MP3 Player I’ve updated the MP3 player again this month, so if you’re a returning visitor you may wish to refresh your browser now. For me the highlight of this month’s selection is The Beach Boys little-known car classic Cherry Cherry Coupe. Not because there’s anything particularly brilliant about the music—it’s just a typical early-Beach Boys mix of Chuck Berry filtered through Phil Spector and topped off with a stunning vocal arrangement, that’s all—but the lyrics are just great. They were written by Roger Christian, who wrote a whole set of mostly car-oriented songs for the group, the apogee of which is Little Deuce Coupe. Anyway, check this out for a couplet:
Door handles are off but you know I’ll never miss ‘em They open when I want with a solenoid system.
Pure genius! Love the album cover too:
Yes, I know The Beach Boys are about as hip as Englebert Humperdink, but frankly my dear I don’t give a damn….
Jammy I recently made some damson jam. This is my label for the jars, just quickly adapted from an earlier honey one:
News Wall Whilst at the D&AD Xchange 07 conference Ulrich Proesel showed a slide of a wall from a village in India, where every week someone paints up a summary of the world’s news. My colleague John Hill was at the show with me and he had the idea of using this as the basis for a little project for the freshers. This was my contribution, based on a news photograph and executed with one 3/4″ inch brush, one propelling pencil (with eraser), one black board marker, and three small pots of emulsion:
MP3 Player
I updated the MP3 player last night with a new (eclectic, exotic, extravagant) playlist. Regular or returning visitors may need to refresh this page. Watch out, Ionisation starts very quietly.
I’ve also switched MP3 encoder for this set of tracks. I was using iTunes, but I’ve found a little freeware programme called Switch that has an excellent range of conversion options and a very straightforward user interface. It’s made by an Australian company called NCH Swift Sound Software who make an interesting and unusual range of reasonably-priced audio programs for Mac, PC, and PDAs. Check ‘em out…
Anyway, I’ve started encoding now in stereo at 160kbps, assuming most people are on broadband. If anyone experiences problems please let me know. Which leads me on nicely to:
Audio Quality
Back in June—here in fact—I commented on the widening gap in audio quality experienced by music producers and music consumers. This weekThe Guardian ran an article by Jack Schofield that discussed this very issue, although mostly in terms of the small market for SACD and DVD-A. However, he does offer this pertinent summary that reinforces my own observations:
We have become the audio version of a fast food nation, consuming low-quality music on the run never sitting down to savour a higher-quality experience.
Quite. Thanks for coming, and please feel free to leave a comment.
MP3 Player
I’ve just updated all the tracks on the MP3 player. Return visitors may care to refresh their pages now…
Comments
Until now it has only been possible for registered Blogger users to post comments here: now anyone should be able to. Please use this facility wisely and constructively!
YouTube
I note with interest that YouTube have launched a series of regional sites, including a UK service. Apparently there are nine regional sites now, with more to follow. According to YouTube co-founder Steve Chen the aim of local sites was to offer tailored services for each country (full story here).
We want to create features unique to certain countries, so if mobile phones are particularly popular we would introduce more mobile features.
OK. Certainly having own-language sites makes sense. However, my guess is that:
This is going to make copyright negotiations a lot easier for them. Most copyright agreements are territory-specific, and of course the Internet has completely undermined that principle. Re-territorializing content is going to make content management a lot more straightforward: this is clearly becoming a big issue for them as lawyered-up media production companies sniff around Google’s vast cash mountain…
Presumably this also represents some kind of network reconfiguration designed to take the strain off the main site. Anyone who’s tried to upload a video recently will have noticed how slow this has become: it used to take 10 minutes or so for a video to become live, but recently that time has shot up to around 12 hours. The thumbnail from my POGO video took about three days to appear!
The Wild Wild West of the electric frontier just got some more fences.
This is Dan Pearce. He’s just finished doing a BSc (Hons) Music Technology degree at Swansea Metropolitan University. His Major Project was a very high quality piece of work on audio compression codecs.
Perhaps the most interesting part of his project was the listening tests carried out on a set of lossy codecs: MP3, Microsoft WMA, Apple’s AAC, and the open source Ogg Vorbis. Dan conducted a set of tests that compared the subjective quality on each of these based on a set of four criteria: bass response, treble response, clarity, and spaciousness. Each of these in turn was measured against four different types of source material: rock/pop, jazz, classical, and spoken voice. A standard bit rate of 64kbps was used. Here’s a graph showing the compiled results across all the tests:
We have a winner! His results clearly show the superiority of the Ogg Vorbis files in all categories except the classical! WMA and AAC are very closely matched, whilst MP3 consistently performs the worst. Dan puts this down to its age: originally released in 1993 it’s by far the oldest. Here’s a set of samples from Dan’s project which, I think, give a good indication of the relative performances of the codecs:
For me, the findings from this report beg a huge question: why are most people satisfied with the quality of MP3? It’s grainy, harsh, and has a poor stereo image. And yet it would seem that many people are now getting rid of their CD collections and switching entirely to MP3. Yes, of course I can understand the whole slew of benefits afforded by the digital files/downloads/iPod thing, but doesn’t anyone care how bad it all sounds?
And it’s not even as if “CD-quality” audio is all that good. 24-bit/96kHz digital audio is just so much better it’s unreal, and these days it’s pretty affordable too. We have this situation where—for music producers—audio quality has recently shot up, whilst music consumers now seem happy to settle for a substantially lower-quality product than they’ve been used to for the last 20-odd years. Odd, to say the least. Maybe, for most people MP3 is just good enough….
[Note: in order to get the audio examples streaming across the 'net without glitching I had to subject all the files to a further level of compression. However, they're all encoded equally at 160kbps stereo, and so the relative differences between them remain the same.]
Return visitors may note the appearance of an MP3 player at the bottom of the right-hand column. So, firstly: go put some music on! Mmmmm….
The impetus to make one of these now came out of my teaching, but it was one of those things I ‘d been promising myself to do for ages. Anyway, we’d been talking in class about interface objects that behaved in the same way that ‘real’ objects do—i.e. those that seem to obey the laws of physics—and I’d mentioned Joshua Davis‘ slider that you can ‘throw’ and that seems to ‘bounce off’ the end of its gutter. I went back and got the code walk-through from Davis’ excellent Flash To The Core book, and the basic interaction on my player ended up a version of that hacked to work vertically instead of horizontally. The rest of the code is pretty generic stuff…
The .fla (104kB) in MX2004 format is here. All Davis’ code has been updated for Actionscript 2.0 compliance. If you want to use it, all you have to do is:
Number your mp3s sequentially by number (i.e. 01.mp3, 02.mp3, etc.). This means you don’t have to keep updating the button codes.
Put them on your web space, ideally in a folder called “mp3s”.
Put the relevant code pointing to these files into the buttons. All code is in the ‘Actions’ layer. Yes, it’s commented.
Type the artist and song titles into the ‘content_mc’ movie clip.
Publish.
Amazingly, the whole thing weighs in at a mere 12kB when embedded in a page. Sweet!
