Blackmoor Vituperative

I have been listening to Concrete Blonde’s Mojave. It’s an odd album. One review I read describes it as “desert gothic”, and that almost fits. I might also call it “gothic blues”. Really, I’m not sure why “gothic” even belongs in there, but I don’t know of a better way to describe something with such an undertone of spookiness. It’s a good album, though. You should buy it. I learned some things about coyotes while listening to it, and that’s not something you can say about most albums.

Just for general grins, here is what’s on my playlist today.

• Concrete Blonde, Mojave, 2004
• Concrete Blonde, Group Therapy, 2002
• Fields of the Nephilim, Elizium, 1990
• Fields of the Nephilim, The Nephilim, 1988
• Fields of the Nephilim, Dawnrazor, 1987
• Hooverphonic, Jackie Cane, 2002
• India Arie, Acoustic Soul, 2001
• India Arie, Voyage To India, 2002
• Queen, Greatest Hits I, II & III (The Platinum Collection), 2001
• Sweeney Todd, 1979 Original Broadway Cast, 1979

Everything but India Arie is an old favorite. She’s new to me, but she performed at Circuit City’s Store Support Center (aka the corporate office) on Friday, and I liked her music, so I am checking it out.

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) – You’d think Steve Jobs would be the hero of the music industry, after a year in which online music sales almost tripled to $1.1 billion. But no. The record labels are again pressuring Apple (Research) to raise prices at the iTunes Music Store from 99 cents a song. Apple and the labels are renegotiating deals struck when its music store launched three years ago, and a key issue is variable pricing — the right to charge more for singles from a hot band, and less for music from lesser-known acts. But charging more could backfire, since pirated music is still widely available to consumers on file-sharing networks, Needham & Co. analyst Charlie Wolf told the Associated Press: “[Customers] have an alternative — they can get it for free.”

(from CNN Money, iTunes faces music price hikes)

Dell Home has the Creative Zen Vision:M 30GB Player (Black) for $290 – $20 off $150 code QGM7T0C1C2TVVD [Exp 4/30] – $10 off code X10DHMT?VL6NBS [Exp 4/21] = $260 with free shipping.

• Plays MP3, WMA, MPEG, WMV 9, DivX, Xvid, Moti, and displays pictures
• 2.5″ LCD (262,144 colors), FM Tuner, Voice Recorder, up to 14 hr battery (audio)

Creative makes the best media players. I have a Creative Zen Touch and it’s great. Here is a tutorial I wrote for people new to creating MP3s.

From the moment I learned about the illegal hacking of customers’ computers by Sony, I have been calling and writing my legislators to urge them to initiate legal action against the company.

Well, it looks like the ball has started rolling.

According to eWeek, Sony’s legal problems have begun, and hopefully they will continue for quite a while.

“The allegation that Sony has incorporated open-source software into its purportedly proprietary software in a manner inconsistent with the Open Source General Public License, if established, would create a nice irony,” said Simon J. Frankel, an IP (intellectual property) attorney and partner with Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin LLP in San Francisco.

“The entire purpose of open-source software is to make broadly useful software available for all to build on. For Sony to take such software and incorporate it into software that it claims as proprietary would be contrary to the entire spirit of open source,” Frankel said.

“The improper use of GPL software by Sony could be the basis of a claim for violation of the GPL, which could prevent Sony from utilizing the rootkit program to the extent that it includes GPL software and, if a proper party were definable, could even subject Sony to damages claims under the license and copyright principles,” said Michael R. Graham, IP attorney and partner with Marshall, Gerstein & Borun LLP, a Chicago-based law firm specializing in IP.

Not long after that, the lawsuits bagan. The first suit came from the EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation), but it was soon followed by a suit from the state of Texas.

“On a very basic level of product liability law, if Sony is distributing a product that causes damage to consumers, then it may well be held liable,” Frankel said.

“There also appears to be a particular Texas statute that may make Sony liable for distributing spyware to consumers’ computers. This potential legal liability only piles on to the tremendous public relations snafu caused by Sony’s media player,” Frankel added.

(from eWeek, Sony’s Rootkit DRM Raises Legal Red Flags)

Way to go, Texas! Time for Virginia to step up to the plate.

Indeed, one way or another, thanks to its use and licensing of XCP DRM, Sony may be in for quite a legal shipwreck.

By all the gods of music and video, let’s hope so.

Shakira has released the English language, second volume of her Fijacion Oral (“Oral Fixation”) album. At the risk of appearing Anglocentric, I think this second volume is superior to the first. It’s an eclectic mix of rock and ballads. It doesn’t have the beat-heavy dance hits of some of her previous albums, and personally I would have liked to have had a couple of new songs to exercise to, but even so, it’s a really good album.

Check it out.

In response to the illegal hacking of customers’ computers by Sony, Stewart Baker, recently appointed by President Bush as the Department Of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for policy, made a comment aimed directly at Sony and others who would illegally hack into their customers’ computers in the name of protecting their “intellectual property”:

In a remark clearly aimed directly at Sony and other labels, Stewart continued: “It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.”

(from The Washington Post, DHS Official Weighs In on Sony)

What I want to know is where are the criminal charges? Why aren’t these people being arrested? This was a premeditated, wide-scale hacking attempt on a huge number of computers — I want to see people put in handcuffs and taken away to pay for their crime. I want to see large men with shaved heads do to Sony executives what Sony has been attempting to do to us.

I’ve been saying that things will get worse before they get better. They just got worse.

On Monday, October 31, alert users discovered that Sony BMG is using copy-protected CDs to surreptitiously install its digital rights management technology onto PCs. You don’t have to be ripping the CD, either–just playing it from your CD-ROM drive triggers the installation. The software installs itself as a root kit, which is a set of tools commonly used to make certain files and processes undetectable, and they’re the favored tool of crackers who are, as Wikipedia puts it, attempting to “maintain access to a system for malicious purposes.” In fact, root kits are often classified alongside Trojan horses. And Mark Russinovich, who created a root-kit detection utility and was one of the first to blog about the Sony intrusion, discovered another little gem when he tried to remove the DRM drivers. It broke his computer — disabling his CD drive.

(from CNet, DRM this, Sony!)

Folks, this is illegal (and I’m reporting it to the FBI). But will anyone at Sony be prosecuted for this crime? Don’t hold your breath.

Here’s a tip from me to Sony, RIAA, and the rest of the media robber barons: if you want to compete with services like AllOfMP3.com, do what they do, do it better, and do it cheaper. If you continue to pin your hopes on DRM, you will fail, you will be reviled, and your stockholders will suffer.

I finally decided to digitize my huge CD collection, but I need a little guidance. What do you think is the best format to rip CDs (MP3, MP4, WAV, and so forth), what’s a reasonable capture setting (I don’t have a huge hard drive, so I can’t go too high end), and what software would you suggest for not only ripping, but organizing and playing my music?
— Edward H.

Digitizing your music collection is a multi-step process. Fortunately, the tools required for this (other than your computer itself) are free. These instructions assume that you are using Windows: if you are using Linux, you are smart enough to do this without my help, and if you are using an Apple, no amount of advice can help you.

Step one is to decide on the format. As you obviously know, there are several to choose from. I recommend MP3: it is widely supported (meaning that you will have a wide variety of players to choose from), and it provides excellent sound fidelity (for most styles of music) at 192 kbps. 192 kbps refers to the “bit rate” — the amount of data used to store the song. While it is possible to use a higher bit rate, most people won’t be able to hear the difference past 192 kbps. Incidentally, I suggest you avoid “VBR” (which stands for “variable bit rate”). While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a variable bit rate MP3, it tends to throw off the “elapsed time” indication in most MP3 players, which I find annoying.

STEP ONE: CDEX

Digitizing a music CD is referred to as “ripping”. This is pretty straightforward. Download and install the utility “CDex” from http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/. The first thing you will want to do after you install CDex is to configure the software.

First, the Generic settings (Options -> Settings -> Generic). The important settings here are “ID3 Tag Version”, “Track Nr Format”, and “Normalize”:

ID3 Tag Version: ID3 V1 & ID3 V2
Track Nr Format: 0 N
Normalize: **NOT** checked

Next you need to set up the Filename settings (Options -> Settings -> Filenames). The important settings here are “Filename Format”, “WAV -> MP3”, and “Recorded Tracks”. “Filename format” is a personal choice, but if you want to avoid name conflicts, you need to include the album name, the artist, and the track number, in addition to the song name. Setting this up now will save you grief later. The file paths should be the same for both “WAV -> MP3” and “Recorded Tracks”. Whatever path you select, create a “Raw” directory and store the ripped music files there, because you will be processing these further after they are digitized (I’ll cover that in a bit). Here are the setings I use:

Filename Format: %1\%2\%7_-_%4
WAV -> MP3: D:\Documents\Music\Raw\
Recorded Tracks: D:\Documents\Music\Raw\

The CD Drive settings (Options -> Settings -> CD Drive) will either be very easy or very difficult. If you are lucky, your CD drive will be supported and you’ll have no problems. If you do run into problems here, resolving them is beyond the scope of this Q&A: try asking for help on the CDex support forums. In any event, here are the important settings for this screen:

CD-ROM Drive Type: Generic (try the “Auto-Detect” button if “Generic” doesn’t work)
Ripping Method: Paranoia, Full
Select All CD Tracks: checked
Use CD-Text: checked
Lock CD During Extraction: checked

Next come the Encoder settings. This screen is where you set the quality of the digitized file. It is also possible to create a digitized file that you will not be able to play, so don’t fiddle around too much here unless you know what you are doing. Here are the settings I recommend (anything not listed should remain un-checked):

Thread Priority: Normal
Encoder: Lame MP3 Encoder (the exact version may vary)
Version: MPEG 1
Bitrate Min: 192 kbps
Mode: Stereo
Quality: High (q=2)
VBR Method: Disabled
Output Samplerate: 44100

We’re almost done. ext is the Local CDDB setting. This is where CDex stores song names and titles for the CDs you digitize. It doesn’t really matter what you select here (you can’t really break anything), but here are the settings I use:

CDDB Path: D:\Documents\Music\localcddb\
Windows-format CDDB files: checked
Store in local CDDB: checked
Use Long Directory Names: checked

Finally, set up your CDDB connection (Options -> Settings -> Remote CDDB). CDDB is an online database of song names and titles. By setting up CDDB in CDex, you will save a great deal of time typing in song names. You will still need to check the titles that CDDB returns, but that’s much easier than typing them all from scratch. Setting up CDDB is simply requires you to select a free CDDB server, and type in your email address, and checking “Auto connect to remote CDDB”.

Now that you have all of that set up, put in your music CD, make sure the song titles are correct, select all of the song titles (either with the keyboard or with the mouse — only the songs you select will be digitized), and hit function key 9 (you can also click the second icon from the top on the right-hand button bar, or you can select the menu item “Convert -> Extract CD track(s) to a compressed audio file”).

A few minutes later, you CD is digital. Now comes step two: post processing.

STEP TWO: MP3GAIN

You’ve noticed that not every CD is at the same volume, right? This isn’t a big deal with you are listing to one CD at a time, but when you set up your songs juke-box style (all good MP3 players permit this), you will wind up having to adjust the volume constantly. That’s where MP3Gain http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/ comes in. Like CDex, MP3Gain is free (although donations are always appreciated).

MP3Gain analyzes mp3 files to determine how loud they sound to the human ear. It can then adjust the mp3 files so that they all have the same loudness without any quality loss. This way, you don’t have to keep reaching for the volume dial on your mp3 player every time it switches to a new song.

Once you are done digitizing all of your songs on any given day, close CDex and run MP3 Gain. First, configure a few settings (located under the “Options” menu item”). These options should be checked:

Options -> Add subfolders
Options -> Preserve file date/time
Options -> No check for Layer I or II
Options -> Don’t clip when doing Track Gain
Options -> Tags -> Ignore

These settings will cause you the least amount of headaches and permit MP3Gain to do its job as quickly as possible. The last two of those settings (“Don’t clip when doing Track Gain” and “Tags -> Ignore”) are particularly important, because they will prevent MP3Gain from accidentally corrupting your digitized files.

Next, set the “Normal” volume, in the little box just above the main file pane. The default of 89 dB is fine for most uses.

Now that the settings are configured, add the “Raw” folder (where you told CDex to store your digital files) to your list of selected song files, either by typing CTRL-D, clicking the second icon in the button bar, or selecting menu item “File -> Add Folder”. The file window will fill up with the songs you just digitized.

The next step is to simply apply the gain. This is done by selecting menu item “Modify Gain -> Apply Track Gain”, or typing CTRL-G. Note: you do NOT want to apply “album gain”, what you want is “track gain”.

Now go have a cup of coffee — this will take a while. If you have thousands of songs, like I do, it may take overnight. But once that’s done, you are almost ready to play your digitial music collection. Almost.

STEP THREE: BULK RENAME UTILITY

The last step is to make sure your song files are named consistently. Fortunately, this is the easiest step of all. First, install Bulk Rename Utility http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/. Like the other software in this process, Bulk Rename Utility is free (although, as always, donations are appreciated).

If you install the version of Bulk Rename Utility which includes the “installer” program (which I recommend), it will create a context menu item, “Bulk Rename”. So simply navigate to the “Raw” directory where you have stored your digitial song files, right-click, and select “Bulk Rename”. The Bulk Rename Utility will open, with your Raw directory pre-selected.

Before you rename anything, you need to change two settings. First, in the menu bar, ensure that the setting “Options -> Auto-Select Entries” is checked. Next, toward the bottom of the Bulk Rename Utility screen, there is a checkbox labeled “Recursive”. Check this checkbox. The file pane above will then refresh with all of the files under your “Raw” directory.

Now that the files are displayed and selected, you can rename them. In the “Repl. (3)” box, type a single space in the text box labeled “Replace”. Then, type a single underscore in the textbox labeled “With”. Then click the “Rename” button, click “OK” on the warning that pops up, and you are done.

What you just did is replace all spaces with underscores. This will save you a great deal of trouble later (for example, if you ever set up a web jukebox on your home server). It may seem a nuisance, but trust me, you are avoiding a host of headaches by doing this now.

STEP FOUR: PLAYING THE SONGS

Because you selected MP3 as the file format, you have a wide variety of players to choose from. For playing songs on your own computer, nothing beats WinAmp http://www.winamp.com/ (free, of course). However, you don’t need to stop there. You can set up a web server and connect it to your home stereo, and then use a program like mp3act http://www.mp3act.net/ (again, free) to access your home jukebox from any networked computer. Finally, you can carry your music with you on a portable MP3 player, such as an iPod running the open source Rockbox firmware.

I am in the process of re-digitizing all of my music. I sold my Neo35, which was a large, hard drive-based MPs player mounted in my trunk, and I replaced it with a Creative Zen Touch, which does everything the Neo35 did, fits in my pocket, and has a much better user interface. So as part of that I am going through and re-ripping all of my CDs to MP3.

One of the many cool things the Zen can do is sort music by genre. So as I’m ripping the CDs, I am assigning genres to them. There’s the rub. Music comes in such a bewildering array of styles, I may wind up with nearly as many genres as I have CDs, which kind of defeats the point of sorting by genre. So I went back and started assigning just a few genres, but then 90% of my CDs were in either “Rock” or “Alternative”. And what does “Alternative” mean, anyway? As I’m assigning the genres, I am thinking, “wait: everybody calls Poe ‘alternative’, but is she really all that different from Rush, which is filed under ‘Rock’?” But if I assign 90% of my collection to “Rock”, why even bother assigning genres at all?

And take Shakira, for example. (I really dig Shakira.) I would probably put her in the same category as Alanis Morissette (“Rock”? “Altenative”?), or maybe Kylie Minogue (“Pop”? “Dance”?), but she always gets put into the “Latin” genre, whatever that is. She should be in a separate category just because she’s from Columbia? I just don’t get that.

I’m just kind of baffled on this whole genre thing.