Speaking of gaming, here’s more news that the fledgling game audio and music area is getting more attention — something that we at CDM see as very good news. (See our sometimes-obsessive gaming stories.) CDM’s resident game composer and sound designer checks in …

In an e-mail he sent to me yesterday, Peter pointed out that Mix was soon to offer a bi-monthly newsletter on game audio. We were both summarily unimpressed – until we discovered that the newsletter was in addition to a monthly digital magazine, a sample of which is now available on the Mix website.

The sample issue covers topics such as audio for mobile games, World of Warcraft sound design, and an interview with Tim Larkin – composer for various Myst games, and sound designer for Half-Life 2 episodic content.(…see our previous interview with Tim Larkin.)

While a tad short on content, any level of coverage from the mainstream audio media is more than welcome, and we’re sure to see some great interviews and stories in future issues.

MP3s, bad because they have less music in them. So much less music, in fact, that your brain loses the ability to feel emotions listening to them. Okay, sure, over-compressed MP3s sound awful, especially at lower bitrates. But get ready for some strange psychoacoustics here, folks.

Producers howl over sound cut out by MP3 compression (and I see, while I was sitting on this, it got slashdotted, though no one took the bait

As Joel Selvin writes for the The San Francisco Chronicle, MP3s have less music:

…the music contained in these computer files represents less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs.

Wow, I knew that compressed digital audio files contained less data, but less music?

In its journey from CD to MP3 player, the music has been compressed by eliminating data that computer analysis deems redundant, squeezed down until it fits through the Internet pipeline.

Of course! If they didn’t, we might stop up the tubes that make the Internet — or … um … one tube, apparently. (No wonder congestion is bad if we have just one pipeline! You need it to fit!) And there’s more:

When even the full files on the CDs contain less than half the information stored to studio hard drives during recording, these compressed MP3s represent a minuscule fraction of the actual recording.

The humanity! All those years when we were buying CDs, we were only getting half of what was recorded in the studio?! Why, that must mean they’re recording, say, four whole tracks when they record the album. And one take. (Okay, I’m assuming they somehow got this statistic by assuming 96kHz sample rates … except that’s not really half the amount of data … and that would still require 16-bit … and I don’t know who told them that, anyway.)

There are the obligatory and predictable quotes from Phil Ramone and others. I can understand engineers being squeamish about someone listening to a low-bitrate MP3 on iPod earbuds, though I wonder how they missed people taping pennies to their turntables in the 60s. (Scratches and dust, I suppose, just give you more music!)

You’ve read these kinds of articles before. They’re not entirely wrong, they just struggle to explain what lossy compression is. A journalist, I can imagine, would do that easily; I haven’t written any compression algorithms this morning so I’ll admit my own understanding of data compression is rudimentary. But, of course, what a journalist should do is talk to experts, and you hope they’ll tell you something that makes sense. In this case, they seem to explain away our ability to hear music at all. Get ready for — experts gone crazy!

My feature story for Keyboard Magazine on recording live laptop performance is now available online at keyboardmag.com (as well as in the July print issue). When I got the assignment, I think my editor imagined futuristic, sci-fi like network recording, in which audio was streamed entirely virtually from players to a recording server and musicians connected to one another over the ether. Instead, we got just the opposite: quick and dirty solutions for capturing improvisatory computer performance, and intentional efforts to make laptop performances sound more like conventional instrumental ensembles. The case studies:

• The Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra hosts laptop jam sessions at the conservatory that bears Leon Theremin’s name. Individual speakers, stereo mic — plus groovy visuals in the background.
• Princeton University’s PLOrk plays with hemispherical speakers so that sound radiates from near the laptop the way it would from a real instrument. Their recording configuration is a little more sophisticated, with not only a stereo pair for the audience but three mics above the stage.
• Share in New York has the toughest challenge of all: a club environment in which anyone can show up with any gear and play. They combine the tried-and-true (old-fashioned analog snakes on the floor) with software tools for standardization (a template in the open source Linux and Mac DAW Ardour).

Check out the full story for details:

Electronica Unplugged

One thing we didn’t broach was what to actually play (these ensembles all experiment with everything from alternative controllers to live coding). But the recording question alone turned out to reveal a lot about laptop performance, and how it’s gradually evolving into just music performance.

Also of interest, Craig Anderton talks about the basics of recording your sets live in Ableton Live. The basic idea: record not only the arrangement, but external audio, as well.

This story also turned out to be an interesting demonstration of what can happen when new online sites (like CDM) interface with a traditional outlet (Keyboard, bringing you music making information since 1976). That’s my ultimate hope: that these outlets will make each other better, and each will expand the knowledge of techniques and what (and who) is out there. Less lofty translation: if Keyboard hadn’t asked me to write this up, I might never have gotten around to it, and conversely, if I didn’t have CDM, I would never have hooked up with folks like the Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra.

Speaking of which, let us know how you record your sets and even laptop ensembles, and if I missed anything!

Previously:
Laptop Orchestras Proliferate, from Princeton to Moscow

I can’t take it any more. In one corner, we have PC pundits negatively reviewing Apple’s possibly-upcoming iPhone weeks before it’s announced — reviewing a product they know nothing about that may not even exist. (Incidentally, Microsoft’s new MadeUp Pro 2007 Edition — total crap. So is the new Imaginesoft NeverNeverLand iMadeUp Express.)

And in the other corner, we have a never-ending flood of reviews of Microsoft Windows Vista, weeks before third-party developers have shipped most of the drivers and application releases that would let them fully test it, bashing the new OS based on old, often misleading arguments. In a way, it’s only fair. After years of getting unfairly slammed in the press (remember the late-90s, when every Apple news story began with “the beleaguered computer maker”?), Apple now has some of its most vocal advocates helming the computer analysis for the New York Times, CBS, Chicago Sun-Times, Newsweek, and Wall Street Journal.

CDM Senior Editor W. Brent Latta sums up everything I’m about to say, only much more succinctly. “I’m not one to let Microsoft off the hook, but I want to know what is different about Vista – not what makes it a copycat of OS X. I have to use both OSes.”

Amen.

Now, I’m all for comparing Vista to OS X, because for the individual consumer, there is a choice. Apple hardware owners can even dual-boot Windows on their own machine, so they could theoretically make an afternoon of trying a new Microsoft OS — and wind up choosing both. With millions upon millions of users, operating systems are some of the most important technology on the planet. They’re worth criticizing. And it’s about time someone pointed out the real advantage of the Mac is its operating system, which often offers reliability and features well beyond Windows. That’s not just because Windows is “bigger” or more “backwards-compatible” and these features are impossible. For music, Core Audio and Core MIDI offer superior compatibility and performance versus Windows XP. The fact that XP is a usable OS and a favorite for many musicians suggests to me that Microsoft could and should compete with these features.

The only problem is, I’ve heard primarily two criticisms of Vista, and neither seems fair:

Whether using your home MIDI gear and software or building an elaborate DIY MIDI project, better understanding MIDI is essential to getting the results you want. Many musicians are aware that the applications of MIDI aren’t limited to traditional musical implementations, but a broad range of creative DIY projects. Explaining what MIDI is, how it works, and how to use it not only in music projects but other projects, as well, was the aim of a story I wrote for Make 07:

Make Magazine Volume 07
Primer: MIDI Control

The Primer link includes additional online resources that didn’t fit in print, including:

1. An overview of software that supports MIDI, including “DIY software” like Pd and Max
2. An overview of hardware, with an emphasis on available MIDI boards for DIY projects and sensor interfaces
3. Behind the scenes: An anatomy of a MIDI message

All of this information is freely available to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. The “anatomy” bit I adopted from a sidebar in my book Real World Digital Audio. I find that a lot of people don’t fully understand the data structure of MIDI messages, because normally it’s explained in technical terms. Hopefully this is helpful (though it’s easiest to follow, of course, in context of a full explanation of MIDI or if you have some basic MIDI background).

MIDI isn’t always the best solution for everything, so to me it’s great that the same issue includes a nice feature on the Arduino sensor board, which uses serial and now USB to transmit data from sensors. Ultimately, you’ll choose the scheme that works best for the application you have in mind. MIDI will be perfect if you’re controlling soft synths or VJ software, for instance, whereas USB or serial might work better for acquiring sensor data to be used some custom Processing code or for use with a home-built hardware rig, sans computer.

Mostly, I’m excited to continue to be a part of Make. They’re assembling a group of really incredible makers, and I’m finding myself reading the issues as they arrive cover to cover just to learn everything I can. I’ve traditionally been a “software guy,” and it’s great to learn new approaches to making things, soft and hard.

Subscribers, you should get 07 soon if you haven’t yet; non-subscribers, the magazine hits US newsstands August 21. I’m still trying to get better information on international availability. You definitely want to buy this magazine — not for me, by any means, but for everything that’s in it!