God Bless Russian engineering. As of this summer, it’s the only ticket to and from our space station, via a capsule that Just Works. It gaves us the very first electronic instrument (thanks, Professor Theremin). And it gives us an insane music tracker slash production tool slash soft synth selection slash modular hosting environment that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile (yes, you’re reading this list right), and now iOS and iPad.

Well, don’t just thank Russian engineering. Thank Alex Zolotov, who sends along his latest work. Highlights:

• Waveform drawing
• A drum synth
• Sample recording
• Side chain compression (top)
• iPad MIDI keyboard support (second from top)

Fortunately, if you’re not a mad scientist, we’ve got a lineup of videos that show you what all of this does and how to get started with this eminently affordable, insanely powerful tool. (Cue someone complaining in comments that they can’t read the interface, etc. Uh… well, you can’t have everything, eh? Bifocals?)

And in case you don’t believe this is a music tool, we even have some music created in it. (Actually creating digital music – interesting.)

Now, let’s Crash Adobe Flash(TM) with a bunch of videos:

More New Features

Where to Start

And yes, even where to start performing live on an iPhone / iPod touch:

More video tutorials:

SunVox Video Tutorials @ warmplace.ru Forum

Official SunVox page:
http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

Why shouldn’t a digital download be better, not worse, than a CD release?

Sit in a studio as most of your favorite albums are recorded, mixed, and mastered, and odds are the digital material is being recorded at higher bit depths and sample rates. And while the perceptual record is more mixed, there’s also no question that, in terms of data, lossy compression schemes like MP3 do demand some loss in audio information. (Lossless schemes like FLAC, by contrast, use less data but do so without sacrificing sound information.)

All of this means that it’s news that you can get Radiohead’s “The King of Limbs” album in 24-bit, lossless FLAC. It’s the first time there’s been a major artist doing this kind of release online, say 7Digital – and, in turn, the first step back toward greater fidelity after the step backward from 16-bit, 44.1kHz lossless audio CDs to the lossy versions available now. By “first,” I can only imagine they mean on 7Digital; if you like this sort of release, it’s worth checking out HDtracks, an online store with content all going this direction (and lots of FLAC):
https://www.hdtracks.com/index.php

It’s also the latest case that demonstrates that iTunes need not be your only online store for music. UK rival 7digital is the first and only digital store to offer up the band’s brilliant “The King of Kimbs” in 24-bit FLAC.

http://7digital.com
Deluxe release @ 7digital [US link]

Whether their listeners can really hear the difference or not, it’s likely stores will begin to move to greater audio fidelity. For their part, 7digital says that the 24-bit FLAC codec for Radiohead “is the first step in 7digital’s move towards higher quality digital music downloads.” The reasoning is pretty simple. Bandwidth and storage costs are getting smaller for online stores as those stores grow and better leverage server infrastructure. Storage is generally cheaper now than it had been, too, though somewhat mitigated by the increasing popularity of solid state flash memory over larger, cheaper hard disk drives. But most of all, stores are likely to respond to artist and listener demand, particularly as resellers try to differentiate themselves from streaming sound and justify your purchase. It’s likely labels may also look to formats like FLAC to squeeze more revenue out of the enthusiasts who are most likely to buy full albums. The deluxe FLAC edition – bundled with 16-bit FLAC and 320kbps AAC for compatibility – costs US$11.99 instead of the technically-inferior US$7.92 320kbps MP3 version.

I’m skipping over the most important issue, though – how do you listen to this?

FLAC isn’t the only compressed lossless codec, but it is the only format that’s fully free and open source. It’s really an ideal tradeoff – you maintain smaller file sizes, but the quality of a 24-bit FLAC file is the same as a much bigger 24-bit WAV or AIFF.

It’s hardly a household name, but FLAC support is surprisingly widespread. Streaming players like the Logitech Squeezebox and Sonos products support it.

Many desktop software players will play FLAC, too: once codec support is installed on your OS of choice, in fact, most players will do it. Linux these days does it out of the box with most players. VLC is probably the easiest, sure-fire way to get FLAC support on Windows and Mac. On Windows, the excellent MediaMonkey, Winamp, and foobar2000 all play FLAC natively. On the Mac, the open source Cog is also an option (though it appears it hasn’t been updated recently, sadly). Aside from VLC, cross-platform, open source players like Songbird (Mac, Windows) and Banshee (gradually being ported from Linux to Mac and Windows) are promising, too.

Of course, part of the reason the situation is spotty is that iTunes has gained a certain hegemony. Nothing against iTunes per se, but I believe having choice is a good thing. Indeed, the predecessor of iTunes itself – the long-forgotten SoundJam MP by Casady & Greene on which Apple’s product was based – was the product of a period of heated Mac and Windows player rivalries. If you love music, you’ll want some options.

And the tide is turning. One of the most encouraging audio player initiatives I’ve seen yet is from Audiofile Engineering. I’m already a fan of AE because of their excellent wave editing and loop products (working on a new review – stay tuned). Now, they’re reviving the spirit of SoundJam’s principle rival, and my own player of choice in another life, Audion. Fidelia is a perfect choice of commercial player for Radiohead; it can play FLAC natively and even dither the 24-bit audio stream for a 16-bit output. I haven’t reviewed Fidelia yet as I’d like to see it mature a bit; minimalism is good, but some basic functionality is still emerging. But I do hope to talk about it soon. And while Windows users have had lots of terrific choices, it’s nice to see choice returning to the Mac, too.

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/fidelia/

Speaking of hegemony, mobile players have tended to lag in FLAC support, but that’s improving, too. The free and open source andless for Android supports FLAC, and I expect more as the Android music player market continues to heat up.

Many of these players do actually also support Apple’s Apple Lossless format – even including many of the free Linux options – so I expect future iTunes lossless exclusives wouldn’t necessarily be a dealbreaker. (That’s true even of andless, so you could, say, rip to Apple Lossless with iTunes and load Apple Lossless and purchased FLAC files onto an Android music player when on the go. Maybe someday we’ll even see DIY devices based on Android that offer high-fidelity audio outputs.)

An obviously-essential part of this equation is whether you can actually hear the results. I won’t start on music consumers who listen regularly on internal laptop speakers and generic Apple white earbuds. But I’d be interested in what you can detect, comparing different music content, using better listening environments. With “deluxe” editions bundling the MP3 and FLAC together, we’ll have lots of raw material for double-blind tests. Anyone with some experience in administering such tests – or who wants to get involved in a research project?

Digital technology has the power to transmit information more efficiently, to make the invisible visible, and to express new things. It can also be pushed so far to the limits of actually transmitting information to be meaningless. It can push well beyond what we can even perceive in a useful way. What’s bizarre and wonderful about Johannes Kreidler’s work is that he’s not afraid of pushing toward that boundary. The results may have only a shred of remaining meaning, or be intentionally, comically meaningless. But he’s nothing if not inventive.

Compression Sound Art (2009) [“Comments on Music – Musical Zip-Files … Time is relative!”

The video above, politically speaking, is Not Safe For Anything – where else can you bring up Hitler and Britney Spears and condoms? But the only visually tantalizing information is the brief view of a condom speaker membrane and a chest with pasties.

The creations range from:

An oven pipe imported in 1972 from Alaska to New Zealand, vibrated at 574 cycles per second using a gasoline motor. Then, in 2003, this recording was manipulated and filtered on an old atari computer using hacked software.

…to:

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, played 22,000 times in one second (audible only to bats).

The controversial nods and humor aside, I think this really does say something about time and data. I could tell you, but I’d need a microsecond. Let’s just avoid any mention of datamosh.

Johannes Kreidler does know how to encode information in useful, accessible ways, too, however. He’s done just that with a terrific book on Pd (Pure Data), the open source, visual programming environment in which he created works like the one above. Can’t dance to it? You can do other things with Pd, too. You can dance to it? Then, by all means, go for it:

Be a Music Geek Ninja with Electronic Music Programming in Pd: New Book

Previous Kreidler sightings:

A song made from 70,2000 samples

The stock market declines, as a song

Sure, we may live deep into the future. High in our Blade Runner apartment studios, we use androids for all of the vocals. Yet we still have that occasional need for good, old-fashioned compression. Like the soy-based dinners we microwave and the synthehol beer we wash it down with, it has to be simulated.

Audio Damage has earned its cult following thanks to inexpensive plug-ins with no-nonsense controls that just seem to fit into projects. So it’s nice to see his new, free Rough Rider compressor. Simple controls, a slight vintage tint, and crankable parameters – not the “careful with that, too far, total destruction!” feeling you get from, say, the unpredictable compressors included with some hosts.

I see on Twitter that Tom from Music thing likes Rough Rider, and he’s a hardware guy, so that’s a good sign. That means he didn’t just eBay some ancient, slightly irradiated piece of Russian equipment.

Rough Rider Download Page @ Audio Damage [Mac, Windows – yep, a free Mac plug-in!]

Via the Ruin & Wesen blog, here’s another way to approach compression in Ableton Live. Live may instantly make you a remix artist or loop addict, but it can’t turn you into a mastering engineer. That means you can either apply science (blech!) or complete voodoo. We choose a culture of voodoo.

My friend utofbu pointed me out the trick of using a Dynamic Tube in Ableton, with Dry/Wet on 50%, and output gain to -3db. This adds a subtle distortion to the sound which makes it more lively … I finally tweaked a "killer" combo which I saved as an Effect Rack, and now just throw it on the master channel once I’ve finished my song. It just makes everything sound a bit nicer, and it’s totally voodoo.

Ableton Compression Trick [Ruin & Wesen]

The magic ingredient turns out to be none other than the Vintape Reaktor Ensemble. If you own Reaktor, this could mean some free goodness to add to any host, not just Live – Vintape adding tape simulation, some other effect adding tube distortion and compression (or perhaps Rough Rider). The ensemble’s creator Stefan Knauthe writes:

Hello Userlibrarists, this is my very first ensemble. As you all know (or maybe not), i’m a huge fan of the scotish [sic] band "Boards of Canada". In Interviews they stated that they often use an old, almost defect Grundig tapemachine for recording, adding wow and flutter, saturation and hiss to the signal, to give it a "sound-ageing" feeling. This is what this ensemble simulates…: there are two wow&flutter units for left and right, followed by a saturation unit and a phaser/flanger section.

And, as we like to encourage in tools like Reaktor, creator Stefan borrowed from another Reaktor ensemble (from Jo Orgren) to get wow and flutter.

You can grab Vintape on the User Library at Native Instruments:

Simpler Vintape [the version R&W use]

Vintape Original

Got favorite compression tips? Give a holler, or send a holographic encoded message. Or just wait, because remember, CDM is monitoring everything you do.

“Maximum PC did double-blind testing with ten listeners in order to determine whether or not normal people could discern the quality difference between the new 256kbps iTunes Plus files and the old, DRM-laden 128kbps tracks.

But wait, there’s more! To add an extra twist, they also tested Apple’s default iPod earbuds vs. an expensive pair of Shure buds to see how much of an impact earbud quality had on the detection rate.”

The result is, not surprisingly, better headphones are better than poorer headphones, more bits are better than fewer, and both is better than one or the other, but bits are more noticeable if the headphones are worse. If you want to spoil the results of the Maximum PC shootout, read that sentence nine or ten times until it makes sense.

Apple Takes a Bite out of DRM [256 kbps versus 128 kbps bitrate, at Maximum PC]

So, who here has given the iTunes Plus store a try? (Old news to many of you; see our previous stories, As Other Music, Others Embrace Downloads, is Big, DRM-Laden Online Music Out? and Where Do You Get Your DRM-Free Music?)

I expect you are truly discerning listeners, of course. Get someone to help you with the blindfold. Slapping your forehead against an Apple Cinema Display hurts bad.

To audio lay people, though, it may be tough to describe exactly what this means. One music fan has taken the battle to YouTube, with a graphical and aural demonstration of exactly what the technique (technically “brick wall limiting”) does to the sound. Rather than approach this the traditional way, he takes a nice, clean 80s track and imagines what it might sound like in 2007. It’s actually not an implausible result:

(thanks to Matrix of Matrixsynth fame)

More experienced engineers have pointed this out, and can even demonstrate visually using actual examples, but this does as good a job as any explaining what happens — in particular, when you re-adjust dynamic levels for different equipment. A common misconception is that compressing audio levels makes it sound better on cheaper equipment and at more listening levels. That can be true to a point, but squash dynamic range, and poorer equipment can actually make things sound worse.

This said, I’ve noticed some important points often get left out of this discussion:

1. Brick wall limiting should not be blamed on digital recording — or visa versa. The whole idea of pumping up tracks’ loudness to boost record sales is largely a result of FM radio as the mechanism for promoting tracks.

2. Not every track you hear in 2007 uses heavy compression. On the contrary, there are some beautifully-produced albums out there, and with the explosion of indie labels, a lot of albums are aimed at aficionados with headphones, not mass-market loudness.

3. Over-compression isn’t always bad. It’s a stylistic hallmark of a lot of modern hip-hop — which in turn might be thought of as a nod to dub and other traditions. It just tends to get applied without artistic intent in some albums.

With the growth in home recording, in fact, this example doesn’t have to just be a criticism of the record industry — it can also be a cautionary tale for being careful with how you use compression. Dynamic range is just as important an area as frequency range, and any reminder of that is worth considering. So before we start whining about other people’s recordings, it’s worth thinking about what different dynamic ranges do to our own music.

For more information: There’s a very knowledgeable rant on this topic in engineer Bob Katz’s book, Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science, which is an unparalleled reference on mastering in general. (And it’s worth separating the art of mastering from what a lot of us do, which may or may not have a delivery medium in mind. Not to mention, the basic rule of mastering material well is, give it to someone else who knows what they’re doing and touch it yourself as little as possible.) Katz most definitely knows what he’s talking about, and his frustration with this evolution — or devolution — of mastering comes from years of experience. That’s not to say people can’t disagree with him on some of his points, so I’d be curious to know what others think.

Elsewhere: Tom at Music thing linked to a helpful visual aid showing the evils of “Living La Vida Loca” as a new, digital wall of sound. More discussion there.