Tag Archives: Music - Page 7

Pick And Choose And Confirm

Posted by on September 21, 2016 No comments

At work today, a co-worker made an unusual comment.  He said he missed floppy discs.  He missed them for the reason that they were self-contained “topics”.  Like, this disc will boot your computer.  This one will load a game.  This other one is a word processor.  That thought is actually going back quite a ways, before hard drives were common.  But his recollection was good, miming flipping through a box of discs, looking for the precise one you wanted or needed.

Later, I saw another (yet another) article about the death of CDs – who was buying CDs?  What kind of crazy people are doing this?  Why aren’t they gone yet?  This made me reevaluate my own situation and I found that I had this same thought earlier in the day talking about floppy discs.

A CD is a self-contained “topic”.  It’s a capsule of time in a band’s lifetime.  It’s how they were “then”.  And when you’re browsing through a collection of CDs, like flipping through floppies, you may be looking for a specific something and you stop flipping when you find it. 

This is not the same satisfaction you get when searching your hard drive, or opening your music software, or browsing your music device.  Although I didn’t think much about it back in the floppy days, that satisfaction was probably found there too.  It’s a confirmation – “I got it!” And that’s reason to celebrate.

Searching (or seeking) physical items is also a totally different mental and emotional experience.  Consider this.  You’re in the mood for some music.  You want something to pep you up.  When dealing with virtual media, you handle your choice “offline” (which sounds backwards, but hear me out).  Your thought is, “What band/album makes me feel like smashing down walls?” And then you run through your mental list of bands or albums and settle on, say, Dokken.

If you have a physical collection, you have the same desire for an album, but instead of processing the results in your head, you flip through the discs and evaluate each disc one by one, an “online” process.  “Does this album make me feel like smashing down walls?”  Maybe yes, maybe no.  And when the answer is yes, it’s a confirmation – “I got it!” and you’re hyped to start.

It’s kind of a stretch to use the floppy disc analogy with everything, because I can’t recall feeling triumphant about finding WordPerfect and saying, “Now I get to work!”  But games, or other sources of entertainment, like CDs, would be.

The point I wanted to make earlier, but now this post is bullshit-long, is that choosing a floppy or a CD is a deliberate act.  This is in contrast to any streaming or cloud service recommendations, or a random pick from a plethora of folders.

Music In The Valley

Posted by on March 21, 2016 No comments

Last weekend, I had a pretty productive CD run.  I think I picked up a dozen new ones.  One of the “why not” buys was a disc called “The Best of Starship”.  It was a cheap-looking CD.  Really cheap.  Like one of those compilation CDs that companies make just for some quick bucks.  It turned out to be something really different, though.

I don’t own any Starship albums, but I do know the songs pretty well from the radio.  When I put the CD in and played it, I didn’t immediately recognize the music.  After the song played a little longer, I recognized it, but something was still off.  The singer’s voice was familiar and all the notes were right, but the production of the track was different.

I looked at the album cover for clues.  In small type at the bottom was “New Recordings by the Original Artist.”  How strange.  What I was experiencing was the Uncanny Valley effect.  That effect is typically associated with robots, how people’s perception of them rises as their realism improves, then suddenly drops off as people get really creeped out by the tiny inconsistencies.  I’ve also had the same thing with software, where if the replication of an application isn’t exact, the little differences drive you crazy.  You notice all the little things.  At that point it’s better to create something entirely different.

And that was the case with this album.  It wasn’t a live album.  You know you’re getting a different sound when buying a live album.  It was a studio album, but it wasn’t like studio outtakes or demos or alternate takes.  It was just doing it again.  And it wasn’t like redoing it with the intent to improve on it, it was trying to remain faithful to the original.  But it wasn’t.  The production was much more sparse – less overdubs, less polish.  It almost sounded like a MIDI sequence plus guitars, plus the original vocalists.  It was good enough to be recognizable.

I have to say, it’s the strangest CD I’ve ever come across.  I’m torn between throwing it away because of (to borrow the uncanny valley’s terminology) the revulsion at what I was hearing or keeping it because it’s such an oddball recording.

Where Have All The CDs Gone?

Posted by on January 28, 2016 No comments

I’m probably really late to the party on this one, but I was recently thinking about the availability of used CDs and came to a realization.  My insight is certainly nothing earth-shattering, it’s just that used CDs are approaching a value of zero.  As such, they can’t be sold for anything of value.

Here’s my brief, one-sided view of the used CD marketplace.  When CDs first came out, I was there.  They were expensive and there was no used CD market at all.  Expensive was $18 back then, which is like selling a CD for $39 today.  Then, before a used CD market blossomed, there was the “bargain bin” at the local CD store.  You could get CDs for as little as a dollar.  “Cutouts” were included in these, where the CD case was notched or drilled to identify it as discounted.  Then, some stores started selling used CDs, but the real place to go for deals was pawn shops.  Pawns shops would have walls of CDs, most always unsorted, which was a real PIA, but really rewarding when you found something you liked.

Now, pawn shops can’t make any money on CDs (and DVDs are quickly approaching that critical mass as well).  What’s the next step after a pawn shop?  A thrift store.  People can’t even sell their CDs, so they just give them away.  That’s where I’ve been having better fortune – at thrift stores.  Yes, I am lucky to have a local used CD store with three locations around me, and their values are usually really good.  But I’ll tell you, if I owned those CD stores, I’d be making regular rounds of thrift shops and picking up well-known albums for super-cheap and selling them in my store.

The one other place you might have some luck is at flea markets.  Sometimes, it’s just some person selling off their personal collection, along with all their other household junk.  Sometimes, it’s a budding business that can’t afford a retail space.  The downside of flea market shops is that there is a very low turnover and new product comes in very infrequently.  So usually, you hit them once and you can be done at that place for a year or so.

Exact Audio Copy Secure Ripping And Image Files

Posted by on January 6, 2016 No comments

I made a brief comment on this technique in a previous post, but I’m going to expand on it a little more because I tried a practical test of the technique and the results initially seemed valid.

Ok, so you are using Exact Audio Copy to rip your CDs, and you want to make sure they are good rips, but sometimes, you get “Read Error” and even worse, “Sync Error”.  This means you have a problem reading your CDs.  But you look at your CD and it’s pristine.  What’s the problem?

I had this happen on a few CDs and I thought, what if I copied the CD to a binary file, mounted the binary file as a virtual drive, then ripped it from there?  Well, guess what?  That works!  But the skeptic in me wondered why the disc would read as data, but wouldn’t read as audio data.  It’s still reading the bits off the disc, why would one fail and the other didn’t?

So, I needed to prove to myself that a imaged CD was a bit-for-bit copy of the original.  To do this, I decided to rip some imaged CDs with AccurateRip enabled.  AccurateRip creates a checksum from the read data.  The checksum would then be compared against a large database of other known good rips and it would confirm that the results were the same.

So, I chose four CDs from AccurateRip’s Key Disc list and imaged them to files.  I used Daemon Tools Lite for the imaging.  (If you’re going to do this, go to oldversion.com and get an older version of Daemon Tools that doesn’t have the imaging feature removed.  I used v4.45.4 and disabled updates.)  I imaged the discs at 24x speed to lower the chance of read errors. The file format I used was MDX.  ISO would not cut it.  Then I mounted each disc using Daemon Tools to a virtual drive and used Exact Audio Copy to rip the images to WAV.  There is no need to rip to a compressed file because the checksum is calculated from the uncompressed data.

Part of the ripping process in Exact Audio Copy was configuring AccurateRip.  I had to provide three Key Discs for it to properly set the offset for my (virtual) CD drive.  I had four Key Discs, so I was well set.  Ripping from a virtual drive is pretty impressive.  It rips on my computer at 50x, faster than the theoretical 48x max my CD-ROM would do.

Disc 1 results: 8/10 tracks accurately ripped
Disc 2 results: 10/10 tracks accurately ripped
Disc 3 results: 3/9 tracks accurately ripped
Disc 4 results: 5/10 tracks accurately ripped

Not the results I expected.  However, it was curious that discs 1 and 2 were newer discs and 3 and 4 were older discs.  So I grabbed four more CDs, two new, two old, and tried again.

Disc 5 (old): 8/9 accurately ripped
Disc 6 (old): 0/10 accurately ripped
Disc 7 (new): 10/11 accurately ripped
Disc 8 (new): 1/12 accurately ripped

So, that doesn’t help anything, or at least doesn’t prove my hypothesis is correct.  So, let’s rip the physical media and compare it to the virtual rips.  We’ll do discs 5-8 since they’re in front of me.

Disc 5: Virtual 8/9, Physical 9/9.  The tracks that were accurately ripped between the two had the same checksums.

Disc 6: Virtual 0/10, Physical 0/10.  All tracks had matching checksums, just no matching AccurateRip entry.

Disc 7: Virtual 10/11, Physical 11/11.  Same checksums on all successful tracks.

Disc 8: Virtual 1/12, Physical 12/12.  The one successful track matched on checksum.

So what’s the takeaway from this?  It would appear that imaging a CD to a file is the equivalent of ripping a CD in “Burst mode” (as termed by Exact Audio Copy).  This means you may or may not get the exact bytes.  But, when ripping in Burst mode, AccurateRip is not available.  Doing the rip from an image file can get you AccurateRip results for some of the files and will flag others as not accurate.  This way you sort of get the best of both worlds.

But, what you lose is the re-reading attempts that Exact Audio Copy performs in “Secure mode”.  And in those cases, you may be able to salvage a track that might read poorly in Burst mode or through imaging.  Remember, in burst mode, you get one try at reading the data (with error correction).

The important takeaway for me is that imaging a CD makes no improvement.  It’s not going to make the CD any better.  My new plan will be to use Secure mode to rip all the possible tracks, skipping tracks with Read errors, then re-rip the skipped tracks with Burst mode.  That’s the same result as ripping an imaged CD with Secure mode.

Another Round Of Metadata For My Friends Here

Posted by on December 29, 2015 No comments

As I mentioned with my new MP3 (phone) player, a lot of my music had no album cover art.  Now I’ve heard, but can’t confirm, that Windows Groove Music uses cover art stored in the files, so I’m doing another round of metadata cleanup.  This time, I’m embedding the album cover art into the files.

I had resisted this for a while, because I didn’t want my library size to balloon. But, considering each song file is somewhere around 25MB, what’s another 100kb on top of that?  Plus, it should ensure that I never have to go hunting for album art ever again, because the art is always in the files.

Well, the deal is, there’s some album art that’s not all that easy to find and some that’s in poor quality.  So, as I made my way though the albums, I had to do a few scans along the way and post them to my Flickr account for posterity.

This will be a never ending cycle, I’m sure.  Right now, my album art is 500×500 on average.  Soon (sooner than I expect, I’m sure), the standard will be 800×800, then 1200×1200, then on and on.

The next thing will be embedding artist images in the files, because that will be used for a future utility I have kicking around in my head right now.  We’ll see how that goes along.

Everything’s A Phone Now

Posted by on December 25, 2015 No comments

A recent post on a blog I follow informed me that there was a great deal happening on an entry-level, budget Windows Phone – the Lumia 435.  I could pick one up for $30.  That made me pause for a moment.

A brand new smartphone, capable of running Windows 10 Mobile, with expandable memory that can take an SD card up to 128GB.  What if I bought it, never put a cellular SIM in it, maxed out the memory and just used it as an MP3 player?  Huh? What’s stopping me?

Let’s look at some current MP3 players.  They are really dwindling in numbers, because, well, smartphones do everything now.  16GB Sony Walkman – $80.  8GB Sandisk Clip – $35.  160GB iPod – $399.  32GB Zune HD – $275.  This phone – $30.  128GB MicroSD card – $50.  And I don’t even need the 128GB card now.  I have a 32GB card from my old phone.  Consider this a done deal.

So now I have another Windows phone.  It’s going to be my new MP3 player.  And better than other MP3 players, it will do Internet and Bluetooth audio, and games, and whatever else I want (except phone calls).

I began setting it up by installing the 32GB SD card I had around and upgrading the phone to Windows 10.  Boy, what a drawn-out process that upgrade was.  When I was done upgrading, I then uninstalled every app except for the ones I needed – primarily Groove Music.

Ok.  Now, how do I get my music on there?  I keep the music on my computer in WMA Lossless.  That format works with Zune.  But you can’t sync to anything other than a Zune device using the Zune software.  And although I can copy the files right to the phone, I don’t want to use my lossless files since they’re around 25MB per song.  I was dreading the idea of manually transcoding my entire library just to copy it and delete it.  Surely there has to be some software that would automate that.

Enter the old stalwart, Windows Media Player.  This software will not die, nor should it ever die.  Windows Media Player can sync files to another device that is nothing more than a memory card.  And in the process of doing so, it can transcode the files to a different bit rate – Exactly what I need.

image

Then you choose what you want to put on your device, and drag it to the Sync pane.  Then Windows Media Player just does its thing.

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So, with my test using the 32GB card, I got about 40-odd percent of my music on there. There’s some stuff I can take off because it’s not really mobile audio stuff.  I also discovered that Windows Media Player encodes to WMA format, so I probably don’t need a high bitrate of 192k.  192k in MP3 is moderate quality, 192k in WMA is very high quality.  Bringing that down a notch to 160k should reduce the space usage.  And I see I also need to get cracking on cleaning up my album art.

But!  Once that’s all done, I will have a pretty sweet MP3 player, that isn’t a phone, but really is a phone, just not being used as a phone.

And So It Grows

Posted by on August 24, 2015 No comments

Lately, I’ve been looking and dreaming about getting a true stereo audio system like what I used to have.  A bit of research showed me that dedicated stereo systems aren’t dead, they’re just brands I am unfamiliar with.  So, I’ve been spending lots of time reading and thinking and drooling over the idea of having a listening space.

And my CD purchases keep going.  Completing my collection of the MCA Master Series wasn’t the end of my music collecting.  Even though I’m not into modern music, there still remains a wealth of older music available for me to purchase.  There are benefits to this.  First, the music is cheap, because it’s old and used.  Second, there is a chance of getting a collectable for cheap.  A collectable CD?  Worth more than a drink coaster?  You’d be surprised.  Especially in the era of music I purchase, there are a couple specific things to be on the watch for in order to get a CD that has collector value. 

The thing to know is that when CDs first came out, in the mid-1980’s, the primary goal was to get as many titles available for sale as possible.  In order to do that, record companies made glass masters of CDs straight from the master tapes used to create records of that time.  Later on, when there was more available time, the record companies would remaster those original master tapes.  The remastering process would include different EQ and effects, sometimes an improvement, sometimes not, but always different than the original.

Knowing that, when I say that there is an audience that insists on having the pure, original sound (defined as being the LP version), and that CDs that contain that sound are limited to early, early pressings, you can easily see the scarcity-to-value premise.  Yes, the original pressings of CDs are more prized by audiophiles.  That’s not to say they are always superior.  As engineers’ mastering and remastering skills became better, CDs got better sounding, with better stereo separation and more dynamic range, but the “purity” of the original sound is still prized.

There’s a couple of simple clues to finding a first-run CD, and naturally, there’s a ton of subtleties that I can’t get into.  But, if you want to get one of these CDs, you need to be looking for an album recorded pre-1990, and manufactured in either Japan or West Germany.  One sure clue that you are getting a first-run CD is that the case spine is frosted smooth, instead of ribbed.  Another sign, and one that raises the CD’s collectability, is if the CD is printed with a “target” design.  Search for Target CD if you want to know more about these.

Yesterday, The GF and I made an impromptu stop at a local CD store.  I was hoping to pick up an Ultradisc or two (Ultradiscs are gold-plattered CDs with highly-reputed remastering and are very desirable).  Not finding any, I bought a couple of CDs by The Cars.  $3 and $5 – not bad at all.

We stopped at Sonic and I took a closer look at my purchases.  One CD I was immediately disappointed in myself with.  It wasn’t a retail CD; it was a CD Club pressing.  These are easily identified and I should have passed on it.  Slightly depressed, I opened up the other CD and was shocked to see a target CD inside.  I quickly closed the case and checked the case edge.  It was frosted.  I just got a target CD for $5, which would be sold by a knowledgeable seller for $15-$20.  Mood immediately elevated.

I had discounted the thought of ever getting any rare CDs from my local CD shops, because I assumed these guys knew what they were selling.  They should have identified that disc just as I had and sold it on the Internet for 3x what they sold it to me.  But, since I had recently bought an Ultradisc for $22 (valued online at $45-$50) and now finding a target CD for $5, this gives me hope for finding other collector’s items.

Band Changes, Brand Changes

Posted by on June 24, 2015 No comments

To expand a bit on a former post where I was noticing that when a musician or band changes recording labels, their sound changes, sometimes dramatically.  I wanted to make up a list of cases where I find this to be true.

Band Album>Album Label>Label
Asia Astra>Aqua Geffen>IRS
Belinda Carlisle Live Your Life Be Free>Real MCA>Virgin
Boston Don’t Look Back>Third Stage Epic>MCA
Boston Walk On>Corporate America MCA>Artemis
Bruce Dickenson Pretty much Any>Any Mercury>Castle>CMC>Sanctuary
Emerson/Lake/Palmer Love Beach>Black Moon Atlantic>Victory
Kansas Monolith>Audio-Visions Kirshner>Epic
Kansas Drastic Measures>Power Epic>MCA
Kansas Spirit of Things>Freaks of Nature MCA>Intersound
Rancid Life Won’t Wait>Rancid (2000) Epitaph>Hellcat
Rush Hold Your Fire>Presto Mercury>Atlantic
They Might Be Giants Factory Showroom>Mink Car Elektra>Restless
XTC Nonsuch>Apple Venus V1 Geffen/Virgin>TVT
Steve Morse Coast to Coast>Structural Damage MCA>High Street
Genesis Selling England>Trick of the Tail Virgin>ATCO/Atlantic
Dream Theater Most Any>Any ATCO>EastWest>Elektra>Atlantic>Roadrunner

Contrast that with some other artists that never changed labels and their sound/quality remained consistent:

Billy Joel: CBS/Columbia
David Lee Roth: Warner Bros (although his sound changed between Skyscraper and A Little Ain’t Enough)
Heart: Capitol
Ozzy Osborne: Jet/Epic
Queen: Hollywood Records

Sometimes the changes coincided with personnel changes, which could make sense.  Sometimes, it was a turning point in the band’s popularity.

The Music Biz

Posted by on June 23, 2015 No comments

The last few days, I’ve been adding additional metadata from my CDs into my ripped files so I can identify them better when logging them in Discogs.  As I was going through each of my CDs, I was logging the record label, the barcode and the catalog number.  As I was doing this, I had a few thoughts.

The first thought I had was noticing that when an artist or band would change record labels, their defining sound would usually radically change, and usually for the worse.  Most cases where this happened would be leaving a major label like Geffen and going to a tiny label like Ray’s Music Records.  There are some cases where an artist would change from a megalabel to a boutique label, like from EMI to Relativity or Magna Carta and although their sound would change, it would still be recognizable.

This got me thinking about how much influence a label has over an album.  Maybe it’s because the larger labels have a stable of high-quality producers that mold the artist’s sound with a heavier hand?  When the band leaves, they either self-produce or are provided a producer from their new label that has a different concept, so maybe that is the reason for the drastic change?

So maybe there is a distinct advantage to being signed on a big label, despite the massive disadvantages that go along with it.  And that was my second thought.  When I look up an album on Discogs and I see there are over 100 different releases of it, I get angry.  I can understand that there may be reasons for an album to be released on different labels in different countries.  I also can understand if a label gets bought out by a different one.  But when I see the album sold by multiple companies, that irks me.  That comes down to who owns the rights to the music.

One time, I picked up a book written by a musician about her story and experiences as an artist.  I didn’t read much of it, but I happened on a passage saying that if a contract ever uses the phrase “in perpetuity” to run away and don’t look back.  The meaning of that term is that the record label owns your work forever.  They can do whatever they want with it: sell it off, license it (whore it out to multiple people), or keep it locked away in spite of huge demand.  Whatever they want.  And that’s what really angers me about the music industry – the idea that the artists and their work belong to them.

It’s not an arrangement like, “You make your music, we’ll help sell it and we’ll take a percentage of the sales for doing that for you.”  It’s more like, “You make music for us, we’ll sell it and give you a percentage of the sales for your efforts.”  And for some long-running acts, you see this terrible situation where they’ve been released from their contract on one label, moved on to another, and the original label starts rehashing all their old songs into different compilations and collector’s editions.  That ends up cheapening the artist’s  image.  I’ve seen artists that have 10 albums and 40 compilations.  How fair is that to the artist?

Filling In The Cracks In The Collection

Posted by on June 15, 2015 No comments

As I’ve previously noted, I have finished the acquisition phase of my CD collection.  I have also completed the scanning of the cover art.  The results of this have been added to Flickr and also as a series of pages for other’s benefit.  To increase the benefits, I decided to contribute to a music metadata website.

I think I’d been through this before, and I had a big internal debate as to whether to use MusicBrainz or Discogs.  Initially, I chose Musicbrainz, but something didn’t sit well with me during that experience and I gave it up pretty quickly.  Recently, I submitted some missing information to Discogs and it went a lot smoother.  So I think I’ve found my home, there.  History shows I’ve said that before and ended up disappointed.  We’ll see.

Discogs seems to be more of what I want anyway, because they focus on collectors, which is more and more how I view myself and my CDs.  So, not only do you simply submit information, you also consume that information by tracking which CDs you own.  I started doing that sporadically.  I’m about half-way through with over 300 of my 600+ albums logged.

The problem is, when you are logging a collectable, you have to be very specific as to which collectible you have.  In the case of albums, each album can be released under different labels in different countries under different catalog numbers.  So as I was logging my collection on the website, I was pretty much choosing the most likely candidate from the multiple choices.

To be the most accurate (and there is a benefit to being accurate), I would have to have the CD in front of me to make sure I was choosing the right one, with the right label and catalog number.  Instead of doing that, I decided I should record the Label, Barcode, and Catalog Number in the files’ metadata, so I can refer to them as needed.  So, for a little while each day, I sit in font of my CD rack with my laptop and record that data into the files.

I had previously used Windows Media Player’s metadata feature to try and add all missing info using their metadata services.  As I was going through and adding the actual info from my CDs, I discovered how inaccurate the results really were.  How could an application determine what label the CD was on, when all it has is a ripped audio file?  For every album I had to change from Sony to Columbia or anything else, I got really irritated.  Not so much that it was wrong, because I understand how it could be wrong, but more because I could have been put in a position of giving bad information.  I insist on being as truthful and accurate as possible.

One of the benefits of being accurate is that Discogs can value your collection based on prior sales of the same item.  Of course, if you have a common or a rare release of an album, that can make a big difference in its value, so accuracy is important.  Being about half-way through my collection, and with moderate accuracy, my collection has a median value of $1500.  I have some CDs worth $60 and some worth $.75.