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.
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The Bucket List
Or Edward and Ray’s Big Adventure. Well, really Edward and Carter’s, but we’ll get to that later.
Morgan Freeman plays Carter Chambers, a sixty-something mechanic and grandfather who gets the news one day that he has cancer — I think lung cancer, but they don’t come right out and say that. Jack Nicholson plays Edward Cole, an incredibly wealthy businessman who, on about the same day, also gets the news that he has cancer. They find themselves sharing a room at the hospital, much to Edward’s displeasure, and bond over the agonies of chemotherapy and boredom, and so a quest is born.
I like Morgan Freeman — he’s sort of like the caring uncle everyone would like to have, and he seems like a smart and nice guy. Jack Nicholson, on the other hand, is really starting to frighten me. His head looks too big, and his face seems to be contorted into a permanent expression of something between thoughtless mischief and downright evil. At one point, he asks Morgan Freeman if he’s the devil, and I had the urge to yell, “Look who’s talking!” but quite frankly, that’s kind of the way the role was written, so he’s just about perfect for the part.
He has all the trappings of wealth — a private jet, a put-upon personal assistant (Sean Hayes, of “Will & Grace”) to handle all the business of living, and a little copper thing that apparently follows him everywhere to keep him generously supplied with Kopi Luwak, the most expensive beverage in the world. (But do NOT click that link before you see the film, or you’ll spoil one of the better jokes.) Carter is solidly middle-class, blessed with three kids and grandchildren, and a wife who adores him. He’s a voracious reader, and such a whiz at Jeopardy, they really should have made that part of their quest. He could’ve won a bundle.
 |
| I’m telling you, Jack Nicholson is totally up to something. |
But the point is, they make a list of all the things they meant to do with their lives, and now find themselves with very little time in which to do them. They travel the world, quite literally, stopping in France, Africa, Tibet and Hong Kong that we see, and they must have had some kind of layover in England, because they had “Visit Stonehenge” crossed off. They see the Taj Mahal and (sort of) Mt. Everest. And they skydive. I don’t know why, but for some reason skydiving always shows up on every such list. Personally, dying or not, the only way I’m jumping out of a plane is if both wings have just fallen off, and maybe not even then. Give me Stonehenge or Macchu Picchu any day.
So it’s part travelogue, part comedy, and part drama, which is normally a pretty strange and unsettling sort of hybrid, but which works here, in the capable hands of two such veteran actors. And personal assistant Tommy (or Matthew, depending on who you ask, since Edward doesn’t like real names, apparently) does a great job too, holding his own beautifully in a very low-key way even with such esteemed competition. And yes, I’ll admit it — it made me sniffle. But I wasn’t the only person in the theatre doing that, at least. Thankfully, it never quite goes as far as smacking the audience over the head with its message, which I was really worried about, though the voiceovers come close. On the whole, though, it was very well done, and I feel a little bad now that I wasn’t really looking forward to seeing it.
We’ll go with three and three-quarter idols. The sarcasm and witty exchanges (which I know I always like) keep it from getting too soppy and sentimental, and they manage not to go too far the other direction also and turn it into a really dark comedy. Nothing at all against dark comedies, but that wouldn’t have been right here, I think. So don’t let Jack scare you away; you can go ahead and see this one without worrying about having nightmares. Well, not too many, at least…
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.
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.
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.