From: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org (shindell-list-digest) To: shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Subject: shindell-list-digest V11 #61 Reply-To: shindell-list@smoe.org Sender: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk shindell-list-digest Thursday, September 9 2010 Volume 11 : Number 061 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [RS] beaches, birds, beasts, & sundry [Chris Foxwell ] [RS] RE: shindell-list-digest V11 #60 [John Walkey ] [none] [adam plunkett ] RE: [RS] RE: shindell-list-digest V11 #60 ["Pease, Kevin" Subject: Re: [RS] beaches, birds, beasts, & sundry Just chiming in with some thoughts on the recent discussions (nice to see activity here again!): Whenever I hear a song by another artist featuring Richard on harmony, it is almost always the harmony that "does" the song for me. "Never Die Young" is a great example, as is Lucy's "One Good Reason." In addition to Richard's pure vocal goodness, I'm always blown away by how technically precise and carefully blended his contribution is. ("Never Die Young" is especially impressive in this regard. Just listen to how perfectly he matches Lori. She has commented on this before, during live shows.) I also prefer Richard's BoMM to CCC's, or Dar's. It's Richard's expressiveness that does it for me, whether he's singing from a man's or woman's perspective. And his terrific general use of vocal pauses/delays really shines here, for me at least. (I'm thinking of the *Courier*version.) Also, I totall agree re: "Calling The Moon." That song always makes me go "...wow." I haven't had a chance to hear the Shrewsbury reworking of "You Stay Here" that y'all have been discussing--I've been having some file downloading/streaming issues in Jordan at the moment, hopefully be fixed soon--but I'm very excited to listen to it. I tend to really like Richard's late lyrics tweaks, such as in Transit ("murderous horde" --> "well-insured horde"), Mavis ("then comes the wave" --> "then comes the big one"), etc. Even if this one was inspired by another artist's cover, I have no doubt it'll add to the song. Re: albums to purchase (and Hi Paul!), I agree that *Courier *does a fine job of covering the classics. Better than fine; almost without exception, I prefer the *Courier *versions of his songs to the originals. I also like the idea of *Vuelta *being the next purchase, both for breadth and quality of material. (In addition to "Mavis," I'd advertise "Last Fare," "Che Guevara T-Shirt," and "Cancion Sencilla" as being particular draws.) I'd go with *Somewhere Near Patterson *ahead of *Reunion Hill*, though. "You Stay Here," "Wisteria," and "Calling the Moon" are must-haves in my opinion, and "Abuelita" is also very strong. (The only two must-haves from RH--in my opinion, again, of course--are "Iron Gate" and "I Saw My Youth Today"; "NBW" and "Reunion Hill" are available via *Courier*. And, I mean..."Smiling." :) ) Re: digital vs. traditional distribution: not sure where to weigh in here. I am the very odd mixture of technophile and traditionalist, which usually has me torn on issues like this. :) I do lament the loss of thematic qualities that would very likely accompany a purely digital marketplace. Although it would of course be possible to continue to release "collections" of songs, similar to albums or CDs, I think we'd see a huge move away from that and towards individual songs, or towards random bundles of songs (as opposed to thematically unified collections). There would no longer be any economic reason to craft an "album" of music, since a song could be released (i.e. start earning money) immediately upon being written, and also the strong unifying element of album/CD packaging, artwork, liner notes, etc., would be totally lost. I suppose it's possible that this would have an accompanying upside, namely the fading away of "filler songs," but still. And I'm sure there are ways to craft digital versions of CD packaging and whatnot. There's just something romantic--to me--about the packaged, themed, polished, *physical* album; I'd be sad to see it fall by the wayside. (I advance the same argument in the Kindle vs. "old-fashioned (??) books" debate...) Then again, I'm stuck in Jordan with no direct access to CDs, whereas I do have some internet access. When it's working, of course. So for the time being...yeah, I'm all for digital releases. :-) Those are my ramblings for now... Chris - -- "We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water." - --J.R.R. Tolkien ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:40:47 -0400 From: Howie Subject: Re: [RS] Digital means new music sooner I think he said that since he can't get good quality sound in his car, he chooses to go for quantity! - -Howie At 06:06 PM 9/8/2010, you wrote: >...........I don't think I understood a word John just said. :-) > >On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 9:29 AM, ja clary wrote: > > > I haven't heard lossless digital yet. But I must confess that while I can > > still hear a difference in my headphones, CDs sound equally as bad as > > anything else I've tried in my car. So I convert to lo-fi mp3 and load up a > > thumb drive for that venue. > > ------Original Message------ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2010 09:28:02 -0400 From: John Walkey Subject: [RS] RE: shindell-list-digest V11 #60 More digital music discussion: What's the difference between the digital format used on commercially produced cd's and mp3's? The data on cd's are not mp3's -- when you copy a cd onto your hard drive it's converted to an mp3 format and then you start losing some fidelity -- is that a correct statement? I'd agree that in my noisy '97 Subaru I could be listening to a cat with emphysema sing 'Wisteria' and it would probably sound the same as Richard cramped in the back seat singing it. Listening to music in the car is much more impacted by convenience than audio fidelity. A Shindell query to save this post form being so off-topic: if you could pair up Richard with someone for a duet (who he hasn't sung with in the past), who would you like? I think a Lucinda Williams collaboration would be interesting. ~John ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2010 07:25:02 -0700 (PDT) From: adam plunkett Subject: [none] http://sysekila.tripod.com/lygimi.html Work From Home ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2010 11:39:21 -0400 From: "Pease, Kevin" Subject: RE: [RS] RE: shindell-list-digest V11 #60 The data on CD's is generally stored in a format called "CDA" (CD Audio). This format is an uncompressed digital audio format using a sample rate of 44.1khZ, which in turn means that each minute of music uses roughly 10 megabytes of storage on a hard drive or CD - so roughly 30-40 Megabytes for a 3-4 minute song. The higher the sampling rate, the more space each second of music will need to store it. Because these files are fairly large, it becomes impractical to store lots of music on a standard hard drive - 1 gigabyte would store ~25 4 minute songs - a fairly standard 250 or 500 Gigabyte hard drive would fill up awfully quick if every song took up that much space, making things like ipods and itunes pretty impractical. The way around this is to compress the files. There are 2 ways you can compress audio files: lossless, and lossy. Lossless compression is completely reversible compression - a file compressed to a 'lossless' format can be uncompressed back to its original form - no data is lost, the full uncompressed version can be completely recovered. The problem with lossless compression is that you usually achieve lower compression ratios: for instance, a 40 megabyte file compressed in a lossless format like FLAC (a 'free / open - source' audio compression format) could be reduced in size about 30-50%, resulting in a file that is ~25 Megabytes in size. This is a pretty siginificant improvement in size, with no data lost. By contrast, a "lossy" compression format, such as MP3, actually discards some of the audio data in order to achieve it's compression goals - you cannot recreate the original source data from the MP3-compressed version, because data is lost during compression. It's not as scary as it sounds, because the MP3 coding focuses most on the data that is out of the auditory range of "most" listeners. By doing this, you can achieve somewhere on the order of 80-90% compression ratios on a standard, 128kb/s mp3 compression - that 40MB file now becomes 4 MB. If you listen to a highly-compressed MP3 file versus the original source CD, you can hear some differences, but for most listeners - and in most listening situations - they're going to be fairly minor differences. As far as your statement about losing some fidelity: you can copy from a CD onto your hard drive in a multitude of formats, so you *need not* lose fidelity copying from CD to hard drive, if you use a lossless compression format such as ALAC (Apple Lossless - available as an import option in itunes, and will playback on an iPod) or FLAC (various software to rip a CD in this format, though playback is less widely supported in my experience - VLC is a good option though). If you copy from CD to MP3, then yes, you begin losing audio fidelity during that first copy, and conversions (not simply copying the file) from MP3 to another format will definitely result in further degradation of the audio. Kevin - -----Original Message----- From: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org [mailto:owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org] On Behalf Of John Walkey Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2010 9:28 AM To: shindell-list@smoe.org; shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Subject: [RS] RE: shindell-list-digest V11 #60 More digital music discussion: What's the difference between the digital format used on commercially produced cd's and mp3's? The data on cd's are not mp3's -- when you copy a cd onto your hard drive it's converted to an mp3 format and then you start losing some fidelity -- is that a correct statement? I'd agree that in my noisy '97 Subaru I could be listening to a cat with emphysema sing 'Wisteria' and it would probably sound the same as Richard cramped in the back seat singing it. Listening to music in the car is much more impacted by convenience than audio fidelity. A Shindell query to save this post form being so off-topic: if you could pair up Richard with someone for a duet (who he hasn't sung with in the past), who would you like? I think a Lucinda Williams collaboration would be interesting. ~John ------------------------------ End of shindell-list-digest V11 #61 ***********************************