It has finally been discovered ;o) that it takes a little work to rip CD’s to MP3’s that sound ok. Back in the hey-day of Napster there were many files to be had, but most of them didn’t sound very good. I guess that the general public is beginning to realize that size isn’t everything…:O|

Wired News: Old Rips: May They Rest in Peace

The Daytime Emmys will announce a new award for video aired on computers, cellphones and video iPods. The New York Times reports:

The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, best known for handing out the Daytime Emmy Awards, is expected to announce on Tuesday that it has created an award category to recognize original video content for computers, cellphones and other hand-held devices, like the video iPod and PlayStation Portable.

The new award will first be presented during the academy’s Sports Emmys presentation, and ultimately be added as a category for other Emmy presentations as well. The category will not be included in the prime-time Emmy Awards.

Why might I find this interesting? It’s great to see a professional orginazation keeping up with technology, and realizing that new technology leads to new art forms that are equally worthy of award. The Broadway Theatre League still doesn’t recognize sound design as a design element, and thereby sound is not worthy of award. That would be to progressive….

Today Meyer Sound announced the acquisition of LCS (Level Control Systems).

Although the screen shots of the yet to be released, Galileo 616 loudspeaker processor on the Meyer web site do look like the CueStation interface, it was little known that LCS was collaborating with Meyer on this project. It will be interesting to see how Meyer leverages LCS’s technology in the future. I think LCS does have a leg up on some of the competition, with it’s cross platform, client-server topology. If Meyer can use it’s marketing power to promote and educate people about LCS, they could make quite a wave in the industry. Alternatively, perhaps Meyer plans on using the software and hardware LCS has developed to take their speaker lines in a new direction.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see….

Meyer Press Release - Meyer Acquires LCS

It’s been a long time coming. According to Clear-Com (Vitec Group), the FCC is in the final stages of approval for the use of CellCom10 in the US. Popularly know as FreeSpeak10 in Europe and elsewhere, the name was changed for the US and Canadian markets due to trademark issues.

UPDATE (12-05-2005) : The FCC has approved the CellCom10 for use in the US, and is already in use at Harpo Studios in Chicago.

It’s been slow going for Clear-Com on this one. They have been showing mockups and feature descriptions of the product at trade shows for at least a couple of years.

CellCom is a revolutionary new concept in wireless intercom, combining license-free digital transmission with an intelligent base station that interconnects with wired communications. Go beyond the typical wireless party-line or even two-channel capability, with one-to-one and group conversations initiated from your beltpack!

CellCom10 supports up to 10 drops and operates using an active transceiver network. The transceivers are strategically placed throughout the desired coverage area and connected back to the base using standard CAT5 connections. The system as whole acts very much like a mini cell phone network, managing the movement of each beltpack from one transceiver to another.

CellCom10 also has the capability to interface with 2 standard party-line channels of com or 4 cross points on a digital matrix, such as the Eclipse or Matrix3 lines, greatly expanding up wireless communications possibilities.

Clear-Com also has a CellCom50 which supports 50 drops, which has not been approved for use in the US.

Latin: Audio, video, disco

Translation: “I hear, I see, I learn”

Believe it, or not… Latin Phases on Wiki

BeOS, which many audio engineers are familiar with due to its use with LCS (Level Control Systems), is back. A few years ago, BeOS sold all it’s assets to Palm, and Be disappeared. With the exception of a few enthusiast web sites like BeBits, and a couple of opens source builds of Be, there was no supported version of the OS. LCS has changed its OS requirements, and development path, and now supports builds of CueStation on OSX, WinXP and Linux (first RedHat, now SuSe).

BeOS was ahead of its time. I still have 2 machines that I use for LCS that run BeOS. They boot very fast, and run reliably.

There is a really good history of BeOS and a review of Zeta on ArsTechinca.

ZETA 1.0 by yellowTAB

A couple of years ago when Stephen St. Croix wrote about iTMS in his column in Mix Magazine, The Fast Lane, he expounded on how cool it was to use this new distribution method. It offers those of us who don’t like to wait the opportunity to get a song or and album, NOW. While the lossy encoding is a drawback for pro audio applications, the quality is acceptable (for the most part) for casual listening.

What do you get for your dollar? Compressed, DRM restricted, AAC encoded computer file. You can listen to the song on your iPod or in iTunes, but only one iPod and one copy of iTunes. (although there may be more possibilities, see the ml_iPod post) One gets to see a small jpg of the album art, but not much in the way of liner notes. Let’s assume there are 12 songs on an album. iTMS generally charges $.99 per song or $9.99 for an entire album, which is a small savings if you want the whole album. One selling point is that you don’t have to buy the whole album. You can get just the songs you want, and you can get them now, but you pay a premium for this feature.

That’s great, but what about other things that can add value to the digital music experience. While low bit rate files may be ok for listening by the computer, what if I want higher bit rate versions or CD bit rates for listening on the stereo in the living room. Or even higher bit rate and word length versions for those who care. What about the liner notes, and high quality album art. How about going the extra mile that the DVD has gone, and offer the musical equivalent of “deleted scenes” or the “bloopers reel.” $.99 seem like a lot of money for restricted low bit rate, non-transferable tunes.

Perhaps Nine Inch Nails has hit on something….They are offering the song “Only” for download, as a ProTools session. This is cool. For the audio geek, professional engineer or the basement engineer, you can take their tracks and mix it yourself. Now that’s a Value Added concept. While the “Mix Your Own” concept might be more than most people want, it demonstrates an important concept in digital music distribution, the ability to offer a much wider range of “products” to a wide range of customers. It feels empowering to me. I tend to purchase CD’s. It puts the decision in my hands as to how I want to deal with the music. I can have it any way I want it, from the CD to 48kbps MP3 or anything in between. Being able to download an entire ProTools session of a piece expands the possibilities even further.

Nice work….

ProSoundNews Online Daily - Digidesign & NIN Offer Free Pro Tools Session Download of “Only”

This is from Mix Magazine. A little computer assembler named Musicxpc has created a recording workstation in a Shuttle XPC chassis.

I have a Shuttle XPC, although not from Musicxpc, and I love mine. While based on the published spec one could build one for a few hunderd dollars less than the retail price of the fully assembled machine, Musicxpc has a few items that add value. Most noteably the system recovery software. Some may not find this to be all that, but for the musician, who doesn’t want to be the IT department, it may be worth the premium.

MusicXPC Professional C3 and C4

M-Audio just released a control surface for use with GarageBand. It’s called the iControl and it looks pretty cool.

iControl gives you total tactile control over GarageBand. You get dedicated transport buttons and jog wheel, eight rotary encoders for track functions like volume or pan, or effects parameters in GarageBand’s EQ or any other AU plug-in. You also get dedicated mute, solo and record-enable buttons. Automatically recognized by GarageBand.

I don’t have a copy of GarageBand, but this caught my eye, as I am always interested in what companys are doing to interface the real world with the digital world.

In these days of digital production and digital audio consoles, and the plethora of other gadgets used in audio, interface design has become an even bigger project than it used to be. In the days of analog gear, the controls were all there because they were part of the electronic circuit. Some of the layout was “designed”, but some of it was the way it was because it had to be for the electronics to work correctly.

Now, designers of interfaces have a different set of choices to make. To take a conception of what is possible in the digital world and translate that to a useable, intelligent tactile control surface, can be maddening. Especially when a particular piece of equipment crosses between different markets and uses.

M-AUDIO:iControl

The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a paper on a proposed music licensing scheme that is very interesting. Basically it works in a manner similar to the method venues use to license music (perhaps through ASCAP or BMI). A flat fee which makes it’s way to the artists, writers and copyright holders of the material. It may, depending on contracts with record companies, partially cut record companies out of some revenue, but the creators get their due. It’s a shame that the record companies can’t seem to embrace the electronic distribution model, and truly take advantage of the massive distribution potential of the internet, including P2P.

EFF: A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing