Monthly Archive

I received the TU-2 pedal yesterday, new as promised, and it works great. It fits right into my pedalboard case. I’ll post a pick to Flickr later.

Update (3/30): Here’s a pic of this round of GAS:

I subscribe to both Sam Ruby’s and Tim Bray’s Atom feeds, and was an amused spectator this morning when Sam broke Bloglines (which I use a lot) and other feed readers by making the title of an entry “<plaintext>”. (Without the use of HTML entities for the <’s and >’s.) In his linkback to Sam, Tim made the comment that “Bloglines is basically unmaintained”, and I have to agree. I like Bloglines’ convenience and the fact that it has enough export features to power my blogroll and my podcast subscriptions list. Soon, I’ll also use it to set up a group of local blogs I read to pump info into Localfeeds: Harrisburg. However, I’ve been disappointed with its Atom support. Even though my Atom feed comes through fine, Sam’s feed’s URLs end up rendered without whitespace (lookinglikethis), and Tim’s feed’s relative links are prepended by “http://www.bloglines.com/” instead of his blog’s URL. I’m smart enough to go to their blogs to see the properly rendered version of their entries, but I thought the point of feeds and feed readers was that I didn’t have to… right?

Mark Pilgrim points out some other Bloglines gotchas that I hadn’t been bitten by yet. Maybe it’s time for me to evaluate other aggregators.

After watching a number of used TU-2’s go for over $90 with shipping on eBay, I made the decision to get a new one at a “Buy It Now” price of $90 with shipping (no tax). From other reputable online retailers, I would have paid $100 plus shipping and maybe tax, too. This round of gear acquisition syndrome is almost complete. The triumvirate will be together soon. And I’ll post photos on Flickr.

This kind of makes up for the awesome deal I got on the LMB-3.

Foobar 2000 version 0.9 is officially released. Highly recommended. Note that the plugin architecture isn’t backwards compatible, so if you’re currently using 0.8x with third-party plugins, you may want to check for new versions of the plugins.

Thanks to Peter and the other developers for this awesome software.

Melissa had the excellent idea of going to the State Museum Planetarium this afternoon. It was a 30-minute presentation that started off with a tour of the March night sky by constellation, with artwork overlaid on each featured one. Then they played a fun film-in-the-round called Passport To The Universe that was a three-dimensional virtual tour of the known universe.

This was Ryan’s first trip to a planetarium; every other word out of his mouth was “cool”. This is the third planetarium I can recall visiting. The first was at the Pink Palace in Memphis; the second was the Strasenburgh in Rochester. This one is a little smaller than I remember those being, but perhaps it’s because I’m bigger.

At $3.50 for adults and $3 for kids at the otherwise free State Museum, I’d definitely recommend an occasional trip.

Rock Star TV Show Returns With Tommy Lee, Jason Newsted

Who is Supernova, you may ask? It’s a new supergroup featuring drummer Tommy Lee, bassist Jason Newsted and one-time Guns ‘N Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke.

[..]

“Friends of mine, like Slash, Macy Gray, Moby and Rob Zombie, will join us and throw in their two cents about who should stay and who should go,” said [host Dave] Navarro. Tommy Lee added, “[..]Starting a new band with old friends on worldwide television is going to be a blast, and we’re going to pull out all the stops to find the most charismatic and musically talented lead singer to front Supernova.”

I’m a sucker for Rock Star, so I will check this out. However, I expect a lot of performing from the current Supernova members alongside the contestants, since they’re not an established band. The house band, if there is one, should have a reduced role. If they keep the format exactly the same as Rock Star: INXS, I’m probably going to declare “shenanigans”.

Unfortunately for Lee, Newsted, and Clarke, there’s already a band called Supernova. Based on this forum post, it’s unclear whether they’ll try to protect their name.

Regarding my ogg123/Justeport recipe: it turns out that ogg123 starts introducing sharp bursts of attenuation after about an hour or so of use. Its status indicators don’t indicate anything’s wrong with the audio data it’s receiving from the stream. Since I know other clients can read the stream without these problems, I think ogg123 is introducing the artifacts. I’ll have to look around for another command-line Windows program that can tune into an MP3 or Vorbis HTTP stream and pipe to stdout.

I piqued Keith’s interest when I proposed that we combine his programming knowledge with my audio geekery (and very limited C++/C# knowledge) to attempt to write an AirTunes-compatible DSP plugin for Foobar2000 using the Justeport source code as a reference. We may be able to get started in a week or so, once we’ve both had a chance to look over the FB2K SDK and the source code in question. I don’t know of anyone else doing this, so if you find a reference, please let me know.

I got Guitar Center to pricematch zZounds on the BOSS carrying case I mentioned; that knocked $20 off. I picked that up along with some instrument cables and an AC adaptor after work today. They keep that place staffed pretty well; the guy that helped me (Christian) steered me to exactly to what I was looking for and made things quick.

I hope to have purchased a TU-2 within the next week so that the two pedals now in the case will have company!

I hooked everything up and got a pretty nice, smooth sound with both the LMB-3 and CE-2B active (in that order). The TU-2 will end up being the first pedal in the chain.

22.2MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 48m 30s (Courtesy of Nitevilla.net.)

This is a special pre-2006-season Brutal Deluxe football podcast. Scott and I review the recent free agent moves & trades and attempt to gauge their fantasy football impact. We also talk about Scott’s recent trip to Seattle.

Please keep us subscribed in your podcatcher; we will be back in April with a post-draft roundup.

Links:

• My Odeo Channel (odeo/7d2ff8e710040137)
• Want a free iPod? Help Scott out!
• SportPodcasts.com
• Email us text or audio comments!: BrutalDeluxe at gmail.com.
• Sponsored in part by Manolas Handmade Soaps

Credits:

• Mixed, recorded, edited and mastered by me.
• Music: “One Big Holiday” by My Morning Jacket from the Wired CD.

…as in, “Gear Acquisition Syndrome”.

In my quest to sound a bit better when I’m not plugged into my ADA MB-1 preamp, I’m purchasing a few effects pedals to port around with my bass. I already have a venerable BOSS CE-2B Bass Chorus. It’s now being joined by a BOSS LMB-3 Bass Limiter/Enhancer that I got for a great price from an eBay seller. I’m now looking to purchase a (you guessed it?) BOSS TU-2 Chromatic Tuner to provide easy tuning/re-tuning capability (like being able to go down to dropped-D tuning in a snap) and to act as a muter. There are a lot of them on eBay right now and I’m hoping to get a slightly used one at about 60-70% of list.

Once I get all three pedals, I’ll probably get one of the BOSS three-pedal cases to organize it all. The only drawback is that my old CE-2B isn’t rated to use the power adapter that the two newer pedals will share, so I’ll have to use its own adapter or its battery. Other than that, I’m looking to have a tighter, richer sound when I’m trying to keep up with my bandmates at church.

Fire up those podcatchers. Scott and I will be recording a special free-agency edition of the BDFL podcast soon. Lots of stuff went down this last week and we’ll discuss the fantasy implications.

I’ve had a chance to compare some six-channel, 24-bit, 96kHz musical content encoded in MLP and FLAC. Remember this complaint? Well, let’s just say the mix sounds great on my M-Audio/Klipsch 5.1 setup regardless of the format. My comparison points:

• FLAC at compression level 8 required 1.42% more disk space than the MLP.
• The FLAC content can be played at full resolution with Foobar2000.
• The MLP content can be played at 16-bit/48kHz resolution in WinDVD. (Thank you, DVD Forum, for deciding that my hardware isn’t worthy of full-resolution playback of content I’ve purchased. References here.)
• The FLAC content can be easily transcoded to other formats for use with other software or devices I own.

I now have a space on MySpace. It’s a social network that a lot of musicians are using to interface directly with fans.

If you’re on there and you know me, feel free to “friend” me; if I know you, I’ll return the favor.

Emerson Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery (DVD Audio)

by Lake & Palmer Emerson

I was introduced to ELP in high school and have always liked their stuff. However, aside from Brain Salad Surgery, ELPowell, one of their “Best Of” collections and a King Biscuit CD, I’ve never purchased their back catalog or listened to much of their more obscure songs. Regardless, I love BSS. I bought the DVD-Audio version of it this week and I’m currently being blown away by the clarity of the mix and the wild use of the surround sound field.

Some of the vocal and instrumental parts are obviously different than the original release of the album. Greg Lake’s first few lines of “Jerusalem” are fresh, clean-sounding, and apparently changed to anyone familiar with the original. Some of the parts I’m hearing I don’t believe were even present on the original mix. Perhaps the spreading allowed in the surround mix is finally opening them up to my ears. Keith Emerson’s liberal use of synthesizers for effect provides plenty of roaming elements in the mix. I can really hear Lake’s bass a lot more, too. And I heard some Carl Palmer percussion that sounded fresh to my ears.

They left plenty of headroom on the mix. Apparently this was one of the early DVD-Audio releases, published in 2000. It’s a bombastic mix at times, but always fun. I’ve been listening to “Hoedown” in the car recently and would love to hear that treated like this. Another notable event: this is the first time I’m aware of that the studio versions of Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression, Parts 1 and 2 have been joined seamlessly. It threw me off when I saw one 13-minute track there. The inclusion of a surround mix of “Lucky Man” is a nice bonus.

There’s also some video content on this disc, but I haven’t checked that out yet. Suffice it to say, if you like ELP and have a DVD-Audio compatible system, you better get this before it goes away. It’s great.

After a bit of research and some experimentation, I think I’ve found a reliable iTunes-less way to send ICYG (or potentially other audio streams) to the Airport Express. I encountered two problems finding a solution that involved a Windows command-line utility: almost none would read an MP3 or Vorbis HTTP stream, and the few I found that did didn’t support writing to stdout so that I could pipe them into Justeport.

I’d heard of mpg123 and the corresponding Vorbis utility ogg123, but I’d never used either. I found that the Cygwin utility set includes ogg123, so I started experimenting with its options to pipe out raw audio for Justeport to use. I hatched a Q8 Vorbis stream on ICYG and quickly got ogg123 to tune in. My first attempts to pipe to Justeport failed, but since I knew ogg123 was producing data, I figured it was probably a buffer overflow.

As I type this, I’ve had a successful ogg123/Justeport/Airport Express connection for about 45 minutes. Here’s the command line I’m using:


ogg123 -q -b 256 -d raw -f - http://<username>:<password>@<servername>:<port>/<streamname> | justeport - <AE IP address> 0


The ogg123 options:

• -q = quiet mode (no status messages)
• -b 256 = 256kB input buffer. Without this, Justeport would disconnect after a few seconds. I assume its buffer was overrun and it gave up.
• -d raw = output raw audio
• -f - = output to stdout
• The URL of the stream is normal HTTP syntax.

The Justeport options mean to grab input from stdin and talk to the Airport Express at the specified IP address with the volume set to unity gain (0 dB).

Thanks to DVD Jon for Justeport and the Cygwin team for including Ogg Vorbis tools in their distribution!

Right now I usually tune iTunes in to the in-house 320kbps MP3 ICYG feed if I want to feed it to my Airport Express. That means the music has gone through three encoding cycles before it reaches my ears:

1. Original encode to a file: MP3 or Ogg Vorbis (lossy), rarely FLAC (lossless)
2. Transcoded by Oddcast for transmission to Icecast: MP3
3. Transcoded by iTunes for transmission to Airport Express: ALAC (lossless)

I could mitigate the multiple-lossy-encoding problem by storing more of the source music losslessly, but I have a pretty large library of stuff that doesn’t sound that bad encoded the way it is. What I’d really like is a DSP plugin for Foobar2000 v0.9 that would shoot a copy of the audio out to a specified AIrport Express. I wonder if an enterprising FB2K plugin developer might be able to determine whether a plugin utilizing the Justeport code (or equivalent functionality) would be feasible. I’d probably pay $30 for a plugin that did that.

In the meantime, I was hoping to use Justeport or an equivalent (if there are any) to run a Windows command-line OGG or MP3 stream reader and pipe it to the AE. However, I haven’t found a command-line decoder for either format that can read the stream (most want to read just files) and pipe to stdout. If anyone reading this knows of one, could you please reply in a comment? I thought VLC might be a way, but I can’t figure out the options I’d need to use to get it to do this.

The Academy (whose awards ceremory tonight looks great in uncompromised HD here at home, by the way) are lecturing us that we shouldn’t be content with seeing movies at home on DVD; that we should get back into the theater and see them as the larger-than-life things they are. I like a good big-screen experience as much as the next guy, but most of the chain theaters today suck. Usually Melissa and I go to a theater to see a movie only when the following conditions are met:

• It’s not the first weekend of release
• It’s a weekday afternoon that’s not a holiday
• We don’t plan to buy concessions
• We don’t know of past projection-type issues (bad aspect ratio, not starting on time, etc.)
• We arrive during the 15 minutes of previews

Sounds like a great place to see a movie, huh?

The DVR box is working out very well. The stuttering I saw initially is gone. I have a feeling it was due to the initial guide data load after I hooked it up. I linkblogged a few of the resources I found; the Wikipedia page for the 6412 guided me to some good remote hacks. A little education on the implementation of the two tuners are helping to make operations smooth. We watched Lost in HD on delay and it was very smooth. The only thing that was goofy was that when the DVR was done recording the show (which was pre-programmed), the box turned off. Our playback location was saved, so it was only a temporary inconvenience, but one that should probably be corrected. I’m still very pleased with the box at this point.