Music trumps tidiness

[pseydtonne]

My apartment is messy -- too messy for visitors, I say. I'll put off any shindig this weekend. I'm just not in the mood to make the place presentable. This isn't depression talking -- it's envelopment in a more interesting process.

I finally made a vinyl album into a CD.

I started the evening's efforts by copying a single song to MP3 -- "Open My Eyes" by the Nazz (it's Todd Rundgren's first band, going back to 1968). The album itself is not in amazing condition, although mostly from wear than from abusive. The source file came up a bit fuzz-distorted, so I set the encoding to 224-bit 48 kHz to get the most treble. I wound up with a 4.5 MB file for a pop song that clocks in at 2:41.

I did some tests with the turntable after that. I tapped the counterbalance down a bit, as I no longer had to worry about getting loud levels. This helped with the chunky sound when I started work on the test album -- Katy Lied by Steely Dan.

I like getting all the recording done in one take, editing out the extra time and needle drops later. This gave me a chance to play with the software, seeing how to set up subtracks and move them directly to CD. This meant I never had to leave the single program. However, it also meant I had to accept the program's desire to make "nice" tracks with two-second silent lead-ins. I didn't want any lead-in, so I carved the last two seconds of pop and crackle off the trail of each song. I'll use another program for burning the CD in the future.

I had also forgotten starting with a beautiful source file doesn't mean you can have a CD with nice tracks. I wound up with better resolution on the high-bit MP3s than I did on the CD because the CD is only 16-bit sampling on 44.1kHz rate instead of the 24-bit 48kHz raw file. At first I really wanted to make CDs of my vinyl. Now I think I'd get better resolution by making 320-kbit MP3s straight from the raw files and use those more.

I'd forgotten how much I like Steely Dan. Now I'm listening to my many other MP3s and I'm in pain from the lack of fidelity. I can really hear the loss in, say, something produced to be sonically overwhelming. Even "Ordinary World" by Duran Duran, which is meant to make you feel a little opiated, is pained when it lacks the swirl of the highest frequencies. They artifact, pixelate, put a ceiling on the illusion.

...by the way, fuck you if you have a problem with my love of Duran Duran, okay? We all have our vices. They're still cute and have voices buried in chorus effects. How can I resist?

I'm going to do one more test album to make sure I like my process. Then I'll copy the most precious album in my collection. After that, it'll all be gravy.

-your requests on the hotline, Apollo Jr

Comments

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

Did you get gazebogrrl's message?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Hey, Insecure Lad, we don't judge you based on what music you like. At least, the we over in this corner don't.

And Duran Duran rocks. Duh. Especially Ordinary World.

...btw, have you done an A-B comparison of mp3 bitrates (and AAC, which is supposed to be a better compressor)? I can't hear the difference, casually, between 192 and 256, but I haven't listened in a quiet room on a good set of monitors or anything.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I got in when you guys were probably sleeping.

I plan to go home for Malcolm Xmas but otherwise am stuck here. I haven't figured out the exact dates but yeah! C'mon down.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Here is my experience so far about the bit rates in MP3:

Each increment above gives back more headroom for the high frequencies. In spoken-word stuff, I often can't hear any difference beyond 160. In CD-quality music, I can hear some improvement up to 192 but I have more experiments to run. With the vinyl, I hear major differences between 192 and 224 (the next step, for some reason) and I can send you files for comparison.

You should come over some time so I can play you a series fo files in the different qualities. By the way, I found a better store for buying headphones and I'll tell you about that.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

Let us know once you've figured out the exact dates--and the sooner you figure those out the better. Based on what we know of our itinerary so far, you'd probably be the first stop, i.e., around the 17th. But we're also planning on going to Vermont to visit her sister and sister's-girlfriend, and we have to do that before the 23rd when they go to visit sister's-girlfriend's-family for xmastery.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Dude, you like Duran Duran! That is so wrong!
Of course, even if that's so wrong I don't want to be right myself...