tag:qtrax, iPod, music

Maybe, maybe: there are signs on the horizon that the content industry will finally come to grips with the harsh reality that their old models just do not work anymore the way they used to: enter Qtrax, a free, ad-supported P2P network that claims to have the blessings from a bunch of major labels, including Sony/BMG and EMI. Qtrax will lauch tonight, so soon we will know more.

Overall, this might be a sign that the RIAA monopoly is finally understanding that suing their customers is not a good way of advertising your goods. And while MP3s are not exactly the encoding that HiFi fans' dreams are made out of, it is still an interesting start into a hopefully much brighter future.

There are a few things that really interest me:

• They are using the Mozilla rendering engine. That is a good thing. Period.

• They promise iPod compatibility. Hmm.. this sounds odd, since the iPod is quite capable of playing back MP3s. Now - assuming for the moment that they are using MP3s - why would you need to make the iPod compatible? Unless there is some sort of DRM or platform lock-in included ... we will see in about 3.5 hours ;-)

• Who will be the ad source, ie. which advertising seller will get the opportunity to get access to a potentially gigantic market. While I have absolutely no idea, I'd be surprised if the name of that company started with a 'G'.

• How will Apple and the market react? At the end of the day, this whole thing is a thinly-veiled attack against Apples extremely strong position with the iPod and iTunes. If Qtrax can offer a similar level of ease-of-use, Mr. Jobs will have to do some very creative thinking.

• What is their Linux story? Or - to rephrase the question in a more interesting way: What is their open source/open specification story? I can see that they are not particularly interested in opening up their platform, as this would directly undercut their ad-based business model. But will they allow ports or make the engine at least reasonably portable to other OSes, including Linux, but also Symbian or other cell-phone OSes (and - of course - OpenSolaris)?

We will see ... soon.

tag: iPod, apple, audio, music, qtrax

For years I have been playing around with all kinds of computer based TV and multi-media solutions and toys: Windows MCE in its various editions from 2004 to Vista, early versions of MythTV and proprietary stuff. Until now none of these where really at a point where they were actually useful for a family room:

While Windows did have a reasonable UI from the start, the fact that it recorded to a highly proprietary format with nasty DRM implication was a deal-killer right from the start. Some of the tuner-cards (like ATI) attempted to mitigate this by bundling plugins for MPEG-2 conversion, but these were implemented rather clumsily and had frequent failures.

MythTV was - until recently - also more of a geek toy: nice for my lab or office, but nothing I could really throw at my family. Now, with the 0.20 config found in the Gutsy release of Mythbuntu, MythTV takes a rather large leap towards usability. 

• The UI is basically usable and driver support (especially for the tuner cards) is becoming acceptable. I am using an WinTV HVR-950 USB stick now with my digital-over-the-air setup and there is not a lot more I could ask for in terms of device support.

• The proprietary NVidia drivers are good enough and support the motion extensions that are needed to offload motion processing to the GPU.

• For audio, I require at the very least S/PDIF support (mostly for lossy Dolby Digital, but there is no other format like e.g. MLP being used for digital TV at this time), which has been quite painful, but ultimately doable.

• There seems to be decent remote support, but I am right now still fighting with my old ATI Remote Wonder (I think that I will cave in here at some point in time though).

The by far most important factor for family room usability for me is RTC wakeup: I could not near having a computer with its nasty fans running all the time. Enter ACPI controlled RTC wakeup: using a couple of scripts^[1], I was able to make the MythTV box boot up in time for any show that I wanted to record. Very cool.

One thing that I was fighting with in the end was a problem with the way MythTV could be shut down automatically after an unattended recording session. For this, MythTV provides mythwelcome(1) which is a helper program to start the MythTV frontend^[2]. The trick that made is work for me was to instruct^[3]mythwelcome(1) to not start mythfrontend(1) automatically: This overcomes a problem with session management in Ubuntu and mythwelcome, and allows the box to shutdown automatically after it completed recording.

Bottom line is that I am quite happy with my MythTV box for now.

[1] There are quite a few of tutorials on ACPI wakup out there, many using nvram-wakeup. Discard all these, and only use those centered on /proc/acpi/alarm, instead (if you can).

[2]  Mythbuntu Gutsy is actually quite smart about using mythwelcome(1): You only need to go into /etc/mythtv/session-settings and enable the welcome shell. No need to change the mythstartup.sh script.

[3] Press the 'i' key while in mythwelcome(1) to configure this.

I recently ran across this most excellent site on the acoustical crimes of the 'content mafia community': http://www.turnmeup.org/

You will find here a lot of infomation on why louder is not better (contrary to popular belief) and what has already been sacrified in the arms race to produce even louder music. My favorite from there is this video:

Enjoy.

tag: Audio, MP3

It sometimes takes a little longer, but it seems that even the Rolling Stones Magazin has finally realized that not all MP3 is good. Duh! But most unfortunately, the terrible habit of extreme volume compression to make songs sound 'better' (i.e. louder) has been creeping into the business for a long time (think of all the Red Hot Chilli Peppers albums that could have been really good, but were compressed to death).

MP3 and other lossy formats amplify this problem, since they are often consumed through extremely lo-fi speakers and headphones. To compensate for the inadequate reproduction equipment, producers are now not only waging a loudness war on our ears, but also are starting to produce pop music in a way that avoids the obvious shortcomings of compressed music, by de-emphasizing high frequencies etc.

Please do not get me wrong: a decently implemented lossy format (like the LAME MP3 encoder) can provide a lot of musicality with very significant space savings for small devices. But most properly recorded and produced music will simply sound a lot better on a decent audio system, with a CD/PCM audio at 44.1 kHz/16 bit (or better: DVD-Audio or SACD at even higher rates) as the source and a good DAC.

It can only be hoped that the current MP3 hype will eventually run out and compressed lossy format will find their appropriate niche for small mobile devices.

tag: Audio, MP3, High Fidelity

Constantin describes in this article how to create an DVD-Audio disc on Linux/Solaris (and also emphasizes the difference between DVD-Audio and DVD-Video).

I assume that most people who are interested in DVD-Audio know that there are also commercial DVD-A solutions out there, like DiscWelder.

However, for the task at hand Constantin would not have needed to create a DVD-Audio disc, but instead could have simply used his favorite DVD-Video authoring tool and create a stereo 96kHz/24bit LPCM track on a DVD-Video. All fully compatible DVD-V players must support this format, thus you do not have to resort to DVD-Audio.

This is obviously different for multi-channel formats where the DVD-Audio format is the only viable alternative. For high-resolution, multi-channel tracks, you will also need an MLP encoder ... and here we are talking about some serious licensing fees.

tag: DVD-Audio, DVD-Video, High-Definition

PS: Here is an overview on the DVD-Video audio capabilities.

I just ran across this song (from 2006) called "Download this Song" by MC Lars. You can certainly debate the quality of the song itself (although I still very much like "The Passenger"), but the point he is trying to make is probably quite right: 10 years from now, CDs will probably be considered either audiophile, totally redundant, or both. Popular music will at that time be produced, promoted, distributed, and listened to online.

However, I doubt that the small, but dedicated group of people interested in classical, contemporary, or Jazz music will be that easily converted - at least not without CD equivalent (or better) download offers.

Anyway, here is the video:

tag: humor, music, audio

• DVD-Audio discs are also found on the DVD layer of DualDiscs. The beasts are two-sided media, that have a Red Book CD side and a DVD side. If you own e.g. some of the re-releases of the Talking Heads (the Brick), you have DualDiscs with high-resolution (96 kHZ/24 bit - 5.1 and Stereo) audio. There are two major caveats with the DualDiscs: some do not feature DVD-A content, but rather a DVD-Video version, some interviews or live concert video coverage. The other problem is that a few CD players have reported issues when playing back the CD side, it is not 100% conformant to the physical characteristics of Red Book discs. I have yet to see a player where is would be the case.
  One of my favorite DualDiscs (beside the Talking Heads) is the 20th anniversary release of "Brothers in Arms" from the Dire Straights in DVD-A.
  
• To make all things codec even more complicated, starting with the new HD video media there are now also new HD audio codecs:
  
• Dolby TrueHD: Finally a code from Dolby that does not take away half the audio information, TrueHD is a 14 discrete channel container using MLP compression.
  
• DTS HD Master Audio: Another lossless HD contender, this time from DTS, with not logical limit on the number of discrete channels.
  
• It was quite obvious that the content mafia industry would insist on delivering broken products for high-definition reproduction: thus was born the completely useless HDCP scheme, that damages the HDMI (and DVI) transport beyond repair. Unless your system is blessed with the right keys for decrypting HDCP-scrambled packages, you will not see any HD content on your system. Microsoft is deeply in cahoots with these dubious characters businessmen and intentionally damaged Vista to not properly display movies or High Resolution audio, as Peter Gutmann recently explained.
  
• There is at least one more source for high-resolution audio links - and it is even free: check out the Internet Archive, music section. A lot of band allow fans to publish bootlegged versions of their concerts in any format, resulting in (sometime) really nice quality recordings at high bitrates.
  

Today's announcement that Universal has finally decided to come to senses is quite encouraging. In this, they join the ranks of EMI that reported very positive revenue figures for their DRM free music. These are certainly encouraging signs that the music industry is finally recognizing that times have changed and that the People are not their enemy, but instead potential customers.

I would like to take this occasion to point to a record company that should be regognized for their groundbreaking approach to music distribution: Linn Records, subsidy of the well-regarded Linn audio products. Not only have they been selling DRM-free MP3s for quite some time now, but much more important, they are offering for a large part of their selection CD quality and - even better - studio master quality downloads. Note that these are not merely high bitrate MP3s, but in the case of the CD quality downloads they ship 44.1 kHz/16 bit resolution, for High Resolution it is mostly in 88.2 kHz or 96 kHz and 24 bit quantization. To make this even better, the files formats are either WAV (uncompressed) or the free lossless compression format FLAC. Burning the bit to CD or DVD-A is actually encouraged.

Currently these downloads are all in stereo only. But upon request, a spokesperson told me that they are actively looking into the possibility to releasing some of their 5.1 music in high resolution.

If that got you interested, you might also want to take a look at their physical products: many of their releases are available in SACD and/or HDCD, and the artistic quality is - from what I heard so far - pretty good.

tag: DVD-Audio, SACD, High-Definition, Audio, DRM