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April 11, 2008 - Woefully Behind

Sorry everyone that is just getting email replies today. I was woefully behind, I'm afraid. (Still am, a little bit). Oh, and if you're "David" your email failed... so I'm posting my reply here:

> Hello,My name is David,I am from USA,I saw your introduction on internet
> would you like to meet?i am free this weekend-saturday and sunday
> i have light green eyes, brown hair,look like Brad pitt
> i work at city bank in shinjuku
> my hobbies is sport, music, baseball, i am studying judo as well
> recently i bought digital camera and like taking photos
> please call me and lets meet
> 090-6540-3296
> David


Hey, yo. Good to hear from you, David.
I'm not going to ask what the hell you're doing in Shinjuku... I am having a party for my new furniture this weekend. So if you're in town - stop on by! (Directions to my house are in my "internet introduction")

- Kevin

March 25, 2008 - Boxes

Today, I tried to search on Amazon.com's box codes and sizes. I started a page:
A Catalog of Amazon.com Box Sizes

It needs help, though. If you have a box (with the Amazon logo on it) - please take a photo of it. Ideally, it should show the box designation (e.g. "B12") and also the dimensions (e.g. 12x10x8). Make it as many megapixels as you reasonably can. I will update the page as much as I can until all the letters and numbers are filled.

You can include a URL that you'd like linked in your credit. Only the first person who sends me a good photo of a box that I do not have will be listed.

DO NOT send me photos of boxes that are already listed.

Thank you everyone!

March 10, 2008 - Basic Rant

I know what you're thinking... "I've been on the intercom all day and have not read a useless rant about something inane... like furniture delivery."
Well, friends - look no further!

I do not expect reasonable furniture delivery to come from this... but it is good therapy.

January 08, 2008 - Vacation

I'm officially on vacation for the next week.

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.

December 31, 2007 - Mp3 vs AIF Battle!

Well, there's some new music on my site - but I've not posted about it. They are "Almost in F", "Fluidscape", "Klockworx", and "Wish Background" if you want to go hunting for them.

I'm running into some tech difficulties right now, as my main MIDI controller (an M-Audio Axiom 61) is broken. I woke up, and 41 of the 61 keys did nothing. I have another one coming in the mail, so I should be back up soon.

In the meanwhile, I'm going to talk a little bit about my use of the mp3 file format.

I get a fair number of requests for "uncompressed" music (wave or aiff format) - just something that is straight PCM, with no file compression.

I don't do this for a couple of reasons. First off the files are huge. I did a couple this week that weigh in at more than 450 meg each. Sorry, but bandwidth is not yet unlimited - and it isn't free. I know many of you have no problem downloading such a giant file, but I'm dishing out hundreds of thousands of mp3s a month... and I just can't afford the server space and bandwidth for straight PCM.

So does the music suffer from being compressed? In theory; yes. In practice; no.
Here are some files you can test for yourself.

http://kmdownload.com/temp/Colossus.aif (68 meg)
http://kmdownload.com/temp/Colossus.mp3 (10 meg)

(please note that they're in a temp directory... so I'm not going to guarantee their continued availability)

I picked this one, because of the highs and lows that mp3 has a harder time with.
If you can hear a difference - any difference at all, please let me know... because I can't.


Why, then, does so much music in mp3 format suck? Bitrate. It is the measure of how much data is lost, or how small the files can be.
Here's a quick chart (in kilobits per second):



 48 kbps: Useful for voice-only podcasts. 

          Music sounds awful at this rate, but it is okay for hearing someone talk.

128 kbps: The former "standard" that music was encoded at... when hard drives were small 

          and bandwidth was limited by your modem. Music still sounds very bad at this rate.

196 kbps: This is 'ok' for music being listened to in a loud or crappy environment, like in 

          your car, or on bad "PC" speakers. I can't personally deal with it very well.

256 kbps: Most music will sound good at this rate. The files are twice as large as 

          the old "standard" of 128, but the quality is usually very good.

320 kbps: This is what I use (and very few others). It retains the very high frequencies 

          well, and offers no audio "artifacts"... those wonky-sounding chirps and phasing 

          effects you get with lower rates.


So, what's the bitrate of AIF? It depends on your sample rates and resolution. Most of what I work with between 2116 and 2822.

Argh! What is all this technical stuff!!!??

Download the files I linked. If you can't hear a difference (feel free to use meters!) then just know that everything on my site is good.... not "good enough", but "good".

I understand why people request AIF. It is because you're guaranteed that it will sound perfect - and most mp3s are terrible.

The other reason to use mp3, is compatibility. Every editing suite in the world (that I know of) can open mp3 files.

September 06, 2007 - Requests?

Kevin is out of ideas for music. Do you have any? Email them to me! The more odd or specific the request, the better the chance I'll pick it to produce it. If you request "more rock music"... I'm probably not going to pick that up. If you want something like "low-production-value 1980's techno fused with easy-listening soprano sax"... much more likely... but I'm not doing that.

Come up with something new, exciting, fun, or bizarre!

Email me at kevin@incompetech.com, Subject "I have an idea". Let's see how this goes!

June 16, 2007 - Fantastic Four

New movie review now online!

May 27, 2007 - On the Trail of the iPhone

If you don't already know what the iPhone is, you won't be excited about this... but it has browsed my site... so someone out there is already using one!

Read more about the iPhone Visit!

March 11, 2007 - Updates all-around!

I've not been posting much music - but I have been making some. There's about 12 pieces in the works right now. Also, working on updating the back-end database.
I'm in the middle of making the switch from Sony's Acid to Apple's Logic as my main music compositing framework, so I'm spending a lot of time learning that beast of an application. As a friend of mine said "[Logic] is really intuitive after you've used it for a few months... and... by... that... I mean... I guess it isn't intuitive at all.". Yup.

So in the meanwhile, there is an awesome review of "300" you can read.

January 27, 2007 - Hokey Ker-Smokers!

Well... there's been a pile of upgrades going on here. Here's the tour!

The NameDB just got a major data infusion - adding 24% more names! (that's a lot of names).

The Graph Paper landing page was out-of-hand, so I did a horizontal redesign to make it less visually tiring, also shorter. It may get further compressed... we'll see how it works.

Incompetech's 404 error message was also out-of-date, so that's better now.

Royalty-Free Music's little search box now collapses out of the way. There is a lot of data on those pages, and keeping them clean is problematic.
The music FAQ has been updated, as well as some other music page links.

Here's the BIG ONE! Just this week, I climbed to #2 on a Google search for Royalty-Free Music, so the emails have been pouring in. I now have a new section where people can build their own licenses for my music!

Behold! Music Licenses!

This application is seriously so cool, you should generate a license just for fun. It is full of 'web 2.0' goodness, while retaining the incompetech spartan feel. Woot!

November 29, 2006 - Super Reorganization

The entire royalty-free music section of my site is revamped. I've been working on setting this up for a couple of weeks. It isn't complete, but it is better than what I had - so I switched it.

Behold!

It is now database-driven, and has a simple search engine. So if you're looking for a Calming and Eerie piece of music, you can take your pick from six I currently have online!

Eventually, you'll be able to search and sort on tempo, instrumentation, and keyword (as well as genre and feel).

I think I got everything right. If you find a problem, please let me know!

November 16, 2006 - Ringtone?

Ok. I made a ringtone. Were this a normal ringtone, I'd hate myself. But this isn't. It makes other people not want to answer your phone. Also - it isn't annoying in a theater. Who would suspect? Get it (right-click "save link as" to download it.)

Please don't email me asking for support. This is an mp3. If your phone takes something else - this won't work. No, I don't know how to get it on your phone. I just transfer with bluetooth, so that's all I know... but I'm not even going to support that.

October 05, 2006 - New Host

I have a brand new hosting company for my music files, and it seems to be working like a champ! Thanks to all of you for your recommendations. I made charts with the features of each host, and the pricing and the wierd things with all of them. Finding a provider is a nightmare.

Luckily - many of the providers' websites were unavailable or slow at one point or another - so they got trimmed out quickly. :-)

I went with 1&1 Internet. Setup was easy, and the rates for 2 terabytes of monthly transfer are almost too good to be true.

I hope the new provider works for all of you! Thank you for your patience... now maybe I can get back to writing music.

- Kevin

September 25, 2006 - Help me out...

I am in the process of finding a new hosting provider for my audio files. One might think this is an easy process... one would be wrong. I need 5 Gig of storage and 500 Gig of transfer per month. If you know of someone who has a plan like that - please let me know.

kevin@incompetech.com

In the meanwhile, I apologize to all the people who are having a hard time downloading music from me. I've quantified and cataloged the problem, but my hosting provider's support staff refuses to believe it is a problem.
I am working to find a new host as soon as possible.

June 29, 2006 - Googled

Recently, my site has been upgraded in the Google rankings. I'm now number 8 for "Royalty free music". I've been getting a super duper big pile of requests recently. I'm trying to keep up with everything, but it is taking some time, and I probably need to change the site to make the FAQs more prominent.

As a general rule, if you really need me to respond to something - KEEP BUGGING ME. It is perfectly acceptable. Also, donating money will get my attention. Seeing how many files are being downloaded, I should ask for money more.

So, please send money. I write music for a living; and I'd like to continue doing that.

- Kevin

May 24, 2006 - That doesn't sound like me...

You know how it is when you record yourself talking, and then play it back - and it no longer sounds like you. Everyone else thinks it sounds like you. But not you...
Well, I was doing some voice recording today, and it sounded like me. B'Wha? Oh! I have new studio monitors! I can't believe it makes that much difference. But it does. That whole garbage I've been told about your head resonating. Wrong!

I'm guessing it has to do with one being so familiar with ones own voice that you can immediately pick out that it sounds 'off' if it isn't reproduced exactly. Get yourself a passable mic and some good speakers, and you can finally hear that you do indeed sound like you think you sound when you talk.

Amazing!

May 07, 2006 - An Open Apology

To all the people who listened to my music over the last few months and years... I'm sorry everyone. I'm really very very very sorry. You see - I just had no idea.

Today I bought some studio monitors, and I listened to my music. And it isn't pretty. Oh, the mixes are fine - the problem lies in how I distribute them. I used to think (WAY back in the day) 128 kbps mp3 was fine. It was what all the cool kids were using. I eventually upped my recordings to 160, then 192 and 256. I switched to 256 AAC encoding a few months ago beliving it was "indistinguishable" from the raw form.

Holy cow was I wrong.

While listening to some of my pieces now, I occationally say "What the heck happened to the high end in this piece??". Without fail - I'm listening to a compressed version that was destined for the web site.
Oh - the high end is still there... it is just... bad?

In any event - I'm going to have to change my format again. Possibly to 48kHz Apple Lossless (inside mp4). It is noticably better then CD quallity. Well - you can notice it if you have good speakers.

more... "An Open Apology" »

March 30, 2006 - RSS Now Available

I couldn't run from the future forever - so I finally implemented RSS feeds for incompetech. I will not be making all previous entried backward-compatible... But hopefully everything from here on out will be happily syndicated.


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