annodex.net/arkaiv using subversion. Tarball available from http://code.google.com/p/arkaiv/downloads/list

Mastering with Ardour and Jamin in Ubuntustudio

2007-12-10T05:00:00.000+11:00

A couple of weeks ago the class I'm teaching recorded a sarod and tabla duo. The session went well, and we got a good sound I think through trying various mic combinations and placement. I though I'd try and master this recording after a couple of mixing/balancing sessions on the main studio machine - Nuendo into a DM2000 using a bit of EQ on the desk, then through to a new TASCAM machine to save the result as a 48kbit. 24bit file (the format we recorded in).

I took this back to my office for my open source setup - ubuntustudio running on a macbook laptop. I use an external USB sound D/A box (edirol UA-5) and monitor through Yamaha MSP-5s, so it's not a bad setup, although my office has some awful acoustics.

Anyway, I wanted to master a session using Ardour and Jamin. I shut everything down so the only apps (bar the gnome stuff of course...) running were jack, qjackctl, ardour, and jamin. The setup I ended up with is probably more complicated than it needs to be, but it made sense to me at the time. Here's my Jack patching:

So I have the mixed stereo track going to a mastering bus, which has Jamin as an insert. The output of the mastering bus acts as an input to a mastering track (so we can record the result) and to the main stereo bus (so we can hear what is going on). Here's a shot of ardour:

You can clearly see the increased gain on the mastering bus, the mastering track and the master bus, as a result of the settings I used to master with Jamin. Here's what Jamin was doing:

Bottom line the session went smoothly (other than having to go back to the studio to remix because of some bizarre panning we had somehow setup and not changed - sarod was in the middle with a tabla each side of it!!). No xruns which was the main thing. I exported the files by selecting the appropriate part of the mastered track, then took these into sweep for topping, tailing and fades. Burnt the CD with Serpentine, and now the players are listening to it for feedback.

Jack, Ardour and Jamin are a fantastic combination. Stable and easy to work with. Most importantly the sound was good, of course.

More on audio editors

2007-12-10T03:30:00.000+11:00

I decided to explore more open source audio editing applications as a result of the click search and fix (declick) thread in a previous post. Gnome wave cleaner still has the best spectrogram for finding these clicks. Here's a file rendered by gnome wave cleaner:

Same file with snd:

And here's the same file with the 3D graph from snd:

Better if we zoom in:

There are certainly no shortage of tools in the open source world - there are a plethora in fact. So far I haven't come across an editor with the tool that allows you to draw a waveform - essentially direct editing of samples. Cubase has a pencil tool for this, and carefully used, can be very useful. I hadn't looked at gnusound, and when I did found the magic tool...

The conclusion to all of this is that as long as one is prepared to use a variety of tools specific to particular tasks, all is well. There is no one-stop-shop for audio editing in the open source world as far as I know, but I don't see that as a disadvantage.

I have been marking essays that discuss production techniques and trends over a span of recordings by particular groups. Apart from being one of the most interesting groups of essays I have ever marked, the discussions about sound (in the more complex sense of a recording aesthetic and signature) led me to put the examples through various tools for visual sound analysis. Jack comes in to its own here, and I used Jamin for total overkill on the spectrum analysis side of things! Jamin is just fantastic, although it really tests a system out. So far it is the only application that has brought on some serious xruns. I also discovered jaaa at http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/ and this is an excellent tool for spectrum analysis. About to try out japa - a more "musical" version apparently.

And after all this I have come across sonic visualiser which so far is fantastic... More later

Audio editing in Linux - finding and removing digital clicks

2007-12-10T03:00:00.000+11:00

After returning from the Solomon Islands with some field recordings, I noticed some awful clicks on one side of one of the stereo mics I was using (an AT 822 - should have used something balanced of course). These clicks certainly sounded very digital but weren't obvious from an initial scan of the wave form (editor is sweep):

Turns out the clicks are small discontinuities that look like this once we zoom in:

These clicks are a lot more obvious using a spectrogram view in Audacity:

(Sorry about the blank rectangle - ignore!). Sharp red lines extending from bottom to top stand a good chance of being clicks, but they get lost here amongst the sharp attack of the percussion sound in the recording (bamboo tubes struck with a bit of rubber - a thong in fact). Check out how they look in gnome wave cleaner though:

That's more like it. The automated declicker didn't remove many of the clicks at all, so it's a matter of zooming in and removing them manually:

Wow - ugly noise all the way through the frequency range... Select it, then manually declick under the edit menu and the result is this:

Pretty seamless (certainly no longer audible anyway). The main problem is that I had to resample the originaly recording from 48kHz 24bit to 44.1kHz 16bit, as that is hte only format gnome wave cleaner seems to like. I'm becoming a big fan of these tools though.

Moving to Google

2007-12-09T08:11:00.000+11:00

As part of moving things increasingly to Google, this is a test post.

Jack and the Macbook internal HDA sound device

2007-12-09T06:00:00.000+11:00

I have a core 2 duo Macbook, the white model, and haven't been able to get a decent working jack setup until today. The trick was to add "options snd-hda-intel position_fix=3" to the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. The Ubuntu forum came to the rescue for this, but it took several tries (fix=1 and fix=2 were not effective). Reboot and jack now sees all of the surround channels, and doesn't xrun out of control. Sounds great which is also pretty important too, of course.

Xmms works really well with Jack now, and one thing that is useful and interesting is to set up the phase meter that is part of meterbridge. This was particularly relevant today as one of my own mixes showed some pretty radical skewing to one channel... Once Xmms is running, this command brings up a phase meter:

meterbridge -t jf -r 0 xmms_0:out_1 xmms_0:out_2

The VU meters are great, too: