Proposal: An Album File Format

While I don’t have the talent or motivation to follow through on this idea, I thought it was worth sharing. Would it make sense to have an album file format that served as a container for individual songs?

I imagine some of the following features:

  • A container file, similar to ZIP or TAR (compression probably not necessary, since most music files are compressed)
  • Contains album metadata
    • Artist
    • Liner notes
    • Web links
    • Cover art (in a standard format accessible to player apps)
    • Song order listing
  • Contains the songs files (perhaps format agnostic? Could contains MP3s, Ogg, ACC, etc.) rather than just linking to a song, as a playlist does

This would purely be a matter of convenience, as all of this functionality is technically available now through playlists and folders. I might also comfort some artists who are concerned about the single-based bias (as opposed to full albums) of music online.

 

Sharing Music on CBC

Just came from the CBC Radio offices here in Charlottetown where I recorded a quick piece with Matt Rainnie for a series on the local afternoon show, Mainstreet. He’s been bringing in people to share some of their favourite music. It seems I’m in good company as other geeks-with-taste who have done the show include Stephan McLeod and Peter Rukavina.

We chatted for a few minutes and Matt teed me up for a plug for my long-defunct-but-always-awsome high-school band, Horton’s Choice. Nice.

The piece will air tomorrow (Tuesday, May 6) after 4:30PM on CBC Radio PEI (96.1FM). I brought along Adam Again’s song Worldwide from their 1992 album, Dig: the two greatest musical minutes I’ve ever heard. Fine spring driving music.

Listen to a sample of Worldwide (realaudio). Since the song is only 2 minutes long, this 1 minute sample is pretty good.

 

When is enough quality, enough quality?

When the MP3 format first appeared there were some who dismissed it because it was a step backwards in quality. This is true. Many MP3s are encoded at 128Kb/s at which certain slight differences can be discerned on a good pair of headphones.

Obviously, these people were wrong. The slight loss in quality was a small price to pay for the massive savings in file size. Taking a 30Mb WAV file and turning it into a 4Mb MP3 made it reasonable to move music across dial-up connections, and a breeze to move across higher-speed networks.

In the case of MP3s, the quality was enough. As storage and bandwidth becomes more available and affordable, this quality gap between CDs and MP3 will close (though higher-quality Mp3 encoding, and through new file formats).

What originally made me wonder about when enough quality is enough quality was a local phone call with a friend. We were having a quiet conversation and I listened to my friend’s voice through the tinny phone receiver speaker. It occurred to me that I had all of the equipment in front of me to do much higher quality audio communication. My PC has a 16-bit sound card and a net connection that can easily stream great sounding music. I have a great microphone too.

I want higher quality telephone audio. Why has our technology stopped at the current level? Perhaps it is a limitation of the infrastructure, but I doubt this (I’m downloading MP3s at 300Kb/s on my DSL connection on the same phone line). It’s certainly not the speaker and microphone technology that is limiting quality.

So, it’s not the technology, it’s us – the customers. We must not care enough to demand higher quality or pay for higher quality. Apparently, we are not willing to pay for it.

Note to telcos: I will pay for it (I’d gladly pay $100 for a new handset/receiver that gave higher fidelity audio).

HDTV is another example of meagre customer demand for higher quality. There are loads of factors that I don’t claim to understand (or even know about) that have stunted the adoption of HDTV. However, it seems to me that people don’t seem to care.

I’ve seen HDTV at the local FutureShop. It looks great – obviously a far greater picture than plain-old NTSC. Joe public, with his 19” TV watching Good Morning Regis & Stupid doesn’t need anymore quality. Regis looks just fine with XXX lines.

48 bit color? Not unless you are scanning for the cover of National Geographic. 32 bit audio – does it even exist? When is enough quality, enough quality?

 

Universal Access to All Human Knowledge

Brewster Kahle speaking at the Library of CongressA link found from Matt Haughey’s a.wholelottanothing.org lead me to a talk by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. His organization is working a variety of projects to make public domain content available in an “internet library”. Among these projects is the WayBack Machine, which archives the web.

The talk is part of a series at the Library of Congress and runs 1 hour and 26 minutes in RealVideo format. It is worth watching: Brewster Kahle: Public Access to Digital Materials (1hr 26min RealVideo).

Kahle’s basic idea is universal access to all human knowledge. Every book, speech, TV show, website, concert, etc. should be available to all of us. He looks at three main questions:

  • Should we? Yes!
  • Can we? Is it logistically possible from a technical and financial perspective? His answer: Yes.
  • May we? Will we be allowed to make all knowledge available under law? His answer: Yes.
  • Will we? He leaves this as an open question.

His numbers on the cost to digitize (scanning, etc.), store (disk space), and make available (bandwidth) all human knowledge are fascinating. According to Kahle, the hardware and labour costs required to make all book and all television and all music ever created available are not that difficult (within the hundreds of millions of dollars).

Taking books for example:

  • There are roughly 100,000,000 books ever created
  • The Library of Congress has about 26,000,000 books (I was impressed and amazed that the Library of Congress has 26% of all books ever created)
  • A book costs between $10 and $100 to acquire and digitize
  • A book takes up about 1Mb of space
  • 26,000,000 books would take 26 TeraBytes.
  • 1 TeraByte costs about $60,000
  • The entire Library of Congress could be stored for about $1.5 million dollars
  • Books can be printed, cut, and bound for $1/book from a mobile book printer (~$15,000)

If anyone has the right to make these claims – it would be Kahle – who’s organization is storing massive amounts of data as part of their WayBack project and other projects.

 

Juvenile Art Rock Legally Unleashed

The Creative Commons organization gives artists the tools they need to release their work into the public domain with limitations.

As a nod of support to the organization, my old band, Horton’s Choice, has released our recordings under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Basically that means that you can use our music for non-commercial use, but you must attribute to work to Horton’s Choice, and any derivative work must also be released under the same type of open licence.

A few things they’ve done well:

I pretend that I think Horton’s Choice was a crappy garage band, but I’m really only using humour to mask my feeling that this was the greatest artistic achievement of my life.

 

Realtime Media Link: CBC’s IDEAS

If you catch this in time (before 10PM Atlantic time, Friday night) – tune into CBC Radio One (RealAudio). The program IDEAS is running an interesting feature on a Toronto composer who interviewed his grandfather about his life, and set the recordings to music.

Don’t worry if you missed it. When it becomes available, I’ll post a link to the archived version of the program.

 

The Open Music Project

Rob and I have been toying around with an idea on and off for the past year (read: we’ve written a few emails). The idea, which would be called the Open Music Project, if the name wasn’t already taken, is basically open source music.

The raw, isolated tracks of a recording can be compared to the un-compiled source code of software. The mixed-down and mastered final track that you’d actually get on a CD is analogous to the complied binary code you run on your computer.

In the same way that compiled code can’t really be edited or modified, it is difficult to work with mixed down finished music. It is difficult/impossible to isolate the individual tracks and do anything useful with them (not really an issue, since most music is copyrighted anyway).

Our idea is to have willing musicians and engineers producing music that is open and available for others to use, modify, and redistribute. The music would available in its raw individual tracks, so any or all of it could be used by other.

I’ve been amazed at how the open source software initiative has mammoth corporations, independent developers, non-profit organizations, and small businesses all working to their mutual advantage. It’s not a perfect system. Open source software, since it is developed by developers, usually for their own benefit, is often weaker in the consumer application area and stronger in development software. I’m not sure how these tendencies would manifest themselves in terms of music and musicians (what do you get when you have a bunch of musicians producing music for themselves rather than for an audience – good music, perhaps?).

This idea hasn’t been in the over for very long. One of the big issues would be file formats. There are good and widely supported formats for straight stereo audio (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Windows Media, etc.). However, it would be idea to have some good standard multi-track formats that were widely supported (perhaps there are? ProTools, Cakewalk, Cool Edit Pro, etc.). Worse case scenario, individual tracks could be distributed in isolated files (MP3, for example) and be re-assembled in a particular musician’s multi-track software of choice.

Is this a good idea? Is it a stupid idea? Would it work? Why? Why not? Has it already been done? Let us know what you think.

I’m really hoping we can call it the Muzilla project. Maybe someone else should name it.

 

In bed with U2’s Elavation tour

U2 - Elevation Tour 2001 (Live from Boston)
I watched U2’s Boston concert DVD last night and I was pleased. Having seen the Elevation Tour in Montreal, I was curious to see how the DVD-on-laptop-in-bed experience would compare with the 18,000-people-in-a-stadium experience. Obviously it didn’t touch the real thing, but it was a nice compliment to attending the actual concert in that there a few things that an entire film crew was able to pick up that I might have missed from our seats at the other end of the Molson Centre.

The disc does a great job of showing how straightforward the tour was. It was a big tour with a huge crew, but on stage the four musicians were pretty much on their own. The camera catches a few great close-ups of the members of the band in which you can really see their facial expressions. The Edge seemed quite preoccupied with playing the music. Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves. Bono played the rock star. There are a few great shots where you see The Edge looking to Larry Mullen for the rhythm. For a second they seem less like U2, and more like four guys in a band.

The set list included 7 new songs from All That You Can’t Leave Behind, a few of the U2 classics, and a few refreshing unlikely choices (Gone, Bad, Stay (Faraway, so close), Until The End Of The World). The Edge used the set list as an opportunity to parade an amazing set of classic guitars including a full-bodied Gretsch, a pearl Telecaster, Edge’s classic Gibson Explorer, a Godin, a beautiful clear woodgrain finish Stratocaster, and a 12-string Richenbacher that The Edge kicks off the stage.

The Edge - photo from U2.comWhat I found most striking about the DVD was how great U2 is at putting on a rock concert. You can really see the experience of 20 years of touring. Bono plays the 20,000 strong audience like it was a percussive instrument. The Edge’s guitar and Bono’s voice alone can fill a stadium design for NHL hockey.

The new album contrasts nicely with the older material in the context of the concert. If Stuck in a Moment were a little more immature and unrefined, if would fit in perfectly on Rattle and Hum.

The live performances shed new light on some of what I had though where the weaker songs from All That You Can’t Leave Behind. New York, which always struck me as goofy (comparing the heat of New York to a “hair dryer in your face” just doesn’t hold up next to the biblical alegory of The End of the World – which Bono introduces this night with “this is judas”) and Walk On both shine make more sense in the live context.

Highlights include, the inclusion of Until The End Of The World and a great rendition of Stay (Faraway, so close). Introducing the band, Bono says “Even his mother calls him, The Edge“. The introductions to The Fly and Where the Streets Have No Name are classic goosebump-inducing stadium rock moments.

 

moments of musical transcendence

All this talk of great music has got me thinking (more than I should, perhaps). I love music. I can’t listen to music in bed at night because instead of going to sleep, I listen intently until the entire CD is though and only then can I think of sleeping.

What I love most about music is the moments where a lyric, song, or performance just hits you. I don’t think can’t describe the phenomenon adequately. I heard Sarah MacLaughlan say describe it once as ‘resonating with peoples souls’. Sounds corny, I know – but I don’t think that’s such a bad way to describing what it.

Sometimes it has as much to do with your own thoughts and environment as it does with the artists and music itself, but I don’t think that matters much. Sometimes it’s a song – any time you hear it – sometimes its one particular time or place you remember hearing a song. Perhaps I can better illustrate what I’m talking about with some examples from my own experience.

  • The Tragically Hip’s performance of Nautical Disaster on Live Between Us. I never really liked the hip much. They always sounded like a sloppy bar band to me (in a bad way). However, when I first heard this song, and ever time since, I was totally captivated. I listened to, heard, and understood every word (or thought I did, which is good enough for me). The lyrics are brilliant and the chord charges perfect – you can feel each chord coming and it feels perfect when it does. There are lots of songs with brilliant lyrics and great melody – this one just hits me.
  • The bridge in the song Transfiguration from Copyright’s album Love Story. The part of the song that goes “Love is divine; Love has its own design” and the musical phrases that follow. The chord changes are, again, perfect. It gives me goose bumps. Honestly.
  • Hearing the opening vocal lines of The Garden Song by Sandbox on a great old stereo in the old CIMN closet in The Barn at UPEI. When his voice drops (“…bring you down…”) Steve Albini proves that he is worth $100,000 to record your record. This took on a whole new meaning after seeing them live.
  • Listening to Heal from Catherine Wheel’s Happy Days as loud as possible in my bedroom on my beautiful old Pioneer 100 watt tube amp stereo when my house was empty when I was in high school. The guitar on the album reminds of a power of a giant church organ and needs to be heard very loud.
  • Listening to Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins from start to finish at an almost uncomfortable volume. Mayonaise is one of my favourite songs ever. Again, church organ guitar.
  • Skipping school and driving around in my parents old Saturn listening to my cassette of Poor Old Lu’s Straight Six.
  • The songs Ugly and Enya by Age of Electric’s from their self titled album.
  • Brighter Hell and All Uncovered by the Watchmen.
  • Playing Street Spirit by Radiohead with my high school garage band (we never actually played in a garage – well once)
  • My Boy by Eyes for Telescopes from their album Please Survive.
  • Watching U2’s Mexico PopMart concert on MuchMusic (the Monteal concert was good too)
  • The opening moments of Where the Streets Have No Name by U2 from both Joshua Tree and Rattle & Hum.
  • The chorus from Satellite from Catherine Wheel’s Adam & Eve.

I hope you can understand what I’m talking about despite my description. It’s not just about great songs and albums, but moments when you notice how great an album is, or actually hear a lyric for the first time even when you’ve heard the song many times before, or something as simple as a melody, vocal or chord change.

Some of you have shared your concert experiences with us before, but I’d love to know what song or lyric or album does this for you? Why? Is it even music?