Evelyn Glennie is a deaf percussionist. I guess that this is possible because percussion creates vibrations that you can feel with your feet, your hands, your fingertips, maybe even your whole body. She is now one of the few or only professional solo percussionists in the world. Anyway, the TED conference gave her a 30 minute session which is reproduced here in high definition (definitely consider plugging into decent speakers or headphones). Evelyn Glennie on "How to Listen". Click on the High Definition link under the video to get the real video.

Someone asked me recently to describe my home theatre. I've put quite a lot of thought & work into it. But not a lot of money. My goal from the start was to achieve the maximum return with the minimum of complexity.

So, right from the start I knew that it was going to be as much digital as possible. I don't care about live TV and I'm a bittorrent expert so I knew I couldn't have to mess around with cable connections. But more to the point, being digital means you don't have to worry about analog components or duplication. For example, you can concentrate on having just a single Digital/Analog Converter (DAC)... a key component in your audio set-up.

The first thing I bought was the DAC & speakers. I had a new apartment and I wanted to be able to listen to music there. In particular, I wanted to be able to do two things: listen to music coming off my Nokia N95, which functions like an iPod, and listen to music coming off my laptop, a MacBook Pro. I did a lot of research online to figure out how I could get the best sound with a budget of $400. And I wound up finding a REALLY nice pair of speakers.

I actually restricted my search strictly to powered speakers, or, as they are commonly called, "ipod speakers"... and most of them are fairly crap. Even the ones from Apple didn't really score that well when I listened to them. I'm a musician on the side and I know what good sounds like. None of the ones I could find in stores reproduced sound the way I wanted—clean, like the original, faithful. They were bass heavy and muddy. But online I read a review of AudioEngine 5, a pair of "ipod speakers" that got fabulous reviews—from audiophiles.

You probably know that audiophiles are nutcases, but there is something to be said for their discrimination and knowledge of the art. If an audiophile says something is good, then it probably rocks if you're a normal person, even a musician like me. So, I found a deal and bought the A5s for $350. And I picked up an Apple Airport Express at the same time.

Both purchases turned out better the more I learned. The A5s have built-in amplifiers, which means that I don't need to (a) buy an amp (which I planned) or (b) match the amp to the speakers. That's a relief because sound matching amp/speakers would be a LOT of work. With the Airport Express, I started to notice something odd. When I plugged my MBP directly into the speakers, it sounded OK. But when I played through the Express, it sounded GREAT. Turns out the Express has a quite good DAC inside. Sweet! The improvement is highly audible.

OK, a little digression here about speakers. Most products, you get what you pay for. Not with speakers. Speakers are in fact somehow immune to the whole mass production economics. Most audiophiles seem to agree that most, or perhaps all, consumer grade speakers are absolute shit. To get good speakers you either spend absolutely boatloads of money, buy second-hand, or ... you can buy from very small companies, even individual crafters. Audioengine falls into the last category. Even though their website may look slick, this is a small enthusiast company that just wants to make great speakers.

What's up with that? I don't know. I think partly it's the analog ecosystem. For good analog components you just cannot avoid spending a lot of money on expensive electronics to put inside. You can't skimp or replace things with digital. You have to have huge capacitors, big transistors, lots of coiled wire, heavy metal. Good speakers are HEAVY. They are made not from plastic or even titanium but MDF—that's plywood in normal english. You can't fake this stuff, you have to have it, but it's not rocket science, just good workmanship. So, buying from a small company like Audioengine is not silly, it's a great choice. End of digression.

So... now I had a REALLY good sound system and spent countless hours discovering all kinds of wonderful things about my music collection. It really makes a difference. In fact, I admit that I've poisoned my ears on lesser systems... I just need to hear the higher quality. The music is just ... better. There's more in it, detail wise, spatially, musically, tonally. Get a good pair of speakers & DAC, and you too can discover the magic.

Next up: TV. Starting out, I thought I wanted the biggest plasma I could buy. I read all of the reviews, the dark room tests, HD movies, the works. Plasma is the best, blah blah blah. Went to a big store and suddenly I realized different. Two things for me. One: I'm only about 8 feet from my screen and I don't want to be dwarfed. So, I can knock down the screen size dramatically, in fact, I went down to 32 inches. Crazy eh? Second: I have a sunny upper-floor viewing room with a window directly opposite the display, and I intend to watch during the day. That means matte screen which means LCD. Benefits are that I save money due to the small size, don't have to worry about burn in or wasting power, and I know what LCDs are like from long experience. So I wound up with the Sharp AQUOS 32D64U. This model has 1080p, which was essential for me. I have to be future proof. It's going to be a long time before there's a higher resolution than that for films.

Finally, I need something to tie it all together, and here my Mac bias definitely played a role. Mac Mini of course. Of course it helps that they are silent, small, and look very good indeed. No ugly boxes for me. I run VLC and mplayer, but mainly Plex, and awesome port of XBMC. Video goes through a DVI to HDMI converter into the TV, and sound goes analog into the speakers (A5's have two inputs). My only complaint is again, the Mini's analog audio output is not as good as the Airport Express. Eventually I will have to buy a dedicated DAC.

This setup does everything I need, and it's got a good future. If and when I want to move up to new components, all of these pieces will make excellent secondary system components for a second room. They all go together really well, look good, and look and sound great. All told the whole system was about $2K which is a reasonable price considering that I'm basically completely satisfied at this point in time.

For the future? I might—might—try out surround sound at some point. I'm not crazy about—pointless for music, but for the movies—maybe. I definitely don't need a bigger screen. A proper external DAC, driven by USB port, is probably the next item to get, and then I would begin the search for a new amp/speaker combo. Realistically though I can't upgrade my speakers (or add a sub-woofer) until I move into a house. My apartment does not have thick walls and with the A5 bookshelf-sized speakers I can crank it up any time without waking people up.

So, there you have it... complete system, as digital as it can get, and in the $2K range. I'm happy.

I've been trying to figure out how to get a perfect CD rip on my mac. The problem in a nutshell is that ripping CDs is "unreliable", in other words, it is impossible to be sure when you rip a CD that you have the correct digital data. How good a copy you get depends on your drive and the software you use.

Why care? In the most extreme cases you can literally get blips and pops in your MP3 file. This might occur even with a totally unscratched disc. But more likely you will get a subtle degradation of quality which will be noticeable if you have a good sound system, and that sucks. So.

The gold standard in secure ripping is Exact Audio Copy, a Windows-only program and likely to stay that way forever. Why? Because you can run it in boot camp or Parallels or whatever. If you want to use EAC definitely follow a how-to guide such as Exact Audio Copy Guide. EAC does not come preconfigured properly.

If you must use a Mac-native program, check out Max, and have look online in how to set it up for maximum secure mode, because it doesn't come in that mode by default. Max was originally written more as a transcoding program (converting between formats) but now supports a linux-originating cd ripper called cdparanoia. Audiophiles still prefer EAC to cdparanoia, and I'm not going to tell them they're wrong, even though they are occasionally insane and overly conservative, so I would say stick with EAC.

Oh yeah, and I would also say, rip into FLAC format. Then, use something like Max to convert from FLAC to MP3 320 Kbps (using LAME "insane" mode) for import into iTunes, use on your ipod/phone/mp3 player, etc. In practise it's unlikely you will be able to hear the difference between a lossless format and a 320 mp3. If you REALLY need to you can use Apple Lossless until Apple supports FLAC, but I like FLAC better as it's the open standard and everyone uses it. Archive the FLAC files for the future. You get to keep a perfect copy but not waste GBs of space on your mobile device.

And by the way, if you download music from BitTorrent, you might as well get FLACs, and they are almost always ripped with EAC.

UPDATE: Actually X Lossless Decoder looks like a good replacement for Max. It has the added ability to split a single huge FLAC/CUE combination into multiple MP3s (or any other format) automatically. Just drag the .cue file onto XLD and you're away.

What the hell is the Loudness War? It's music business, baby. Put it this way. Everything is getting LOUDER.

IF YOU'RE LOUD YOU GET NOTICED PEOPLE READ YOU FIRST BUT EVERYTHING STARTS TO SOUND THE SAME.

That's just a simple "visualization" of what the loudness war is doing to music (recorded music anyway).

You could perhaps lay the blame on 5-CD changers. If you had one back in the 90s, you probably noticed that whenever it switches discs, you had to adjust the volume. And then MP3 players didn't help, although now the software will automatically adjust the loudness of tracks to match each other. And car CD players, where everything has to be loud to even hear it. But really, it's the fault of computers, and in particular a device called a digital compressor.

Basically here's the problem in a nutshell. Music has variations in volume, between the quiet parts and the loud parts. If you're in a movie theatre, concert hall, or at home with a good stereo, this is exciting, it's dynamics. The music can start out quiet, and then build up and then reach out and grab you by the throat in the exciting bits. This is GOOD.

But psychological studies have shown that people subconsciously think that louder is better, and the problem comes in when you are moving from one song to another. If you go from a loud song to one that starts out really quiet, your subconscious brain is going to tell you that the quality of music just went down, and you're going to hit the skip button or change radio stations.

So the producers use the compressor to "compress" (yeah, that's why it's called a compressor...) the dynamic range so that the difference between the quiet parts and the loud parts is minute. Basically, they make everything LOUD.

A few years ago Rolling Stone had an article called The Death of High Fidelity, it's about the Loudness War, and you can see a sort-of good video about it on YouTube. 

There also a a great article from IEEE Spectrum magazine: Tearing Down the Wall of Noise. Good reading.

All in all these stories demonstrate without a grain of doubt that (a) the Loudness War is real and (b) it's causing damage to the music. Constantly loud music makes you tired and ultimately isn't satisfying or good. The subconscious thing is temporary, but the damage to the music is permanent.

What can you do about it? Buy music that isn't compressed, for starters. Some artists are fighting back, like Norah Jones with Not Too Late and Dylan's Modern Times. Or, just buy OLD albums, like CDs from the 80s, the time before compressors existed. Or buy vinyl, which for physical reasons doesn't really allow compression, but to me, having to go back to old tech like that is just silly. The music industry needs to fix this on the new technology. Even if they can crank up the volume, they shouldn't turn it into pure noise.

PS: Seems that you can use "Average RMS Power" to get a rough idea of the dynamic range of a tune. And you can measure that using various tools, e.g. Amadeus Pro (Analyze > Waveform Statistics). Here are some values from my library:

• Norah Jones, Feels Like Home, Sunrise: -13.5 dB .... that's not great but it's not as bad as it could be ... I don't really listen to this much any more though, and I think it's partly because it's tiring to listen to.
• Decca Georg Solti Nibelung, Walkure Act I: -25 dB... I have no trouble with ear fatigue listenging to this one.
• Beatles, Revolver, Taxman (no idea what edition): -16 dB ... I find it a bit loud, but I guess partly that's intentional?
• Cowboy Junkies, Trinity Sessions, Blue Moon: -21 dB .... what can I say? niiiiice.

OK, so I guess pretty much everything in my collection is OK at least. Probably because I delete anything that has crap dynamics. For comparison here's some stuff I wouldn't listen to.

• Coldplay, Viva la Vida:-12.3 dB ... well, it could be worse.... a bit... this would be a lot better with better dynamics.
• Rihanna, Disturbia: -11 dB ... just looking at the waveform for this makes my ears hurt in advance.

Yeah, those are fairly hard to listen to.

Someone ought to make an average RMS database.

...and here they are, finally, the first mp3 recordings of the McMaster Concert Band ever made public. Share and enjoy.

• 1. Celebration ... composed by Donald Coakley (3:56)
• 2. Soliloquy and Dance ... composed by Philip Parker (7:28) this is the good one*
• 3. The King of Love My Shepherd Is ... composed by Alfred Reed (4:50)
• 4. The Fisher Who Died in His Bed ... composed by John Herberman (11:08)

* This is the good one ... because it features graduate student David Free playing an extensive oboe solo. In fact it's basically an oboe concerto. Also, my cheap lavalier mic picked up the oboe quite nicely.

Program notes: (1) The Coakley is a fairly obscure Canadian composition. It hasn't been recorded very much. (2) Parker is a good one in this batch, because David rocks and because of the way I mic'ed the concert. (3) Reed's piece didn't come out to well because of the auto mic gain. (4) I like this piece, and I played crotales which you can occasionally hear cutting through.

Recording notes: Basically it's not a good recording. I did it with a wireless lav mic (Sony WCS-999) and my DV camcorder. It has 16bit 44 stereo but on the other hand, I couldn't turn off the automatic sound level. So there's major distortion on sudden loud passages and the dynamics don't come out at all. Finally, it was recorded in mono. All in all, given all the technical constraints I think it came out OK.

Got some band videos here. This first video is just a brief snippet of a typical practice. Up at the front there is Keith Kinder, conductor. I always call him Dr. Kinder. He's a good conductor - he spends time not just telling us what to do, but why to do it too.

As you can tell the sound quality on the 6630 is terrible. It's OK for recording people talking but can't handle music at all. On the other hand this phone is now about a year old and I expect that the newer models are quite a bit better. I'll have to get one soon I expect.

I don't know what that first song is, but it's a rehearsal and we're starting and stopping. It's a huge band—about 100 piece. You can see in the video the three—count them—bassoons. You don't see that very often.

This second video is a bit of some classic piece that I can't remember the name of. I didn't play in it anyway. So here's an art film through the slides of a bunch of trombones. The frontmost is Joe Biro.

So another concert band season is upon us (I play percussion )... and so it's time to go through the old repertoire and mine the internet for publicly available MP3s and recordings.

The only song I'm actually playing for this round (concert in a few weeks) is Divertimento for Winds and Percussion by Roger Cichy. Various people note that the song is supposed to be "jazzy", and this description of the song comes from his faculty page at Providence college :

In 1994, he was commissioned by the Des Moines Symphony for an orchestral work. The resulting composition, Divertimento for Strings, Winds and Percussion, was later transcribed for wind band and has received numerous performances from premiere college and professional wind bands in the U.S. The work has been released on a 1995 recording by the North Texas Wind Symphony, conducted by Eugene Corporan, on the Klavier label.

I don't have the Klavier recording (although presumably the estimable Dr. Keith Kinder (no home page...) does). So here I present some recordings I've found online, all of which are perfectly legal for you to download and listen to.

• The best one comes from the University of Maine Symphonic Band - unfortunately they only recorded movement III and movement IV . Still, it's pretty good stuff. And it sounds like with a few minor exceptions I'm playing the snare the same way they do. Which is always nice. In fact their snare drags a bit sometimes ;-)
• Next up is Rutgers University Orchestra but they only provide just a bit of movement I . Still, sounds good.
• Rochester "River Campus" gives us a very brash movement II (although they fall apart for a few bars near the end).
• And finally, I'll throw in a slighly less high-quality set from Norwell high school in the states - II , III , and IV .

Enjoy.

Here's some recordings I found out there on the web for our new repertoire. Unfortunately the Hannaford Overture (which I quite like, by Canadian J. Scott Irvine), and Dance Sequence (by Marco Pütz) I can't find.

Pageant (by Vincent Persichetti) - I think I'm going to like this one. I've got a couple of recordings for you. The first one is the Northwestern University Symphonic Ensemble and it was played on Stochastic Hit Parade with Bethany Ryker on WFMU in NYC. In real audio format, and the piece in question is from 0:00 to 7:21 so ignore everything after that. RAM link to Pageant

The other recording is from the Rhode Island College Wind Ensemble s recording: Pageant - mp3 A fine recording but it's either cut off or only the first movement.

The Vanished Army (by Kenneth J. Alford) - Traditional sort of march. Recording is from the Austin Academy ... vanished Army in mp3

Armenian Dances (by Aram Khachaturian) - Coming back to Canada I found a recording by the Hart House Symphonic Band . No offense Hart House but either the recording is lousy or the band is ... well, anyway, here is I. Allegro Moderato and II. Allegro Largemente both in mp3 format.

I play in the McMaster University Concert Band. I'd really like them to release the recordings they make on the web as MP3 files.

Anyway, in the meantime, I'm going to collect some MP3s here of other bands playing the numbers we've played (or will play).

Our most recent concert we played the following pieces.

Gavorkna Fanfare by Jack Stamp. There's a great timpani solo in this song. The best mp3 I found for this is from the USAF Wind Ensemble : gavorkna.mp3 . They play it much faster than we did. I think this is pretty common in the US marching band tradition. They sound pretty good but I like it a bit slower.

Second Suite in F for Military Band by Gustov Holst. I played the tacet in this particular tune so I got to listen .. it's really good. I've had the song of the blacksmith in my head all week. The USAF Band has a recording in their collection . MP3s from the USAF:

• March - Like the others below, this one sounds a lot like we did. We took the central section somewhat slower. Which in my opinion is better.
• Song Without Words - This one is very slow and therefore challenging. There's a crescendo near the end that's hair raising when we played it at the last practice. I don't think it came out quite as well in the concert but it was still good.
• Song of the Blacksmith . - This song features an anvil. We played using metal ball peen hammers on a steel brake drum (Andrea Fraser). Their rendition sounds a lot like ours did, except that there's a section played by trumpet where we sounded way better (just before the first anvil part). Also, I have a feeling we may have played a repeat that they skipped.
• Fantasia on the 'Dargason' - This rendition is a lot lighter than ours was. Anyway, I obviously prefer ours. There's a nifty 3/2 layering in this song (6/8 on top of 4/4).

I always liked this song. Now I can play it (I mean the full orchestra version ;-) The first 4 bars (repeated 5 times). Performed by yours truly, on my powerbook keyboard, with Garageband, MidiKeys, the Steel Xylophone SoundFont from HammerSound (free), the Pizzato Strings sound from the QT library, which is lame but I can't find a SoundFont for it yet. I didn't use any quantization in order to get that live performance feel to it. I mixed the stereo so that it's like a real orchestra - Violins on the left, Cellos on the right. The Celesta is in the middle though, since it's solo. The sheet music is from mfiles (also free), that's what I worked from. The Orchestra Layout image file. The piece, is by Tchaikovsky.

I just downloaded the Myst IV Revelation demo (it's free there) and it's very cool. It brings back memories of Myst and maybe (I can hope) it will be as good as Riven was. Anyway, I guess I'm going to buy it as soon as I'm done writing this, but first, some obligatory info on hacking the sound files out of the demo.

We're talking about the OS X version here, presumably the PC version is analogous. Go into the .app package and look for sound/data. Ignore the .snd files, they are metadata. Inside "data" you will see files with three different extensions. Here's my guide to what they are.

• .LS0 - inside the "English" folder - these are easy, they are straight OGG vorbis, just rename them with the .ogg extension and play in your favorite player.
• .SS0 - music and some backgrounds. Three of these are straight OGG vorbis files, rename as above. Some of them are ADPCM - see below.
• .SB0 - many of these are 44100 Hz, 2 channel (stereo), 4-Bit 4:1 IMA DVI ADPCM files (a common format in WAV/wave files). You can listen to them using SoundHack a free program for OS X and there's probably similar soft for PCs. Open as unknown format. Set the format to the above. Save Info. Save as. The resulting file should be listenable. NB: Many of these files contain multiple sounds. NB2: Some of them won't work using this technique, I don't know why.

Have fun.

Update: Revelator will extract just the ogg files automatically.

PS: Why all the work? They're probably just trying to make it difficult to extract the audio by stripping the normal headers from these files. They could have left the WAV headers in place and made it a lot easier.

My version of Black & White X 5 by Bill Conti. I bought GarageBand as part of the iLife package, more to get the latest iMovie. But last night I fiddled and lifted this song from the Thomas Crown Affair soundtrack. It's a piece for piano - so I tried to play it on the piano - and then discovered it's actually a piece for five pianos. I don't have a MIDI keyboard so I used MidiKeys . Follow the link to hear it, 1:10 minutes. LAME encoded. Sigh, the second piano is way too muddy. I'd have to go back in and manually edit the AUMatrixReverb to make it work right.

And also here is the Garageband file .