Incompetech: January 2008 Archives

the website with the self-referential tagline...

January 2008 Archives

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January 31, 2008 - Cantina Blues

I'm trying a new posting style. Here's the video.

And the link to the piece.
Cantina Blues

January 30, 2008 - Pronunciation Help

January 29, 2008 - Crazy Request

Sometimes I'm in the mood for odd requests. There's no rhyme or reason to these... I just got an email requesting a tango today. So I did some research, and figured out what a tango is. I got some help from Apple's loop library, and checked out Wikipedia to see what the heck they are.
Here's the result:

Tango de Manzana

The snare part was super fun.

And here's the remainder of the recent soundtracks.

Epic Unease

Gnarled Situation

Also, I updated the "About" section of the site. It had some mention of incompetech not being able to make money, and and outdated rant about web design. So - that's all fixed.

January 26, 2008 - Soundtrack - Volume Two

And... here's some more music. All orchestral and soundtrack-like.

Cheers.

January 24, 2008 - Soundtrack - Volume One

Ok, I've been holding out on you guys. I'm working on a feature film right now, so I'm kind of taking the time I used to use for posting new things and using it to create new things.
Here's a selection of pieces.

More to come in a few days!

January 15, 2008 - No New Music

Just kidding.

There are bunches and bunches of new tracks now online from my good friend Jon M. T. Roberts!
He's a super-talented composer and performer, and I finally got him to go online with it all.
The music is all licensed Creative Commons: By Attribution (just like my stuff), so go and get it people!

His site looks and works a lot like mine, so there shouldn't be much confusion. :-)

http://www.jmtr.com/
Try the "Light Intermission Music". It is awesome.

And don't forget to send him emails. I promised some emails... so... I need your help with that.

January 08, 2008 - Vacation

I'm officially on vacation for the next week.

Cheers!

January 02, 2008 - Quirk Sells

Ok, both my main controllers are out of commission still. I'm left with a 25 key mini controller.
So I made a little quirky percussion study.
Human Beat

And here's a quick percussion bit I whipped up as a short-order request:
Asian Drums

Cheers.

January 01, 2008 - On Audio Compression

Ok, my synth MIDI controller is down, and now my piano MIDI controller is gone. So it looks like a few days of just talking.

Audio compression! Hoo, boy! This is going to be fun. Audio compression has nothing to do with mp3 or wav or file formats at all. It has to do with how the music is produced.

16-bit audio files (like a CD) have about 96 decibels of range from most quiet to loudest. It is sort of measured backwards -0db being the loudest possible; -6db is pretty loud; -40db is very quiet, and -80db is largely inaudible (I'm generalizing here... it is wrong but mostly not).

When I produce a track, there is generally exactly one "frame" of audio (like a single frame of a movie) that reaches up to the 0db mark. The process is called "normalization" and it ensures the greatest possible dynamic range for the music.

This sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to produce music. In general - music is not done this way... at least not in 2008, it isn't.

There's a few ways that people "cheat" the loudness into an audio track. If one turns up the gain, so it goes beyond the 0db mark - it can stay there for more than a frame. 2 frames in a row, and there won't be any distortion of the sound. But more and more, people are running 8 frames or more at 0db. That causes distortion. But it does make it louder.

The other way to make something louder is compression. Audio compression is something like turning up the contrast on a photo. It makes the blacks more black, the whites more white, and you lose the subtlety of the things in between.

There are a lot of very good and reasonable reasons to use compression in audio. (I do use at least some compression in nearly everything I do.) But somewhere, things got carried away... and tons of music productions are now loud and blatant.

I have good speakers, if I want it louder, I'll just turn it up.

Maybe it is FM radio, or Satellite radio, or bad TV speakers, or iPods with bad headphones, or $12.95 PC desktop speakers... I don't know. But the master copy - the one you get on a CD should be dynamic and not distorted. Maybe there could be a button to convert quality audio to "louder" audio somewhere.

Please say "No" to excessive compression and zero-lining. Thank you.