Tag Archives: music

An embarrassment of musical riches

Back in the 1980s, technology triggered a tidal wave of experimentalism in popular music. Punk had established an “anything goes, anyone can do it” attitude, and punk bands like Tubeway Army, Wire and DEVO began to explore the possibilities of the cheap synthesizers being built by companies like Casio, Korg and Roland. This grew into the new wave movement, with groups like The Human League, Depeche Mode and OMD achieving chart success with stripped-down experimental sounds that would never chart today. Then came affordable sampling synthesizers and bands like The Art Of Noise, and even musique concrete became mainstream.

Encouraged by this, several record labels known for their pop repertoire flirted with classical music in the late 80s, trying to bring it to a wider audience. Factory Records started their Factory Classical division, and Virgin (who had been issuing classical music since the mid 70s) set up a sub-label called Venture.

Meanwhile at Zang Tuum Tumb, there was Andrew Poppy. I first heard his work on ZTT IQ6, Zang Tuum Tuum Sampled. I added the name to my “Buy on sight” list, and wasn’t disappointed.

However, the great popular modern classical music experiment died suddenly in the early 90s. Virgin was sold to EMI, and pretty much stopped releasing anything experimental. Factory went bust. ZTT imploded in a mass of lawsuits. Mute was still around, but Daniel Miller had never been interested in anything involving orchestras. I picked up a few more Andrew Poppy releases over the next decade, but only by scouring record conventions.

And then the Internet changed everything. The long tail became more viable. And then, a few weeks ago, I discovered there were five Andrew Poppy albums available that I’d never heard of. I had some gift money left over from Christmas, so I ordered them all, from the man himself.

Here are some brief notes on what the various pieces sound like, for non-completists considering purchase.

Running Naked Through The Garment District

Drum Machining: Drum machine samples speed up, cluster, fragment, and collapse into soft clouds. This could almost be Autechre at times, or a robot version of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music”.
Double Stitch: Beautiful and mellow, shoegazey, like Harold Budd or quieter tracks by The Durutti Column.
Lining For A Desirable Suit: Slightly more up-tempo mellow synth/guitar minimalism which dissolves into warm summer. Shades of Angelo Badalamenti and Twin Peaks.

Blood Sugar

Last Light: Sometimes a piece of music sounds exactly like the title suggests it might. This is one of those cases. Strings.
Snowdronia: Not at all what I was expecting, i.e. not a 20 minute piece of drone music. Instead, it could be a longer and more delicate and icy take on “Last Light”. There is some drone, but it’s just part of the overall picture. Stylistically, edges towards the quieter moments of “Godspeed You! Black Emperor”.
Revolution Number Eight: The mood takes a turn for the sinister. If this is an airport, it’s the one from Stephen King’s “The Langoliers”.
T.A.R.D.I.S.: “Time At Rest Devouring Its Secret”. Previously available on a CD of its own of the same name.
Untitled track: A sketch of piano, echo and delay.

Infernal Furniture

First, a series of solo piano pieces. Then, the recorded piano pieces are digitally sampled and manipulated.

…And the shuffle of things

Something Secret: Electronic drone, ethereal voicelike tones, strings, and a voice discusses the nature of sound. Stylistically, reminds me of Derek Jarman’s “Blue”.
Wet Fold: Wet thumping percussion, gentle droning buzzing, echo, and discreet piano. I liked this a lot.
My Stress Mistress: A piano tries to relax, but the electric organ isn’t helping.
Balcony Scene / Doppelgänger: Harks back to “Alphabed”, but with operatic vocals.
Wave Machine Parts II and III: A caffeinated piano cadenza followed by one which switched to decaf.
The Head of Orpheus Football: This one’s a bit Momus, a song about taking football back to its roots—by playing it with the severed heads of famous football stars.
What Else: What Then Now: Back to Andrew Poppy’s roots with systems music.
My Father’s Submarines: Another spoken-word-over-music piece like “Something Secret”.
Almost the same shame: Solo piano with an interesting side effect that develops.

Shiny Floor, Shiny Ceiling

If you like pop music and classic music, and are at least neutral about opera, give this album a try. It defies me to come up with a genre for it or think of anything else it resembles. Classical lounge hip-hopera?

CD bronzing

If you’ve never seen factory-pressed CDs decay, or think it’s a myth, well, I have some photos to show you.

Here’s an overall view of the label side of the CD. Notice the strange swirly patterns. That’s not a camera artifact; the label part of the CD seems to have some separation from the metal layer, resulting in the interference patterns.

Here’s another view, showing that part of the label embossing has caused brown patches. Notice also that there’s a ring around the edge of the disc which doesn’t have the interference pattern.

Here’s a closeup of the edge of the disc. If you look carefully at the full size image, you can see several brown patches eating into the disc from the outside.

Finally, here’s the central ring, confirming that this is yet another bad disc produced by Philips Dupont Optical (PDO), the source of almost all of the bad discs.

Your sign of possible problems to come.

As for reading the discs, well, they still rip OK except for the last track or two, the ones nearest the outside edge.

You might recognize the discs as Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Aphex Twin. I’ve sent a note to Warp asking them if they are aware of the problem and whether they can comp me a download of the two tracks I can no longer rip.

Update: The nice people at Warp Records offered to sort me out with some downloads and offered to replace the discs if I wanted.

I also found another bronzed Warp CD, plus this one which is totally unreadable:

Memo to music corporations

If you don’t offer lossless downloads, you’re leaving money on the table. Here’s why:

People who are serious about music and buy a lot of it tend to be serious about sound quality. In my own tests, I’m able to distinguish lossless files from even 320kbps MP3s. Therefore, I’m very reluctant to buy anything but lossless music.

Right now, the CD is dying. Amazon is full of people selling their old used CDs. Even the used CD stores are going bust because not enough people want to buy the discs. Austin’s main used CD store recently announced it was going out of business, and when it’s not a viable business model in a town as full of students and focused on music as Austin, you know it’s not going to be viable elsewhere for much longer.

So, serious music fans want lossless audio. Stores are full of used CDs selling for pennies. You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? We buy the CDs used for $3-4 including shipping, rip them, then give them to Goodwill, sell them used again, or pass them to a friend to check out. We get lossless audio for less money than you charge for a lossy download on iTunes, and you make no profit at all on the transaction.

But there’s another way. We don’t want to stiff the artist. We don’t want to have to deal with postage, packaging, ripping CDs, checking for errors, finding cover art, and so on. Offer us a way to buy lossless audio files for under $10 and we’ll probably take it.

So, ball’s in your court.

And to artists: My favorite way to buy music is FLAC files directly from you, sold via Bandcamp or your own Web site. Please bear that in mind when contract renewal time comes up.

Ripping redux

A while back I wrote about double-blind testing various MP3 bitrates in order to decide what format to rip CDs to. The short summary of my testing was that I could easily hear the difference between 320kbps MP3 and lower bitrates, but that the difference between 320kbps and lossless was tougher to hear, at least under the circumstances of the test.

However, as a result of what I learned, I decided to rip everything to lossless FLAC files. I’ve also been playing FLAC files rather than MP3s, and I’m pretty sure that I can distinguish even 320kbps from lossless—but only with particular sections of particular pieces of music.

I reached this conclusion because when listening, I had moments where I heard familiar tracks with unfamiliar clarity. They were pieces of music which I had listened to many times as MP3, and now listened to for the first time in years as lossless audio.

The first time I noticed the phenomenon, the moment of clarity was from Sophie Trudeau’s violin, as featured on a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album. In retrospect this makes sense, as violins have a very jagged waveform, a comparatively high pitch, and subtle harmonics. The fact that the MP3 encoder was also having to deal with everything else that was going on underneath the violin must have made the task even harder for it. So if you want to do your own double-blind tests, I’d suggest some music featuring violins.

However, most of the times when I suddenly heard the music anew, it was because the stereo image was much clearer with the lossless files. Instruments were clearly separated, and the separation didn’t drift. I suddenly remembered an interview with Laurie Anderson in 2011, in which she talked about how MP3 damaged the stereo sound field. At the time I was skeptical, but now I think she’s right. My listening tests had even hinted at this, with the stereo image being one of the things that had distinguished my 320kbps sample.

The problem is that two of the tricks MP3 uses to compress the audio relate specifically to the stereo image. The first trick is to combine the left and right signals in certain frequency ranges into a single mono signal, on the grounds that the human ears can’t determine direction at those frequencies. This is the same logic used to justify having a single subwoofer on your home audio system. I’ve never been entirely convinced by it; I have a dual-subwoofer setup in the living room, and on tracks that have lots of low frequency stereo effects, you can definitely tell. Try the start of Orbital’s “In Sides”, for example.

The second MP3 trick is to convert the separate left and right channels into a combined L+R channel which records most of the music, and a smaller L-R channel which records the differences between left and right that determine the stereo image. This is an old trick used in FM radio.

So MP3 is basically filtering out a big chunk of the stereo image, then taking what’s left, separating it out from the music, and squeezing it to be fairly low resolution. It’s not hard to see how this could do bad things to the stereo image of a piece of music. It’s also clear that for many people, it’s not important—people still listen to mono, and plenty of people listen to stereo on equipment that has inadequate spatial separation between the left and right speakers.

I’ve also pretty much gotten CD ripping down to a science.

Choice of software

For fast and accurate ripping, Exact Audio Copy on Windows is your best bet. On Linux, I’m sorry to say that your best bet is Exact Audio Copy running under WINE. The closest platform-native open source alternative is Morituri, but it’s painfully slow. It can take an hour to rip a CD that EAC will rip in a few minutes. I don’t know why it’s so slow, as cdparanoia is pretty much as fast as EAC; but for some reason, it keeps speeding up and slowing down the drive during the ripping process, rather than pulling in the entire track in one go.

One place where Morituri wins over EAC is metadata. EAC pulls all its info from freedb, which is full of fairly inaccurate data entered by any anonymous yahoo who uses software like EAC. I’ve found that feeding it something obscure like The Hafler Trio will often result in it substituting random metadata for some other release. Morituri uses the Musicbrainz database, which is much more accurate, but also a fair bit less complete.

Musicbrainz have their own application, Picard, which can be used to look up CDs and to add richer metadata to ripped audio files. I’ve generally found that the best approach is to rip with EAC, ignoring minor metadata crappiness, and then use Picard to correct the information later.

Stupid CD tricks

There’s another thing Morituri does better than EAC, but it’s of rather limited importance: when a CD includes audio hidden in the track 1 pre-gap, Morituri automatically rips it as track zero.

This pre-gap audio trick is used to put hidden tracks on some CDs. If you play or rip the disc normally, you don’t hear the track. If, however, you start playing track 1 in a CD player and then immediately rewind back past time 0:00, you find the hidden audio.

Clever, but ultimately kinda annoying. Wikipedia has a useful list of albums with hidden pre-gap tracks.

Often, later releases of a CD got rid of the pre-gap offset and had the extra material as a regular track. Sometimes it depends on country. The original German release of Rammstein’s “Reise, Reise” apparently has a recording from the black box recorder of a plane crash as a pre-gap track, but the US release includes it as normal audio at the start of track 1.

Hardware

It helps to have more than one CD drive to rip with. Sometimes a scratched disc will rip better on a particular drive.

There’s also really no telling which discs will have errors during ripping. My copy of Negativland’s “Free” had one tiny scratch which somehow made the last track fail to rip—but a CD single by Propellerheads that was covered in literally dozens of scratches ripped perfectly.

A lot depends on the CD’s manufacture. Sometimes you’ll get a disc where the hole is punched off-center; this is often apparent from the louder noise it makes in the drive. In that case, turning down the drive speed can help extract troublesome tracks. Also, CDs play from the middle outwards, so the later tracks are more likely to suffer errors if the hole is slightly off.

The worst problem is pinholes. If you hold a CD up to the light and see a lot of holes in the aluminium surface, you’re probably going to have trouble getting a good rip. My copy of “Force Majeure” by Tangerine Dream has no scratches at all, but pinholes make track 3 rip with errors.

Dealing with errors

Not every error is a problem. Different pressings of CDs have slightly different mastering, so it’s not uncommon to rip a CD and find that every track is flagged as not matching what’s in the AccurateRip database. The time to beware is when only one or two tracks fail to match, and the rest are as expected—that means you probably have an actual error.

First, try a visual inspection. See if you can find the likely dirt or scratch, bearing in mind that (as mentioned earlier) CDs play outwards from the middle. Focus your cleaning attempts on that specific area, rather than doing anything to the whole disc that might make the situation worse.

Try a microfiber cloth, and rip the track again. If that doesn’t improve the rip, the toothpaste method is worth a try. I’ve got one of those fancy rotary disc resurfacing things, and it has never fixed a problem that toothpaste couldn’t fix.

If there are no scratches and the error is due to pinholes, no amount of cleaning or polishing will help. However, the errors won’t necessarily be audible. Try ripping the track a few times, ideally with different drives, and look for two rips that have the same MD5 checksum. Listen to that rip, and decide if it’s good enough.

If all else fails, the good news is that everyone’s getting rid of their CDs right now, so there are bargains to be had on Amazon and in used CD stores.

Backing up

First of all, you might be tempted to set up an expensive RAID array. Don’t bother. RAID does two things: it helps ensure high availability, and it helps performance. Neither of these is likely to be a concern for your music collection. Streaming and decompressing lossless audio from disc is trivial for any modern computer, and it won’t kill you if you have to take your music files offline for an afternoon to restore a backup.

So no, you don’t need RAID. Just a backup on another disc somewhere. And RAID is not a backup. Putting your files on a RAID array will not prevent them from being accidentally deleted, or from becoming corrupted due to human error or software error.

To guard against corruption, you could use a fancy filesystem that has integrity checks, like ZFS. However, FLAC files have their own checksum internally, computed on just the audio data. You can use the command-line FLAC tool’s ‘–test’ mode to verify that the audio data is still the same as when the file was encoded.

That just leaves the other problem, of detecting if entire files go missing. You could use a tool like tripwire, but I ended up writing my own script in Ruby to periodically compare the contents of a music directory against a file listing filenames and FLAC checksums. It outputs a list of files which have been added since it was last run, files which have moved, and files which have been deleted. The moved files are detected by comparing checksums, thereby allowing me to shuffle and reorganize files and improve metadata without causing the code to think lots of files have been deleted. If there’s a better tool for the task, I’d be interested to hear about it.

Photo credits: jaswooduk, the girl who owns the world.

MP3, AAC, ABCDE

The problem

I love music, so I’ve got a lot of CDs. I don’t want to have a lot of CDs, though, because they take up space. While I appreciate cover art and read liner notes, I find that I don’t ever hunt down a CD to gaze at the artwork or read the notes — I’m more likely to look for information about it on the Internet. So, for a while now I’ve been considering ditching the CDs and going digital only. The question, of course, was what format to use.

The “I don’t want to risk losing anything” choice for ripping CDs is FLAC. There’s no audio loss, but you only compress the data to about half the size. That leaves you with a terabyte or two of data to deal with — and since it represents your entire music collection, you’d better keep it backed up, ideally outside your home. Backing up that much data is still a painful and expensive proposition.

So then we come to the lossy compression formats. I consider there to be two worth considering: MPEG-1 layer III (aka MP3), and MPEG-4 (AAC). Sorry, Ogg proponents, but not all my devices will play Ogg files, and the last MP3 patent expires in 5 years anyway.

A somewhat related question is where to buy music. Buying more CDs is only making the problem worse. So the main options are the iTunes store, Amazon MP3, and Google Play. I decided to test their chosen lossy compression formats.

The iTunes store uses 256kbps AAC.
Amazon uses 256kbps MP3.
Google Play uses 320kbps CBR MP3.

Clearly 320kbps MP3 is likely to be better than 256kbps MP3, but will it be better than the allegedly superior AAC at 256kbps? Is it worth buying from Amazon rather than Google if they’re cheaper? Just how much better is AAC really?

For ripping CDs, I had an extra format to consider: variable bit rate, where the encoder tries to use only as many bits per second as are needed to compress each given second of music. (Well, technically MP3 is chunked in frames that are a 64th of a second, but you get the general idea.) Quiet sections of music that don’t have much going on result in not many bits per second being spent; complicated sections will ramp up until the maximum 320kbps is used.

It’s possible that Amazon use VBR, and that their quoted 256kbps is an average or target rate. Unfortunately, they don’t say, and it apparently varies between albums. So, I took the approach of comparing to constant bit rate 256kbps MP3.

The procedure

I should start by saying that I’m not a ‘golden ears’ hi-fi nut. I obviously don’t believe in the inherent superiority of analog sources, or else I wouldn’t be considering going digital-only. I also don’t believe in bullshit like unidirectional current accelerators, special $1,000 digital cables, or CD demagnetizers. If you do, you should just stop reading now, because you’ll have so many issues with my testing methods that you’ll dismiss my results anyway.

My audio equipment is midrange, I don’t have a $5,000 amplifier and power-amp combo or anything like that. If you have a setup like that and listen on electrostatic headphones, your results may well differ from mine.

I started out by ripping a CD audio track to a raw wave file (WAV). I then encoded that raw audio file into each of my lossy test formats. I did it that way rather than ripping the CD with different settings, because I wanted to be sure that the encoders all had exactly the same data going in.

For the AAC encoding, I used iTunes with the “iTunes Plus” setting, because Apple’s music store offerings will be encoded with Apple’s encoder, and part of what I want to do is evaluate where I should buy music. I’ve read that Apple has a ‘pro’ encoder that they use for their content, but I don’t have access to that, so iTunes it is.

For the MP3 encoding, I used LAME. Why not iTunes? Well, mostly because in past tests, I found that LAME did a better job than iTunes at the same bit rate. Before iTunes 5 or so, iTunes had a terrible MP3 encoder; my guess is that Apple don’t see it as a big priority compared to AAC. I used the -h switch with LAME for all files; I used --vbr-new --preset standard for the VBR file, and --preset cbr for the CBR files.

I’ve seen it argued that the Frauenhofer encoder these days is better than LAME for constant bit rate encoding. At the risk of spoiling the surprise, that turned out not to be important to my conclusions.

Once I had my four encodings of the music, the next step was to decode them all into wave files again, using iTunes. Obviously I wanted to make sure that all the audio went through the same player, one that’s generally considered adequate and is used by most people.

More importantly, though, I wanted to make sure that my five files were all the same size, ready for the next step.

The thing is, when you’re comparing audio, it’s really easy to convince yourself that you can hear something, if you know what you’re supposed to be hearing. So I wanted to do a true blind test—I would make sure that I didn’t know which files were which until after I had finished comparing them.

I did this by writing a quick Ruby program which took the 5 input files, randomly shuffled the array containing their names, and then ran through the names in sequence copying them to A.wav, B.wav, and so on—while simultaneously writing a log file listing which source file had become A, which had become B, and so on.

require 'fileutils'

shuffled = ARGV.shuffle
n = 65
out = File.open("log.txt", "w")
for file in shuffled
  outfile = "#{n.chr}.wav"
  FileUtils.cp("#{file}", "#{outfile}")
  out.puts "#{outfile} = #{file}"
  n += 1
end
out.close

I could now compare the files A thru E, make notes and pick my winner, and only then look at the log file to find out which I had picked.

The music

For my test audio, I wanted something that fulfilled some key criteria.

I wanted it to be from a digitally mastered album, so that limitations of old analog recording technology wouldn’t mask areas of encoder weakness.
It should be some kind of electronica, as that’s mostly what I listen to.
It should have lots of retro synth sounds, with square, pulse and triangle waves. The reason for this is that MP3 encoding is based around Fourier transforms. The Fourier series for a true square wave requires infinite bandwidth, and a sawtooth is nearly as bad, whereas a sine wave can be encoded much more easily. Basically, the more near-vertical lines the waveform has, the harder it is to MP3 encode.
It should have a wide range of volume levels, to check encoder performance for quiet as well as loud music.
It should have significant stereo effects, as MP3 is typically encoded in joint stereo mode.

Joint stereo is a trick involving separating out the left/right pan position of the encoded frequencies, and then restoring it at playback, rather than encoding the entire left and right channel separately. It often results in noticable compression artifacts.

Basically, I was trying to pick something that was maximally likely to cause the lossy encoders to give an unacceptable result. My choice was the same as last time I did some MP3 testing: Emerge by Fischerspooner.

To see why I picked it, here’s the output from LAME’s VBR encoder:

LAME 3.99.5 64bits (http://lame.sf.net)
Using polyphase lowpass filter, transition band: 18671 Hz - 19205 Hz
Encoding 03 Emerge (lossless).wav to 03 Emerge (lossless).mp3
Encoding as 44.1 kHz j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III VBR(q=2)
    Frame          |  CPU time/estim | REAL time/estim | play/CPU |    ETA 
 11038/11038 (100%)|    0:10/    0:10|    0:23/    0:23|   27.796x|    0:00 
 32 [   71] %*
 40 [    2] %
 48 [    0] 
 56 [    1] %
 64 [    0] 
 80 [    1] %
 96 [    3] %
112 [    3] %
128 [  300] %****
160 [ 2447] %%%%%%********************************
192 [ 1729] %%%%%%%%%******************
224 [  666] %%%********
256 [ 1457] %%%%%%%%***************
320 [ 4358] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%*****************************
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   kbps        LR    MS  %     long switch short %
  243.0       36.3  63.7        39.1  16.7  44.2
Writing LAME Tag...done
ReplayGain: -9.2dB

Around a third of the track was judged by LAME to need the full 320kbps to encode, and a third of it forced LAME to fall back to the less space-efficient LR encoding for the stereo image.

The listening

After some initial listening, I picked three key sections of the track for closer comparison. Section 1 was a quiet bit near the start (around 0:39 in, if you have the CD). Section 2 was a medium intensity chunk with vocals, lots of synths, and some guitar fuzzbox very quietly in the background (around 2:22). Section 3 was the crescendo (around 3:33 onward) featuring two separate sets of vocals at different stereo pan points, synths, effects, the works. There’s a bit of clipping at the end of the track, as you can see if you open the raw file in Audacity, but nothing too bad.

I used the command-line utility SOX to extract out my chosen sections, producing files 1A, 2A, 3A, 1B, 2B, 3B, all the way to 1E, 2E, 3E. File 2A was section 2 of the track, encoded via encoder A, and so on.

I took my 15 wave files, put them on a flash drive, and copied them over to my PlayStation 3. The PS3 is connected via all-digital connections; it would send the 44.1kHz 16 bit audio data to the Denon receiver, which would do all the analog stuff. Remember, all the files were pre-decoded raw audio data, so the PS3′s MP3 and AAC decoding wouldn’t be an issue. I also set the Denon to DIRECT mode, bypassing the DSP, so that wouldn’t affect the results.

I plugged in the best headphones I currently own, a set of Shure SRH-440 studio headphones. (I used to be a big Sennheiser fan, but the 440s are better than my previous midrange Sennheisers.)

I sat down with some scrap paper and listened, using the PS3 controller to jump effortlessly between my audio clips.

The results

I compared the clips in pairs, with the aim of continuing until I found a winner. I’ll now run through the comparisons in the order I did them. I’ll reveal the encodings as I go, but remember, I had no idea which audio formats matched which filenames until after I had finished.

A vs B (lossless vs AAC)

This was a walkover. Sample A won by a landslide for sections 2 and 3, where I noted that the sound was “confused”—when there was a lot going on, AAC seemed to blend it all into a bit of an unintelligible mess. Sorry, Apple, but 256kbps AAC is not CD quality.

A vs C (lossless vs 320kbps CBR MP3)

This was the comparison I had the hardest time with. I rated slightly C worse on the quieter bits, but gave it a tiny nod for the stereo imaging at the end, which I thought sounded a bit clearer. I’d have called it a draw if I hadn’t been forcing myself to pick a winner.

C vs D (320kbps CBR vs LAME –preset standard -h –vbr-new)

This was another easy one. I thought C was quite clearly better, especially when the music got raucous in the third section.

C vs E (320kbps MP3 vs 256kbps MP3)

This was another tricky one, and in this case I need to ‘cheat’ a little and interpret my notes in the light of the eventual reveal.

I preferred encoder C for the quieter parts of the music, but I wrote in my notes that in sections 2 and 3, the synth lead was darting back and forth across the stereo image. Since I didn’t know which file was the original lossless rip, for all I knew that might have been an intentional studio effect such as a stereo flanger.

Well, it turns out that no, that was an encoding artifact, rather than something all the encoders failed to deal with. So 256kbps CBR fails badly compared to 320kbps and pretty much everything else.

So the final winner was: A and C in pretty much a dead heat.

Round two

Not everyone listens to synth bleeps all the time. I wanted to see if I could get a similar ranking using encodings of orchestral music. I went to find something that was digitally recorded and mastered in a modern studio, but using acoustic instruments you’d find in an orchestra. It needed to be a manageable length, and have wide variations in volume level. I picked “The Object Is A Hungry Wolf” by Andrew Poppy, from the remastered “Andrew Poppy on ZTT” set.

Same procedure was followed as before. However, I won’t go through the pairwise comparisons, because the sad truth was that I couldn’t pick out any kind of winner when comparing any of the samples. LAME’s VBR encoder said it hardly needed more than 256kbps for any of the frames of audio, and I guess it was right.

Conclusions

I was pleasantly surprised to find that in some cases, I could hear the difference between encodings, and that the perceived quality was in line with what you’d expect given the bit rates.

The Hydrogenaudio wiki says that LAME’s standard preset is transparent, and that encoding with other settings will have no noticable effect on quality. My results seem to contradict this; I had no hesitation ranking 320kbps LAME-encoded MP3 as better than the standard preset, when using the Fischerspooner track as source material. This is a big disappointment for me, for one simple reason: I have all my music ripped and encoded via LAME’s standard preset.

Apple’s iTunes Plus AAC files are not good enough to be considered ‘near CD quality’ in my view. The difference was subtle, but noticable.

However, my Sansa Clip Zip MP3 player has noticably better audio quality than either of my iPods, even after switching to better earbuds; and my MacBook Pro has rather poor quality audio output compared to my Lenovo music server machine and my external USB audio interface. Apple aren’t the only ones who cut corners on audio either—the Google/Samsung Galaxy Nexus has sadly inferior audio compared to the Sansa, and I don’t use it for music as a result.

So I’m guessing that if you’re listening on a Mac or an iPod or your mobile phone, you probably won’t be able to detect a difference between iTunes AAC files and CD audio. For that matter, you probably won’t notice the difference between 256kbps MP3 files and CDs.

But the difference is there. So if you care about making sure you aren’t giving up sound quality even when using good equipment, my personal conclusion is that 320kbps MP3 is the way to go. As far as I can tell, 320kbps MP3 is utterly indistinguishable from lossless audio, given the best equipment at my disposal, and using music that’s hard to encode.

That means that for buying music, my preference is probably going to be Google Play, bleep.com, and any other online store offering maximum bitrate MP3 files. And I think that realistically, there’s no call for FLAC encoding everything; I might as well use MP3 and make my life a lot easier.

Shortcomings of my approach

There are some obvious limitations of the procedures I followed.

I used iTunes for all the compressed audio decoding. There may be better MP3 decoders; there are certainly worse ones. It’s possible that by using a better decoder, you could get acceptable performance at lower bit rates than I did.

I didn’t test Fraunhofer’s MP3 encoder against LAME. Maybe 256kbps would be perfectly fine if encoded using a different encoder.

I didn’t test Apple’s internal AAC encoder that they use for the iTunes store. Maybe iTunes purchases are better quality than CD rips to the same format; I’d be interested to know if anyone has compared them.

I didn’t test AAC against MP3 at similar bitrate. That wasn’t intentional, I just eliminated AAC from consideration, not knowing that that was what I was doing, before I got to the MP3. It doesn’t matter to my conclusion, but if you want to know whether you should be buying from iTunes or Amazon, I can’t answer that.

I didn’t consider better-than-CD source material. Maybe Neil Young is right, and we need more than 16 bits at 44.1kHz; or maybe Monty is right and CD is good enough. I’m reserving judgement on that until I have the chance to try a proper A/B test.

The obvious counterpoint to going with just 320kbps MP3, is that I should keep FLAC so I can encode into other bit rates, depending on device. That suggestion probably made sense a few years ago, but now that I have an MP3 player with 40GB of storage via a MicroSD slot, I can’t see myself ever caring that I’m wasting space on 320kbps MP3 when I could have gotten away with (say) 256kbps.

You might similarly say that eventually FLAC will make sense. Well, yeah, before too long we’ll have affordable terabyte flash drives for backup. But right now, FLAC is a disk-hogging pain, and since it’s unnecessary in audio terms and there’s no longer a need to keep it around for making low bitrate MP3s on demand, why bother?

Yes, MP3 is lossy. It isn’t perfect. But hey, I lived with vinyl LPs and audio cassettes for a decade or so. I don’t need perfection, and the effects of bad mastering and the loudness wars are a much bigger problem than any tiny artifact introduced by 320kbps MP3.

Amazing Week, Day 2: Internet shopping

Part of Amazing Week 2012

During my teenage years I developed a taste for electronic music, of the kind that generally didn’t go anywhere near the charts — except for a few years in the early 80s. Several times a year I would travel up to London and trawl around all the big record stores. The Virgin Megastore, the HMV Store, Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, sometimes more. I’d go through the racks from A to Z, looking for anything on my list of obscure wants.

Every time I visited a new town I’d try and hit a few record shops; every now and again I’d get lucky. I still remember with amazement finding a copy of “Anywhere” by New Musik in the £2 discount bin in a record shop in Beaconsfield. I remember visiting Torquay once, partly because it’s where I found a CD of “Total Devo”.

Many albums were only available as imports. These were often extremely expensive. But then in the late 80s, I found myself with e-mail and access to Usenet. I made friends with a couple of guys in the US, and we would trade CDs — I’d send them things that were only available in the UK, and they’d send me things that were only available in the USA.

I realized that things had changed completely in 1995. I’d been looking for the albums of a band called Data, founded by Norwegian Georg Kajanus. I learned from Usenet that a compilation of two of the albums been released on CD — but it was being put out by a tiny Swedish record label.

Suddenly this was no problem. I went onto the web, found a record store in Sweden that would accept Internet orders, and sent them my order. I think I faxed them the actual credit card number; in those days not everyone had SSL, and it was quite common to send the credit card details separately for security.

Mail order existed before the Internet, of course. What makes Internet shopping so amazing is that you can search the equivalent of millions of catalogs and find almost anything.

Part of me misses the challenge of it all. Where’s the fun in hunting for a copy of the Human League’s early demo tapes if you can just click a few buttons and download them in 320kbps MP3s? Now music is so instantly accessible that the problem is deciding what to listen to next.

It’s not just music, of course. That book on blissymbolics I had searched every library for was on Amazon. The Israeli natural deodorant that works really well for me is readily available from sellers online. I can get really good, sharp razor blades from Japan for a fraction of the price of Gillette razor cartridges.

In fact, the problem now is that increasingly I find I want things that are only available online. For example, a couple of weeks ago I went out in search of a decent multimeter. Maybe I tried the wrong stores, but it was either Fluke — industrial strength and built to last but too expensive for my trivial usage — or it was no-name Chinese meters that I wouldn’t want to trust to test batteries. In the end I went to Amazon and ordered a midrange meter from Amprobe. I’m glad I had that option.

So next time you’re ordering something online, think about how amazing it is that you have access to millions of stores around the world, in one giant marketplace, without even leaving your house.

The music of Baby Bird

Way back in the mists of time — 1996, in fact — I was living in dear old England, pondering whether to emigrate. One Saturday I wandered into my local CD store to trawl the discount rack for anything that looked interesting. On my way there, a CD on the countertop next to the cash register caught my attention:

I had no idea what the hell it was, but the cover photo had me intrigued. “Baby Bird”, it said, “The Happiest Man Alive”. A tiny infobox at top right promised “Disturbed Love Songs” in “ALMOSTEREO”.

I picked it up and looked at the back cover. A circle of stars, each with text, presumably track titles. Three paragraphs of text in the middle, telling a story, ending:

…He wants to be someone else. The radio crackles off. All the lights go out. A bomb has dropped. Like a siren slowly starting up, the power fizzles on, with a thing by Baby Bird. The kid’s head stops shaking. He picks up the Panasonic and throws it through the window…

A note at the bottom said “Any imperfections or crackles may result on this record as the vinyl has to be reconstructed from melted down Level 42 and Queen albums”.

It was a bit Paul Morley without the pretension, and it’s fair to say that it was calling to me on the basis of the cover alone. I asked if I could listen to some of the actual music. Here’s what I heard as it started:

A few minutes later the CD was mine. And so it was that I fell into the world of Stephen Jones, aka Baby Bird.

I listened to not much else for a week or so. The album sounded like it had been recorded on a four track in someone’s bedroom, and it probably had, but that wasn’t important. Like Sparks, what grabbed me was the lyrics. Intelligent, humorous, unexpected; sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes creepy. Here’s the start of “I Didn’t Want To Wake You Up”:

I learned that Baby Bird had quietly recorded five albums’ worth of material over the course of six years, and that each one was a limited edition of a thousand copies. Now I had a mission.

It may be hard to understand now if you’re under the age of 30, but back before the Internet became ubiquitous it could take years to find a particular album. Every time I visited a new city, I’d check out the record stores, just on the off chance. I still remember the excitement of finding an album I’d been looking for for five years, in the two quid sale rack in a record shop in Beaconsfield. I won’t bore you with all the details of my quest, but I eventually found all five CDs. Five albums of gems like this, an excerpt from “Hate Song”:

Then something totally unexpected happened: Baby Bird had become Babybird, and had a number one hit in the UK singles chart, “You’re Gorgeous”. A song sung by a middle-aged man, from the perspective of a teenage girl, about being seduced into nude modeling and amateur porn — and suddenly it was on Top of the Pops and playing on the radio everywhere.

I’m not used to having music I listen to appearing in the charts. I’ve learned that what I think of as approachably mainstream can often clear rooms. In the 90s I’d read NME to find out what they were slagging off, and then listen to that because it was usually at least interesting. Now here was something good, and so bizarre I would never have thought it would appeal to anyone, and it was a hit. I just didn’t understand England any more. And I left.

Apparently there had been some sort of bidding war based on rave press reviews of the lo-fi albums, and the hit single was the start of a new Baby Bird, contracted into a single word and expanded into a full band. I was lucky I’d managed to track down the CDs, as they were fetching ludicrous prices on eBay.

A full-band Babybird album followed. Initially I hated it, but I decided I was probably being hipsterrific and resenting the fact that everyone was now listening to something I thought was my secret. I gave it a second chance, and decided I still didn’t like it as much as the lo-fi recordings. Something had been lost in the slickness and professionalism; some of the songs sounded like they had been polished and re-recorded until all the life had been squeezed out of them.

The next album, “There’s Something Going On”, was much better — and much darker. The first track, “Bad Old Man”, is a case in point:

And that’s sweetness and light compared to “Take Me Back”, which I still find hard to listen to.

Every Babybird album since then has been a delight. Apparently it just took an album or so for Stephen Jones to learn how to bend a full band to his will. It was worth the wait, for tracks like this:

But if you want the grimy lo-fi originals, which I’d highly recommend as a starting point, pick up the boxed set of the remastered versions. It’s a bit tough to find now, but well worth seeking out. Alternatively, you can buy the albums from Google Music in DRM-free 320kbps MP3. If you want to start with one of the slicker more commercial albums, my personal pick this week would be Ex-Maniac.

In the mean time, you can catch up with Stephen Jones as @babybirdmusic on Twitter. He’s got a book out. That old guy on the cover of the album that first caught my attention? His dad.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Part 2: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts

In which I continue to post my thoughts about a documentary everyone else watched six months ago.

I thought during this episode that I could see a central point being made in Adam Curtis’s series. He seemed to be attacking the myth that networks are inherently self regulating and stable. I think he’s off-base painting it as a myth promoted by computer scientists or engineers, however. People who build computers know that they only stay stable because they are so simple, with the fundamental simplification being treating everything as digital binary information. There were analog computers, such as the Norden bombsight, but they were ultimately a dead end precisely because it was so difficult to make them reliable.

Today, enormous amounts of engineering go into making computers stable, trying to make them immune to chaotic behavior triggered by noise and unexpected input in their feedback loops. CPUs have to be designed so that their circuits can filter out thermal noise, quantum effects, and other unwanted sources of randomness and unpredictability. Serious business computers use special ECC RAM designed to catch and fix errors and small divergences that would otherwise cause crashes and instability. We’re actually hitting the point where hard drive storage becomes problematic because the error rates are too high to keep big disks from chaotically losing information. Instead, companies like Google have to build their petabytes of storage using multiple distributed storage units. There are new file systems (ZFS and btrfs) which are adding data duplication and error correction techniques to try and make multi-terabyte disks and distributed disk clusters work as if they were reliable single drives.

Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, of course, the problems were different. Then it was ferrite cores cracking, paper tape wearing out, floppy disks going bad, and so on. But the fact that computer-like systems easily end up behaving chaotically is not, I think, something that any engineer would have been unfamiliar with.

Aside #1: When it comes to music, chaotic feedback systems are very much preferred. From the electric guitar to the Moog synthesizer, feedback loops are one of the first things you implement with any new piece of music technology in order to make it sound more interesting.

Aside #2: While it seems quaint now, during the 50s it was seriously considered that the entire universe might be a feedback system that naturally tended towards a steady state.

The thing is… Economies based on perpetual growth really aren’t sustainable indefinitely. We’ve been in an anomalous period of history, effectively cheating by using up finite natural resources. However, human managed stability isn’t workable either, because we don’t have the control we think we have, or the knowledge to work out how to adjust a complex natural system to keep it stable. Wildfires are perhaps the best example. It seems obvious how to prevent forest fires; so obvious that cartoon bears tell children they can do it. But catastrophic wildfires have been getting worse and worse, precisely because the US has attempted to prevent fires.

The truth nobody likes to admit is that we need to live our lives on the assumption that change will happen, including disastrous change. We need systems which keep disaster localized. In economics and political terms, that means smaller markets, smaller countries, smaller companies, less control. Obviously, nobody in power wants to admit that that’s the case.

Not mentioned in Curtis’s documentary is that this view of the world as a place where steady states are possible, even desirable, is a very Western idea. If you look at Chinese philosophy, Taoism teaches that change is inevitable, and to be welcomed; that even catastrophe can be viewed as an opportunity for positive change. (The idea that the Chinese character for crisis is composed of the characters for change and opportunity, though—that’s a myth.) Buddhism, too, teaches that impermanence is inevitable, and that our clinging to a desire for perpetual stability is the root of what makes us unhappy—not just because we are inevitably disappointed, but because our actions in seeking permanence cause suffering.

Personally, it’s not even clear to me why a stable steady-state world would be a good thing. Looking at reality, the only things which are steady state are dead things; life is characterized by constant change and adaptation. So basically, as presented by Adam Curtis, both sides of the debate are wrong: The world can’t be treated as a dumping ground without ill effect, and it isn’t self-regulating—but equally, we can’t turn it into a regulated stable system and prevent ecological disasters.

The scary thing is that the environmental debate today is still dominated by the two same incorrect ideas: the one side insisting that we can carry on without any climate crisis, the other that we can fix the problem and avoid crisis. There’s a Woody Allen quote that’s closer to the truth:

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

A final note: It’s interesting that both hippies and Randian Libertarians ultimately have the same mistaken belief, that a simple system with no imposed power structures will end up egalitarian and stable.

The gangster chic of remix culture

Giles Bowkett ponders remix culture, and writes:

There’s an interesting and somewhat alarming correlation between culture based on recycling other culture and organized crime.

I don’t think there’s any particular mystery about why this is the case. It’s down to the unfortunate fact that corporations have decided to try and make artistic collage and appropriation into a form of illegal art. If you make music via extensive sampling, sooner or later you’re going to get sued, or at least seriously threatened with a lawsuit. Examples range from the pop/punk of Culturcide, Chumbawamba and KLF/Jamms, through the eclectic satires of Negativland, to the academic experimentalism of John Oswald. Even referring to a product or famous person by name can get you sued, as Momus found out (twice). More recent artists like Girl Talk seem to be avoiding lawsuits mostly because the music industry is too busy suing file sharers.

None of those artists’ work had any particular connection to crime–until they were sued. But after a decade or so of high profile copyright and trademark lawsuits, the connection between crime and sample culture was established in the minds of artists. While hip-hop started out sample-based out of necessity–the early proponents couldn’t afford any expensive studios or instruments, and relied on tape manipulation–before long even the most successful and wealthy hip-hop and rap acts realized that the illegality of sampling was a perfect complement to their subject matter. Similarly, as raves were driven underground, the music became more sample-heavy.

Kids today may not realize that back in the 1970s and early 80s, giving the finger to the establishment was easy. All you had to do was dress outrageously, make a virtue of your alleged lack of musicianship, dismiss previous artists as irrelevant, and swear a lot (ideally on live TV). But by the mid 90s, offending the establishment was getting harder and harder. You could fire a machine gun at the audience and dump a dead sheep outside the venue and barely get any outrage. By 2001, The Onion pointed out the ridiculousness of artists who still hope to shock through mere appearance.

No, there’s only one way to really piss off the establishment these days, and that’s to disrespect their intellectual property without paying proper monetary tribute.

But moving from John Oswald to Patton Oswalt, I think Oswalt’s rant is really about his dissatisfaction that his long-nurtured position of cool knowledgability in the underground geek culture is now something anyone can obtain easily. I have some sympathy with that. I remember taking day trips to London to visit half a dozen major record stores, and searching bargain bins and used racks in the hope of finding some obscure unwanted copy of an album I’d been seeking for years. Now the challenge has gone.

It took me four years before I tracked down a copy of synthpop band New Musik’s second album “Anywhere”; when I eventually found a vinyl copy in the £2 bin in a record shop in Beaconsfield, it was like Christmas had come. You, on the other hand, can buy a copy right now on Amazon, albeit for a bit more than I paid. Looking for Landscape’s classic “From the Tea-rooms of Mars… to the hell-holes of Uranus”? You won’t have to travel to the Oxford Street Virgin Megastore in the hope of finding it, as I did. It wouldn’t help to try, in fact, because the megastore is gone; nobody’s going to travel half way across the country in the hope of collecting the TELEX back-catalog when they can order it all with a few clicks. It’s just too easy.

Another subtext I see in Oswalt’s rant is the familiar and tiresome claim that they don’t make any good art any more. The music I listened to in college was awesome, man, these modern artists just can’t compare, right?

Wrong. Sure, the 80s gave us punk, synth and new wave, but it also gave us Black Lace, Olivia Newton-John, Captain and Tennille, Styx, Kenny Rogers, The Tweets, and of course Rick Astley. The 80s launched the career of Céline Dion, and the charts were perpetually infested with Stock, Aitken and Waterman productions. The 90s were no better; they may have made electronica resurgent, but they also brought us Backstreet Boys, Vanilla Ice, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Britney Spears. Take off the rose-tinted blinkers and you can find incredible new music made in the last decade, from Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” and Röyksopp’s Melody A.M., to Jackson and his Computer Band and Whitey.

There probably isn’t going to be a pop culture “Year Zero”; at least, not for music. While the 70s and 80s both saw technology completely change the boundaries of what was possible, at this point technology is cheap enough and sophisticated enough that pretty much anyone with a day job can put together a mini recording studio and make music that sounds like absolutely anything they can imagine. A couple of grand will get you 16 channels of digital stereo multitrack recording and a rack of virtual synthesizers that would have made Rick Wakeman weep for joy in 1974.

Sure, lots of people are using the technology for mashups and YouTube joke videos, but I suspect that’s just a temporary phenomenon. People are learning to use the tools at their disposal, and remixes are a great way to do that. It’s like the early days of desktop publishing, when the world exploded with bad fonts. Give it a while, and things will settle down, and we’ll see more Jonathan Coultons, Weebls and Liam Lynches, and fewer reaction videos and nut-shot compilations.

The 70s again, through the lens of TV theme tunes

I’ve recently become somewhat fascinated by a number of 1970s TV themes. They’re not theme tunes of shows I ever watched, and not themes I remember. Rather, they’re tunes which have something odd or off-putting about them.

First up: The theme from LWT’s “Weekend World”. The YouTube clip is an 80s recording, but the same music was used in the 70s too; Wikipedia tells me it’s “Nantucket Sleighride” by Mountain, and that in the 80s the show used a cover version. It’s driving prog rock, slightly sinister, just like an out-of-control winter sleigh ride in Nantucket might sound. The weirdness here is that the show was sleepy Sunday afternoon political discussion. How did that music ever get chosen for it?

Next: Granada TV’s “World In Action”. A politically-focused documentary show. Again, the best YouTube recording is from the 80s, but the same music was used in the 70s as well. For best effect, imagine the music over the 70s titles. Creepy, depressing, a soundtrack for a country falling apart. Used to scare the hell out of me as a child.

The story behind how this music came to be used seems somewhat bizarre. It was improvised by Texan folk rock musician Shawn Phillips and another session musician, Mick Weaver. Producer Jonathan P Weston then edited the TV theme out of the jam session, and allegedly put his name as sole composer and performer because Phillips and Weaver weren’t members of the UK musicians’ union at the time. Apparently Weston then collected 30 years of royalty checks, and Phillips and Weaver didn’t see any of the money. Ironic, given the kinds of corruption the TV show used to investigate. And now I discover Shawn Phillips lives a few miles from me, here in Austin.

Finally: A John Barry composition, The Theme to “The Persuaders”. Again, to me this seems like a seriously creepy and sinister piece of music. It’s completely out of keeping with the TV show, too–to get a feeling for how inappropriate the mood match was, check a random clip from the series. The show was a lightweight action-adventure romp, with Roger Moore giving the kind of jokey tongue-in-cheek performance he later gave to the role of James Bond. They’d end on a laugh, and then suddenly the creepy music would play.

They don’t make TV show theme tunes like these any more.

mathew

Love's so sweet it suffocates us like a sickly kindly gag, and we're floating down the sewer pipe like kittens in a bag.