Dr Howl - Can mad science fix the music industry?

[BabylonHoruv]

Ogg's are actualy about twice as big as MP3's in most cases.

I am a musician (well, that may be debateable, my wife insists I am not, but I maintain that I am) and a DJ and I have to say I really like MP3's.  I don't think that music purely as software can ever truly become the dominant paradigm.  People like having something they can hold in their hand, something they can carry around with them and play in the car or in a friend's audio system, something with cover art.  MP3's may be lower quality, I know that the ones that get streamed on the station I DJ for are much lower quality than listening to a CD, but they are still good enough to enjoy the music.  I used to use 120 minute tapes when i was a kid too, they were shit, but good enough for me most of the time.  I always save MP3's in 256 or at least 128 kbps which is noticably better than the 64 kbps that gets streamed by my station, but I don't notice much difference between those and wavs or flac files.  Mind you I prefer using wavs to actually make music from, but That feels like more of an ideosyncracy to me than anything else.

[Jasper]

FWIW, the few FLAC recordings I've downloaded sound superb.

FLAC is lossless, which makes it nearly ideal, but do you know any music stores that offer FLAC?

No.  

[Triple Zero]

I don't for the record, get the lame project at all.  Ogg vorbis and AAC are just as small as MP3, and a much better starting point for quality.

Requia, true but it's more widely supported on mp3 players. even though AAC seems to be gaining ground, as my phone supports it

I used to be all about encoding my CDs to OGG, but later came to regret it as some DJing software [old versions of Traktor] didn't support it and I couldn't just drag-n-dump a bunch of tracks on my mp3 player, cause I needed to sort out the OGGs first and transcode them, which takes time so that sucks if you just want to grab a few tracks before you leave home.

Fortunately, the only quality difference between MP3 and OGG/AAC is at low bitrates. So yes, AAC and OGG are superior taken over the entire range. Still, when encoding your CDs you want a high quality VBR, and there is virtually no quality difference, and then I prefer MP3 for interoperability.

AAC might be a good choice to encode home-mixed ringtones for my phone, though. Cause you can use ridiculously low bitrates and the quality loss just makes the sound a bit muffled, but not all robotic warbly glitchy like MP3 would.

I always save MP3's in 256 or at least 128 kbps which is noticably better than the 64 kbps that gets streamed by my station

You probably want to use VBR (variable bitrate) [especially using the LAME settings in my previous post]. There's really no reason to use constant bitrate MP3 encoding anymore these days. There used to be, but since a couple of years the newer versions of LAME have improved their VBR algorithms to the point that VBR is simply superior to CBR. You can read this website for more info: http://jthz.com/mp3/#VBR

I agree that above 192kpbs I don't hear the difference anymore myself, either.

but I don't notice much difference between those and wavs or flac files.  Mind you I prefer using wavs to actually make music from, but That feels like more of an ideosyncracy to me than anything else.

no you should use lossless encodings when making music. for the same reason professional photographers and graphics artists don't save their intermediate work in JPG either. it's because if you (lossy) encode and then change something, and then re-encode, the quality losses stack up and you lose definition. which is pretty embarassing if you didn't notice it on your speakers at home, until you play the track in a club ...

btw your statement about OGGs being "twice as big as MP3s in most cases" is kind of meaningless as you can't compare the quality setting of OGG with that of MP3.

[Triple Zero]

(uh Mang, btw if you want the discussion about MP3 encoding split off, give me the word)

[Jasper]

As a sort of lame (literally) aside, I like to take my game music mp3s and reencode them into other formats back and forth until the quality is shitty enough to evoke that nostalgic feel.

Just saying.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Sigmatic, you might like Psychic Emperor. Their music is made with a toy guitar and an old Gameboy.

[Jasper]

Why thank you!

[E.O.T.]

I JUST

          transferred all of my MP3's to 1/4 inch real-to-real

[Triple Zero]

to both Sigmatic and EOT:

there's an app for that.

[Mangrove]

I JUST

          transferred all of my MP3's to 1/4 inch real-to-real

Trip - you can leave the thread as is for now. I'm actually kind of glad that the MP3 comment I made has promoted some back & forth among people with the technical know-how, so it's not a bad thing. It's one of the more relevant thread-jacks I've seen. Could've gotten all fucked up with Cartesian dualism, so I'm not complaining.

What's also nice is that the people here who are concerned about formatting etc care enough about it and the music they listen to. If anything, that only serves to underscore my point and warms my heart a little knowing that in spite of my bitching, there are people with open minds and ears on PD.com.

[Mangrove]

Everyone gets exploited, and shit music is a fact of life.  It's the way of the world.  But I loved reading that.

You managed to condense my whole rant into two sentences! 

My hope is that the exploiters would show a little more taste in their choice of victims and skew the good to shit music ratio a little more in our favor.

[bds]

Sorry if this resurrects a threadjack, but v0 mp3 is one of the most widely used mp3 encoding settings (among torrent sites i frequent, anyway) and is nigh-on CD quality for a fairly low filesize. The vast majority of my music is in it, and I love it.

Having said that, though, I can hear the difference between a v0 mp3 and the 24bit/96khz FLAC rips of the Beatles Stereo Remaster box set, and any mp3 below 128kbps may as well be 5 minutes of armpit farts as far as I'm concerned.

Oh and amazing rant.

[Doktor Howl]

Mrs. Mang and I slouched in our living room after dinner to enjoy fresh coffee and the warmth of the wood stove. Reflexively, we put the TV on – it's a moment of decompression and signals the transition in our lives when the work day is over and the evening has truly begun.

I'm not proud. Last week, we happened upon some American Idol performances. Putting aside the obvious horrors and implications of the show, I had to admit that a few of the latest crop of dewy eyed warblers can sing, at least in tune if nothing else. A couple may even have pleasing vocal tones and yet, there was something uncomfortable about this scene. Something disconcerting, something that was just plain wrong.

"There's not enough exploitation."

"What?" replied Mrs Mang as she repositioned herself on the love seat to make room for our black Lab to annex ever more space, cushions and blanket.

"There's not enough exploitation...or at least, not enough of the right kind. These American Idol kids are just too damn comfortable."

Mrs Mang couldn't see where I was going with this.



Now, what do Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Jimi Hendrix have in common aside from being iconic and influential African American artists? They were all subjected to exploitative bastards. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it was a matter of common or garden racism that caused this and, there's undoubtedly an element of that present. But, there's another reason beyond melanin in play here. They were exploited because simply, they were fucking great at what they did.

Louis Armstrong aka 'Pops' aka 'Satchmo' single handedly invented the idea of the jazz solo, popularized scat singing and was probably the only jazzer to influence both vocalists and instrumentalists in equal measure. He was truly unique; an innovator drawing upon past traditions and extending them into the future. Yet, his early career was controlled by mobsters – literally at the business end of a revolver when rival gangs argued over who owned his contract.*

Billie Holiday had a string of god awful managers and agents. Many of them were her boyfriends and almost all of them were vicious, abusive assholes. But, she was getting $2k a week (a week!) during her heyday. Not because she had a 4 octave range like Mariah Carey but because she could sell a song like few others. She could even give really crappy songs some gravitas and swagger. Needless to say, when she had great material she was other worldly. Check out the 1950s footage of her doing 'Strange Fruit' and you'll get what I mean.

Duke Ellington's early manager and publisher Irving Mills generously helped himself to a writing credit on many of the classic Ellington compositions. He didn't contribute so much as a single note to what, in 1928 was dismissed as 'jungle' music but clearly, he knew enough about the 'biz' to see that the suave Mr Ellington was worth backing and bilking.

Jimi Hendrix? Here's a guy so stupidly good at the guitar but would sign pretty much any legal document thrust in front of him. You could blame the drugs. You could blame his terrible eyesight and the fact that he refused to ever wear prescription glasses. Remember though, that this is the same dude who got stuffed on a plane bound for London with almost no possessions beyond a passport and a toothbrush because someone promised to hook him up with Eric Clapton.

It's not just a black thing. Look at Elvis and Colonel Parker. He lit up the world of popular music with an improbable mélange of bluegrass and RnB and was given a series of execrable movies for his efforts. Race car drivers? Clam bakes? Hoola dancers!!??

These people and many others got royally screwed. Not because of color but because they were eminently bankable and that was because they were really fucking good at what they did.

If we permit ourselves to move ahead to a more recent example we find Kurt Cobain. So scared was he about being exploited, so tortured about his own authenticity that he blew his face off after bolting from a rehab center.

Kurt, if only you had stuck around for a few more years, you would've realized that you were scared of an era that was coming to an end. Your rehab could've been a TV show. Your escape from rehab would've been a TV show with better ratings. Don't worry about being bloated or letting yourself go because your weight loss would be a TV show. Don't worry about looking like a vagrant because your makeover would be a TV show. Don't like your band anymore? Fine. Get a new one on a TV show. Don't like your spouse? No problem, because Rock of Love was just around the corner and you could have replaced Courtney courtesy of VH1. It's somewhat immaterial whether you lived or not because "Nevermind" was still picked up by the Classic Album documentary series. Kurt, you got so paranoid about being fucked over by The Man tm that you jumped the gun (ha!) and fucked yourself – they only wanted you because you were good at what you did.**

The hip musical cognoscenti will berate Idol for perpetuating 'manufactured music'. Well guess what? Motown was manufactured music and deliberately so. Berry Gordy literally made the musical equivalent of an automotive plant. To ram the point home, he even let his artists film a promo 'video' on a car production line in Detroit.

He knew how to find talent though -  The Supremes, The Jacksons, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder & Marvin Gaye. Manufactured? You bet your ass! But manufactured with A-list vocalists, hot songwriters and a house band that grooved like no other and would work hard both day & night. If a James Jamerson bass line doesn't move your soul you probably don't have one and you probably don't deserve the ears on your head either.

Something strange happened. I cannot pinpoint exactly when, but there was a paradigm shift. Perhaps not a shift so much as an extension of the existing regime. Exploiting musical artists has become a forgone conclusion so now it's time to increasingly exploit the audience. Let's pluck fry-cooks and shop girls from obscurity, make them comfortable***. Let them bring their moms & dads too and we just love, LOVE LOVE to hear about your childhood! Look how nice we are! So generous, so considerate! And with our generosity we will give you passable vocalists, forgettable songs, predictable schlock arrangements and homogenous wall lining production. Our magnanimity is boundless – here's a ring tone.

(When polled, 2/3rds of respondents said they'd still prefer to buy CDs but we're so munificent and you can have sonically inferior MP3 downloads instead because it's what the kids want and it's so much better to listen to MORE music on NEWER equipment than it is to listen to GOOD music on just about any equipment.)

As a musician myself, it is my sincerest wish that art and artists would be accorded the respect they deserve. I'd love to see good work justly compensated for and while I am an optimist at heart, I'm also not in denial. I know that that the industry will continue to drain and suck dry whatever floats past their clutches.

So, if you're going to be exploitative bastards, at least have some taste.


Footnotes:

*How many Mafioso would risk taking a bullet for Jordan Sparks? Susan Boyle? Anyone???? Hello????
** Kurt, how good does it feel to know that your beloved Sonic Youth did a compilation CD for Starbucks?
*** No one made Billie Holiday comfortable. They arrested the poor schlub while she was in hospital....dying.

Honestly, Mang, I don't know why anyone would be surprised by this sort of thing.

Music can be a very dangerous thing...Elvis was horribly dangerous to 1950/60's parents, and he wasn't even political.  Bands in the 60s made fun of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and one even changed the national anthem...and if you can change THAT music, you can change anything.

But fortunately, they had Colonel Parker and people like him, and all those radicals were brought into line, or died from their own excesses.  And the industry learned:  If you know what the kids want, manufacture it, and control the message (and the advertising revenue, ho ho!).

So now you have the Jonas Brothers, who sell sex to 11 year olds in a safe way, and fake-ass shit like Good Charlotte and Tokio Hotel, so our kids can learn that angst beats meaning and packaged products are easier.

So, yeah.

[Doktor Howl]

And to answer your question, no.  Mad science cannot fix the music industry.

But it can fix a local scene.

[E.O.T.]

And to answer your question, no.  Mad science cannot fix the music industry.

But it can fix a local scene.