Jeremey's Weblog

Open Letter to Apple on High Res Audio

I'm really excited about the Apple/iTunes DRM-free EMI catalog announcement. Here's an opportunity for Apple and the record labels to blow open a whole new market for high resolution audio. So, guys:

There's a market for high resolution audio! Especially in downloadable, DRM-free form. So you're going to 256k bps, that's great. Please make the sample from the original masters, not from the CD! And I double-beg, please sample at 20 or even 24 bits! Wow, that would be awesome. 256k+ bps at 20 or 24 bits sampled from the masters would blow "CD quality" out of the water and make iTunes the best source on the planet for high resolution audio.

Forget SACD and DVD-AUDIO formats. I love DVD-AUDIO, but it's extremely cumbersome. I want it in my iPod! Give us real high resolution and we'll pay for it. $1.29 per song is great. An extra buck or two on an album wouldn't even be bad if the audio is not just a higher quality CD sample, but a higher quality sample from the masters.

Thanks.

Technorati Tags: apple, audio, music

Death Cab for Cutie in Houston

From my very crappy cameraphone... at least we had front row seats!

Clutter

Remember how your desk used to be covered with CDs? Well now that we have iTunes (or other inferior music app ;), we've lost that whole visual, organic, "hey, I forgot about that, I really want to hear that" thing. But no more! Enter Clutter, a new app which lets you drag umpteen album covers onto your Mac OS X desktop. If you don't have the album art, it'll fetch it from Amazon for you. When you double-click one, it launches that record in iTunes. Awesome. This is really cool for me, because I'm always forgetting about music. Maybe I have too much... naaaah.

Pandora

This is really, really, really awesome. Pandora is a radio-station front end to the Music Genome Project, which is an enormous detailed music profiling tool. Basically you give it one or more songs or artists that you like, and it begins playing music that it thinks you might like. You can thumbs-up/thumbs-down a song or skip to another, etc. The cool thing is that it does not use any "usage pattern matching" or "collective popularity" kinds of algorithms, it uses around 400 distinct musical properties that a team of musicians has analyzed for each song. So it doesn't just recommend popular music that other people bought, but instead it recommends actually similar music, based on the music itself. Very cool!

I'm gonna go broke on iTunes now.

New Eisley EP on iTunes

There's a new Eisley EP on iTunes (released today). I don't see it under their band name, but searching will find it (Head Against the Sky), or click here. If you're an Eisley fan, go get it. If not, shame on you... at least a little. :)

Sigur Ros

Wow... this song and this video are brilliant:

http://www.emichrysalis.co.uk/quicktime/sigur_ros/glosoli/index.php?version=7.030&bandwidth=38400

Apologies to them for my inadequate i18n skilz (the name of the band has non-English letters).

Wired on Digital vs. Analog

A brief but interesting read: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69022,00.html

The bottom line is that digital is no better or worse than analog, and amazing records can be and have been made with both. Digital gives you more power and control, unquestionably... and it can be used wisely... or not.

That being said, digital is very exciting for two reasons:

• it breaks down barriers that prevent people from getting into the audio/recording field and it significantly de-mystifies the whole art of making records
• it opens the doors to processing possibilities that could never happen in analog gear (look at Altiverb)

The most interesting part of the article is the Death Cab for Cutie guitarist's observation that the process of recording digitally is different from analog, and that the analog process is better for them. But clearly that's a problem of process, not of the recording medium itself (and their latest was done digitally and honestly sounds better than any of their previous records).

Logic

I started using Logic (Express) last night. The first hour was very frustrating, but once I "got it", it all clicked and I'm loving it. I did a complete (but preliminary) production of one of the songs I recorded at the Doin' the Stuff conference this summer in about 3-4 hours and it sounds pretty good. Once you grok how Logic uses "audio objects", it's a very smooth workflow. I easily brought in tracks recorded in Digital Performer (4), both mono and stereo, and Logic knew what to do with the split (L+R) stereo tracks. That was one of my biggest gripes with Live as a production environment.

I had the benefit of having some good Audio Unit plugins (EAS and Nomad Factory) which helped with the production, but I used Logic's PlatinumVerb to good effect (though I didn't like the presets, but in fairness I think they were designed to be run on a bus and not an insert), one of Logic's compressors, and I used its ChanEQ on every channel except the master (the EAS plugins are better suited for that).

Bouncing the master to disk was incredibly easy and flexible, too. I love it! Here's a screenshot:

Here Is Our King on iTunes

David Crowder Band's new single is available on iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=78682594

Woohoo! I should get it for free at the show, but these are guys I want to spend money on.

Eisley Live in Santa Cruz

So Eisley played in Santa Cruz last night, and Boyd got me a pass to photograph the show. Here are the results: http://homepage.mac.com/jeremeybarrett/eisley.html. Note that the photos are completely raw at this point.