Sketches of Spain

A number of years ago I bought a CD – Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain, released by Columbia Records. It’s a wonderful recording which starts out with a fantastic interpretation of Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo.  I probably first listened to it back in the 90′s when I first discovered, and fell in love with, the music of Miles Davis.

Fast forward a number of years to somewhere around 2004: my love of CD’s as the format of choice had completely died, supplanted by storing my music on hard drives. Around then I decided to rip my entire collection of CD’s – in and around 600 albums. However the CD case for Sketches of Spain contained no CD! I looked everywhere for it but deemed it to be lost. Every once in a while I’d remember the album and check my digital collection to find it wasn’t there, and I’d move on.

Yesterday after listening to a couple of Miles Davis albums (it had been a while), I decided to rectify the missing Sketches of Spain issue.

The “you can’t have it” approach to commerce

My first stop was Emusic, with whom I have a subscription which provides 100 track downloads a month for €30. As far as I can tell all Columbia Records releases are absent from Emusic, no doubt due to lack of DRM or some such. I then searched on Amazon’s music store. There was indeed a digital version available, however apparently due to licensing restrictions I can’t buy mp3′s from Amazon UK unless I’m in the UK. The thought occurred to me that I could run my net connection through a variety of proxy connections but it’s such a pain that I couldn’t be bothered.

Buying a physical CD release really wasn’t an option in my mind – I’m fully digital now from purchase to speaker – and the fact that I’m living in Cambodia makes purchase of a CD even less likely!

The “I’ll get it some other way, thanks” approach to buying

So I turned to Google and searched for “buy miles davis sketches of spain flac download“, figuring if I’m going to buy it online it may as well be in a high quality lossless format.

• First result: The Pirate Bay ¹.
• Next 9 results: All torrent or similar illegal download links.
• What did I do: I downloaded it illegally of course.

Columbia Records, or their parent company, have obviously decided that it’s most important to protect their music catalogue by making it difficult to purchase online. Perhaps they have an exclusive deal with iTunes for worldwide purchases, but I’m not an iTunes user and don’t plan to be.

Whatever their reasons, by confounding my attempts to make an official purchase they actually guided me into the temptation of downloading their music illegally. I don’t feel in any way bad about it, considering that I originally bought it and lost it – so I’ve paid my money to Columbia. However I was willing to pay for it again, but instead torrents offered me a simpler option and provided the music at a higher quality than I would have received from most online music stores.

There’s a couple of good articles by Warren Daly over at Invisible Agent that round up a lot of my thoughts on this subject:

• Pay for illegal music downloads?
• The war on music

Basically, music labels need cop on and get with the times. Stop condemning your customers as criminals while not providing an avenue for said customers to be legitimate.

Date Added: July 5th, 2010 | 2 Comments

Cubase 5.5 Features

At the recent Musikmesse conference Steinberg announced Cubase 5.5, a free update for registered Cubase 5 users (which makes me happy). In hearing the announcement I realised I missed out on a the 5.1.1 update which came out in December.

The main items that jump out at me are:

• Optimised performance (better multi-core resource handling)
• REVerence and LoopMash are more efficient
• New video engine (hopefully will make working on film scores better).
• Improved scrubbing
• Better channel batch export options

There’s more in there including a new automation panel (something I don’t think I ever use, but maybe will look at it in the new version), an improved Media Bay, and various GUI enhancements.

Full press release below from Steinberg’s announcement page.

Cubase 5.5 – More Features, More Enhancements

Cubase 5.5 and Cubase Studio 5.5 are the latest updates to Steinberg’s music production systems, featuring performance, automation and video enhancements, as well as refined beat tools and workflow improvements. Both updates will be freely available to download for registered users of Cubase 5 and Cubase Studio 5.

Optimized performance

The Cubase audio engine has been tweaked for an even better low-latency performance on systems with four or more CPU cores. Updated versions of LoopMash* and REVerence* reduce CPU demand for these plug-ins. The native x64 version of Cubase 5.5 now features an improved VST Bridge that boasts higher performance and dramatically enhanced compatibility with the majority of bridged 32-bit VST2.4 plug-ins.

More mixing and video

The automation panel has been given a smart facelift, and now sports additional automation functionality such as the new Fill modes. For even more convenient access to all required track, mixing and plug-in parameters, the Quick Control system has been expanded to Group, FX, Input and Output channels, while the setup of VST Connections has been simplified. A new Open GL accelerated video engine with full HD support*, scalable performance and the ability to play out videos via FireWire on Windows round out this much anticipated update.

Bigger beats

The Cubase Sample Editor has witnessed significant refinements when it comes to reworking with beat-laden loops, including a new sensitive hitpoint-detection algorithm and the introduction of a local timeline for the AudioWarp definition mode. Groove Agent ONE boasts extended Export/Import functionality, visual adjusting of sample start- and end point and 19 brand-new and exclusive drum kits made up of over 800 finest vintage drum machine samples. LoopMash* has been updated with track-dedicated level meters and volume controls plus a new global similarity threshold slider for controlling the overall density of a loop construct.

Workflow consolidation

The MediaBay interface has been redesigned to provide improved usability besides simply looking pretty neat. It now also comes with an integrated virtual keyboard and memo recorder to quickly record preview phrases. The Channel Batch Export provides user-definable file naming options and includes a non-modal audio export window which remains open for adjusting settings whenever required. Both the Infoline and the toolbars have been cleaned up and consolidated for improved legibility and faster access. The scrubbing function features a much smoother and acoustically accurate feedback for precision editing.

Date Added: April 7th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Tag Scanner Screen Capture

I’ve use a lot of applications to try and improve the state of my ridiculously over-sized music library. Some have been better than others, that’s for sure.

Over the last while I’ve been entirely falling back on a Russian developed application called TagScanner. It’s solid, dependable, doesn’t attempt to offer any crap-ware on install, receives a reasonable amount of updates (which work well!), and it allows you to happily tag every different sort of music file you can think of with pretty much any or all tag types. So whether you prefer mp3, OGG, or FLAC, TagScanner will do the job. You can search for matches in FreeDB, Discogs, Amazon or TrackType.org which means you’re definitely going to find a match for most albums in existence. Did I forget to mention the best bit? It’s free!

This also means that you’ve got access to a huge range of sources for album covers, letting you embed the album cover into each file as well as giving you the option to save a copy of the album cover locally.

Finally it also includes something I consider to be important – the renaming of actual file names in whatever format you choose. So, once I’ve gotten the correct tags for said album I just switch to the “Music Renamer” tab and using “%artist% – %album% – %track% – %title%”, I rename all the files. This keeps things, somewhat anally, neat in my filing system and also means that if I’m searching for music files through the OS rather than a music library, I can easily find what I’m looking for, it also means if something accidentally gets misplaced, I can track it down.

Spiel from TagScanner Website

TagScanner is a multifunction program for organizing and managing your music collection. It can edit tags of mostly state-of-the-art audio formats, rename files based on the tag information, generate tag information from filenames, and perform any transformations of the text from tags and filenames. Also you may get album info via online databases like freedb or Amazon. Supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia and MP4(iTunes) tags. Powerful TAG editor with batch functions and special features. Playlist maker with ability to export playlists to HTML or Excel. Easy-to-use interface. Built-in player.

via The Ultimate TagScanner.

Date Added: March 12th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

My word, when I signed up my musical alter-ego, Ebauche, to receive royalties from Last.fm, never did I think it would expand my wallet so massively.

Below is a screen shot showing my royalty earnings. I am loaded.

Ebauche's Royalty Earnings on Last.fm

Ladies and Gentlemen, the champagne is on me ¹!

Date Added: February 24th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Was listening to this yesterday and figured I should share it out.

The track below, Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around by The Fairfield Four is guaranteed to put a smile on your face, in my humble opinion.

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If you like this, then check them out over on Last.fm, or pick up an album on Amazon.

Date Added: February 19th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

For the benefit of Meontwit_ter2 who was curious as to what a bluegrass version of Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” actually sounds like.

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This cover is by “Iron Horse” from their album “Fade to Bluegrass: The Bluegrass Tribute to Metallica”.

Enjoy!

Date Added: January 15th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

Warren Daly has just done up a lovely new ambient mix set for free download over on Invisible Agent – grab the download now!

I forecast this will get some repeated playing on my part (being a bit of an ambient junky) – great work Warren!

The latest AgentCast from Warren Daly is a smooth blend of minimal electronic textures and floating ambient soundscapes.

It includes delicate trickles and singing reverberations from Arovane, Japanese composer Hirohito Ihara (a.k.a Radicalfashion), Pete Namlock and Robert Rich to name just a few.

Warren generally concentrates on mixing Electro and Techno but in this instance he covers many distinctive and elegant styles of Electronica and awakens a multitude of emotions, highlighting his diverse and innovative abilities.

via Warren Daly – DJ Mix / AgentCast – Ambient, Downtempo, Electronica – Invisible Agent.

Date Added: October 28th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

Excellent video that I recommend getting your eyes around. It was made in collaboration with The Scratch Perverts, Foreign Beggars, Shlomo and Will Clarke with sound design by Will Cohen.

More info to be found at www.neurosonicsaudiomedical.com and Motionographer. Thanks to Nialler9 for sharing and Alan C for sending this on.

Date Added: August 31st, 2009 | Leave a comment!

One would imagine having 64 bit computing as a physical possibility for the past 6 years would have meant that software makers would be on top of this opportunity but, remarkably, in the power-needs world of music production nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ve recently started work on a new film project and felt that now might be the time to consider moving to a 64 bit version of Windows in order to take advantage of a system with 12Gb of RAM – something that could greatly benefit the use of the Vienna Symphonic Library – however I couldn’t have anticipated just how complicated such a move could be.

Issues

It’s remarkable how unprepared some of the software makers are. I’ve been testing on a spare machine and so far I’ve found:

• Propellerheads Reason will not work with Cubase 5 64-bit, but will work when Cubase is running in 32-bit mode;
• Apple Quicktime will also not work with Cubase 5 64-bit;
• It appears that the Waves plug-ins won’t work if the OS is 64-bit.

I haven’t even gotten round to testing a few other crucial items. What amazes me though has been some of the responses from software vendors, including one who point blank didn’t know whether their software would work when Cubase was running in the 32 bit emulation environment on a Windows x64 OS. I tested it for them and reported back – um, is there a reason we shell out hundreds and hundreds of Euro for your software?

It appears that I’d be foolish to even contemplate switching to a 64-bit OS for the foreseeable future. I really do want to embrace this as the way forward but there’s just too many potential pitfalls that it seems like a bad idea. This means that I’ll have to drop this fresh install of Windows 7 RC from the laptop and then I have to try and work out whether I’m going to go with Vista32 or XP. It also means that there’s crap all point in me purchasing more than 4Gb of RAM for my new machine (and of course I’d still only have about 3Gb of addressable RAM because my graphics cards will take up some of that addressable space). Arse and feck anyway.

Of course, as everything barring Waves will run in the 32 bit emulation mode, perhaps it still would be worthwhile..

Perhaps I’m just wrecking my own head – but I keep going round in circles on this.

Fair play to the guys at VSL though for pushing forward on the 64 bit end of things, including their new plugin bundle, the Vienna Suite.

Date Added: August 31st, 2009 | 8 Comments

Invisible Agent, Irish electro, techno and all-sorts record label, have just pushed out another of their patented “Agent Casts” (a pod-cast with more “invisible”).

Check it out over here: John Dalton playing a blend of straight up Techno – download it for free.

Tracklisting

1. Gerald Mitchell – Out the Boat
2. Gaetano Parisio & Danilo Vigorito – Logica EP C1
3. Alba Patera – Cag
4. Jeff Mills – La Force
5. Gary Martin – Puna Kauai
6. Leni Faki – Lusaka Pt.2
7. Mark Williams – Love Club Pt.2
8. Bryan Zentz – D-Clash
9. Leandro Gamez – You are Poison
10. The Deacon – Multi-Dimensional Drama
11. John Dalton – After
12. Gayle San – Get Serious
13. Ben Sims Vs Mark Broom – City Life
14. Rino Cerrone – Total Off
15. John Dalton – Trial4
16. Diego – Mind Detergent (Robert Hood Mix 2)
17. Deetron – Don’t You Know Why?
18. Gerald Mitchell – Freedom Dancer
19. John Dalton – Tint
20. Bandulu – Deadly Ride

via New Agent Cast (DJ Mix) from John Dalton (August 2009) – Invisible Agent.

Date Added: August 30th, 2009 | Leave a comment!