Which is disappointing. Perhaps it is not so to you, but it is to me.  I put some significant time and energy into this blog, especially in the early stages, to make it appealing to the user and to write content that would be informative, but not dry and boring. It’s a fine line to walk, and I hope I succeeded at least in part. Unfortunately life got in the way, as it does, and I left.

But I was never gone entirely. I would check in here and there to make sure that everything was continuing to run smoothly. I was pleasantly surprised to see that steady, though not massive, number of people were continuing to look at what I had produced. I began to wonder what would happen if I came back and began to write consistently again.

Now I don’t know whether I can do that or not. Life has gotten more busy, not less, since I stopped writing. At the same time however, I have more and more places where I am wasting time I could be spending doing something else, like this blog.

I want to return and try my hand at blogging again. That being said, I don’t know with what consistency I will be able to do this. We’ll try it and see how it goes.

Cheers!

Patrick

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With iTunes match, all songs that can be found in your library and in the iTunes store can be upgraded from whatever low-quality version you have into a brand spakin’ new high quality 256 kbps version for free.

But the question becomes, what does 256 kbps mean?

Before we explain that exactly, we need to understand a little bit about digital audio.

When an artist is recording, far more information is produced than you might expect. For example, 1 minute of absolute silence that is uncompressed will take up about as much space once encoded as one minute of music that is compressed (please note that this stat is from Wikipedia and has no reference so I can’t verify it). Clearly we need to slim it down a little bit.

The typical audio CD can hold around 800 megabytes of information. Typically, if you were to buy a CD directly from the label, the audio will be uncompressed. CD audio like this takes up around 10 megabytes of information per minute of playback time. This much information is prohibitive to store and to send over the internet, so compression was needed. MP3 is perhaps the most well known example of this. An MP3 file at 256 kbps (I’ll explain that later) would work out to a file size of up to 6.5 megabytes for the average 3 1/2 minute song (my own calculations, please correct me if I am wrong), where as that same file on the CD would take up around 35 megabytes. Considerable savings if you ask me.

So obviously, digital music compression is a must, but it presents us with all these strange numbers. Why?

To make this simple, we will go in order of the information in the picture above. I will skip the few that are completely self explanatory.

Kind (Format)

This is simply an indicator of white kind of file this is. Or, more accurately, what kind of encoding (explanation of the precise meaning of that word must wait for another time) it has. In this case, as we can see, the encoding is AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). AAC was built as a successor to MP3, over which it has many improvements. AAC is not actually a file type, it is kind of compression (or encoding). In this case, the file in question is a .m4a file.

Bit Rate

This one is what you might call the most important part of the compression. On a CD, the amount of information being read every second is about 1.4 million bits per second. When a bit rate it set, it is effectively limiting how many bits be included per second. 256 kbps (which stands for kilo bits per second) means that only 256,000 bits, less than a fifth the number of bits on the CD, can be included in the file. This means that the compressed file will be 80% smaller than the original file. Now you may ask, how can it have 80% less information and still sound good. I’m not sure. I’ll get back to you on that. 256 kbps is about as high as most mp3 songs are, but higher rates to exist..

Sample rate

A sound wave is completely continuous, which means there is no breaks in the sound. In order for the file to be read, it has to be broken up into little tiny packages that can then be encoded. Sample rate is simply an indicator of how many little packages each second of sound is broken up into. This music is, therefore, broken up into 44,100 (44.100 Kilo hertz) little packages per second. In theory, we could increase this. But this would produce a progressively larger file size until, once we started not sampling at all, the file size would reach infinity. Naturally, this would not work well, so we limit it.

Profile:

This is a piece of information specific to the AAC format, and I don’t really understand it. But as far as I can tell it is a particular way of encoding based on the type of audio being encoded.

Channels:

Back in the early days of music recording, all music was in mono. This means that, if you listen to this music using headphones, there would be no difference between the sound coming out of the left and the sound coming out of the right. Even when the ability to produce recordings where different things could come out of different speakers came into being, it was difficult and expensive to own a system that could produce it (a speaker system that played stereo cost, logically enough, about twice as much as a system that played mono). And even then, the difference was not great enough to be worth the money. With the advent of headphones, Stereo sound became very popular due to the fact that each ear had it’s own sound source and did not hear the sound source of the other ear.

And that, my friends, in a nutshell, is digital music specs. Naturally there is far more that we could get into, but I believe this is a good introduction to the topic. That being said, if you find something you have questions about, feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

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Or, rather, do you respect the person who created it. You do realize, of course, that someone put a considerable amount of time and

One track may seem trivial, but spread that across millions of people…

energy into writing it? You also realize that it was then recorded, edited and mastered over dozens of hours before it was then prepped for distribution then, finally, put somewhere that you might obtain it for a fee, in the hopes that the people that did all this work might get something back for their labor.

The discussion about the music industry and its issues in terms of profit sharing is not a discussion that we should be having right now. So I ask you again.

Do you respect your music?

If you pirate music on a regular basis, or even just here and there, then I can answer for you: probably not.

But exactly how much of an impact does music piracy have on revenue?

According to a blog post on the blog Freakonomics, TheStop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) that online piracy (in all forms) costs the US economy somewhere between $200 and $250 billion a year and are responsible for the loss of some 750,000 jobs. Some estimates are much more conservative, closer to $58 billion.

Now, it should be noted that these numbers include all digital piracy, not just music. But this number is clearly still in the billions of dollars.

Mark Twain once said that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Although this can be most certainly true, I believe that there is a definite problem when it comes to music piracy.

To you, music piracy may seem like no big deal. You download a song or to illegally, no one is the wiser. And really, does one song really hurt? Well… Imagine if 1 million people said that. Actually, we don’t have to imagine…

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Steve Jobs became an iCon (see what I did there?) of the 21st century

The “i” has been on top for quite a while now. There is no use in arguing that the products that have been introduced to the market by Apple Inc. particularly those by Steve Jobs (may he rest in peace) have changed the market as we know it. But they have been in control for quite a while now, and there are plenty of companies that would like a peace of that pie.

Here are a few stats to explain what I am saying.

• The iTunes store launched in 2003 with some 200,000 songs available for purchase. Since then, the library has grown to 20 million songs.
• Apple announced in February of 2010 that it had sold it’s 10 billionth song, a number which is, by now, no doubt much higher.
• Over 300 million iPods have been sold worldwide since they were first released in 2001.
• Over 140 million iPhones have been sold worldwide since the launch in 2007.
• Over 40 million iPads have been sold.
• Apple has a total revenue of over $100 billion per year. They have over $75 billion cash on hand, which is more then the federal government.

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The Key is

Have you ever tried (and this you CAN try at home, in fact I encourage you to) wetting your finger and then running it over the rim of a wine glass to here the note it created? Kind of cool huh? This note is the key (no pun intended). As you probably know all sound consists of vibrations that hit our ears and are then interpreted by the brain as some sort noise. Well it also works in the opposite way. Just as something vibrating produces sound, sound hitting something produces vibrations.

Remember that note we produced from the wineglass? Well this is the point where that becomes important. The note that we produced is called a fundamental frequency. It is the frequency at which the wine glass most efficiently turns energy into sound. Naturally, there is a lot more going on (see this blog for information on that), but that is the basic idea. Now if an object is hit with sound waves at its fundamental frequency, it will begin to vibrate along with the sound.

As the note gets closer and closer to that frequency, the glass will vibrate more and more intensely. Increase in volume will also cause the glass to vibrate with more force. Eventually the glass will, quite literally, shake itself apart. Depending on the loudness and the accuracy of the voice, it may just crack, lose a chunk, or shatter. However it can quite awesome.

That being said the chances that you will go to a fancy concert and come back with a ruined suit or dress are rather minimal. This will only work under specific circumstances. First off, the singer has to be on exactly the right pitch for a relatively lengthy amount of time. Secondly, the singer has to have enough volume in order for a glass to break. The videos that I have linked to thus far have both been examples were the singer’s mouth was only inches away from the glass. By the time the voice of a singer gets to you, it won’t be loud enough to cause problems.

So rest easy. But know that it can be done.

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Different Types of Metronomes

A mechanical metronome at work. Photo courtesy of Paco Vila on Flickr

There are a few different types of metronomes on the market today.

Mechanical Metronomes: These types of metronomes could very well be considered “classical” metronomes. They typically come in a pyramid shape and use an inverted pendulum to keep the beat.

Electronic, or Quartz, Metronomes: When electricity came onto the seen, more precise ways of measuring time came into being. Quartz metronomes use quartz crystal, much like a wristwatch does.

Digital Metronomes: Of course, whenever you have a electronic version of something, you have a digital version of something. A digital metronome is just a piece of software that will do the whole metronome thing for you. These do, however, frequently provide extra features, particularly for recording artists.

Metronomes: A Brief History

The concepts behind a metronome are very old. Older, in fact, then you might imagine. It all started out in the 1600 when Galileo observed that a pendulum always completes a full swing in the same amount of time no matter how large or how small the swing is. It makes sense, then, that pendulums are very good timekeepers. Since they always swing in the same amount of time, as long as you can keep it running, it will continue to swing at a constant speed. So, if you can create a rig to keep track of it, you got yourself an excellent timekeeper.

Now I am not here to discuss the mechanics of a pendulum clock, which is the most obvious use of this technology, I am here to discuss the metronome. Safe to say that using that same technology you could create a metronome that would swing back and forth at a constant rate, producing a ticking sound similar to that of a clock. All you have to do to change the duration of the swinging is shorten or lengthen the pendulum. This is accomplished by an adjustable weight that moves up and down the pendulum. Etienne Loulié was the first to demonstrate this in 1696, however it made no noise and did not contain an escapement to keep it constantly swinging.

In the 1816 century the first modern mechanical metronomes began to be manufactured. The patent was held by a man named Johann Maelzel, but many considered it truly invented by a man named Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel in 1814.

The Influences on Music

Up until the time of the metronome, music had no exact tempo markings. There was no way for the author to convey exactly how fast they wanted a piece to be played. They could use words like Adagio (slow) or Allegro (fast). But beyond there was no precision. Now composers could indicate exactly how fast or how slow the wished a piece to be played. Many liked this, and many did not. Beethoven was one of the first well known composers to use metronome markings in his music. Many other composers though, such as Johannes Brahms where not as fond of it. Brahms once said that:

I am of the opinion that metronome marks go for nothing. As far as I know, all composers have, as I, retracted their metronome marks in later years.”

Many musicians view the metronome as a hindrance to musical expression. If you don’t have an exact beat you have to keep, it allows you more freedom to do as  you choose in the music.

Uses

The most common use of a metronome is to figure out exactly the tempo that a piece should be performed out. Choirs, for example, which lack an percussion (except when singing with a orchestra), will tend to use a metronome in rehearsals. However it can also be used in all different types of music such as solo piano. Some rock drummers will even use digital metronomes to create a constant ticking that is fed into their monitor so they can stay exactly on beat.

All and all, the metronome has been a big addition to the music world in every way. Simple, yet highly effective.

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The Circle of Fifths (click for full size)

Well I am here to tell you that there is a second way to do it besides the one mentioned in my previous post on the topic. In fact, I’m surprised I did not mention it before. It is known as the circle of fifths. No, I would like to say that using this method in no way means you should not memorize your key signatures, being able to quickly recognize what key a piece is in can be very important. But it does allow you to figure out relatively quickly what key something is in. It is also a good aid for memorization.

The circle of fifths is built on intervals. Due to the way that. Going clockwise around the circle, every note is a perfect fifth above the previous one. C has no flats or sharps. G, on the other hand, has one sharp and is consequently a perfect fifth above C. To continue on, D is exactly a perfect fifth above G and has 2 sharps, and so on. This would continue on to D flat, which has 7 sharps and is a perfect fifth above F# (or G flat).

Now for the flats. The principle works the same way for flats, except in reverse. Instead of going a perfect fifth up, you go a perfect fifth down. An F is a perfect fifth below a C. Or, in other words. A C is a perfect fifth above an F. However, you should not that a perfect fifth down, is the same as a perfect fourth up. For this reason, the circle of fifths is sometimes called “the circle of fifths and fourths.”

The circle also works, naturally enough, for minor keys. If you know you are in a minor key, but are not sure which, simply start at A and work your way up or down. You will find the key you are looking for soon enough.

This allows you to tell, from any instrument (but especially a piano) what key you are in just by looking at the notes on the instrument. It can be incredibly helpful.

Use this enough and I know that you will get this memorized. Then, before you know it, you will have to reference it less and less. It will start out slow. One or two sharps is easy enough to remember, and eventually more and more key signatures will be added on until you know it by heart.

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Headphones for the Masses

The earbuds that come with an iPod are cheap. This is the best way to describe them. They were designed to provide acceptable sound quality to millions of people who did not realize that there was anything better. This is sad. Very sad. Because those Apple earphone users sure are missnig out. Audiophiles tend to spend hundreds, or sometimes even thousands of dollars getting great headphones. Thankfully you don’t have to spend this much.

A Shift in Perspective

I recently graduated from cheap headphones myself. It started out as a durability problem. All the headphones I got (for the most part $15 Skullcandy), were flimsy and broke quickly (I wasn’t very nice to them, but I didn’t realize this at the time). So I went on a search to find a better pair. My efforts lead me to SOL Republic, a new company that was recently started by the son of the founder of Monster Cable, the company behind the well known Beats by Dr. Dre line of headphones. I had heard good things about them. So I decided to try out their $60 of in-ears known as the Amps.

The difference was incredible. Having listened to cheap headphones for quite a while, I had never realized how much better music could be. The problem with cheap headphones is that they do not really deliver music the way it’s supposed to sound. From what I have heard, this pair is quite cheap ($60) for the sound quality they produce.

But How Much Better Can They Be?

The most noticeable thing was the bass. Have you ever listened to a speaker system with a subwoofer? If you have you know that you can get some very powerful bass that shakes you were you stand. Now obviously no pair of earphones can do that in the way a large subwoofer can. But they can still give you powerful bass that you can feel, not just hear. That is exactly what this pair did. But that was not all. Clearer vocals were also noticeable, as well as just an all-around better experience.

Music is a ubiquitous part of many peoples life. But most never experience what it really is. I challenge you to try something new out. It may seem silly to spend more then a few dollars on headpones. But trust me, if you like sound, you will appreciate the extra bucks.

Great Sound Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank

If you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars (which about %99.9 of us), there are plenty of options. From what I have heard, SOL Republics headphones tend to sound like others at a much higher price point (yes they have other models that cost more, including on ear headphones), so they might be a good place to start. But I would also suggest this article from Cnet that runs down the top (in their opinion) headphones for under $100.

And tell me what you think. Did it make a difference?

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Life is full of roadblocks. Although I can’t give you exact details. I hit one in September. It fundamentally changed my day-to-day life. Blogging got pushed out.

But now I am back. Here are a few things I have learned in the past month or so that will hopefully help my blogging career.

I really, really enjoy blogging

After going a while without blogging, I began to realize that I really missed it. Every single day I wanted to go back to the good ol’ blog and publish some more posts. But I didn’t. I had the time, but I chose to use it for other things. I think it was a big mistake. And I hope to rectify it.

I have a lot more to say

Who knows what's down the road!

Since I published my first post back in March of 2011, I have written quite a few words. 50,000 of them in fact (just enough for a Nanowrimo novel!). Some of my writing even got me on a relatively popular podcast (which was pretty awesome). However all that is in the past. The future is what is before me. I have plenty more to say. 50,00 words isn’t enough. I’m aiming for 500,000.

I do have the time

When I first stopped, I rationalized it away by saying I didn’t  have the time. But as I continued through my life, I began to realize that time was not the problem. I really had no excuse for not bloggin. If I want to I can make it happen.

So What’s Next?

Lots more writing. In fact, after this post, I want to continue on as if nothing had happened. Unfortunately (and naturally enough) my traffic has taken a big hit. But I can rebuild it. My google rankings have remained relatively intact, which is awesome. So that’s a big bonus. But it will take a while to rebuild.

Look for a post in the next day or so!

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At least not yet.

If there is one thing people tend to forget about a musician or band it is that the music of an artist evolves dramatically over the course of the years and albums.

One band I really enjoy is Switchfoot, a rock band from San Diego. The started out rather mellow, but they have grown incredibly and changed in a dramatic way.

Lady Gaga has not finished her career. I would guess that she will probably have a hit song every record from here on out. However some people would argue that Lady Gaga can’t have a masterpiece. They would probably even venture to say that she is a bad person and what not, and that we shouldn’t listen to her music because of it.

Wait, we shouldn’t listen to her music because she is a bad person?

I would also venture to say that many of the people who would say these kind of things are Christian and conservative (not that this is a bad thing, I am definitely right-wing myself, and a Christian for that matter). However we have to make a distinction between the music and the musician. Think Lady Gaga is a bad person? Are you saying this badness is somehow transmitted through the music into the ears of the listener?

Perhaps, but, if you are like me, you don’t pay attention to the lyrics so much as the music itself. Remember, you can have music without lyrics. But if you have lyrics without tune or backing track, then it’s not music (although some might disagree with me). This is why the music itself is the most important part.

Do you think that her videos have strong sexual overtones (as many of them do)? Well  then just don’t watch the videos.

This is a good rule of thumb if you are Christian, atheist, or anything else under the sun: Hate the sin, not the sinner.

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