One thing about music being downloadable (legally) these days....
...is that it's yet another thing that needs to be backed-up!
Like many people, on the launch of Apple's iTunes Store in the UK I went along to have a look at what it offers at the moment (you might notice a lack of Fatboy Slim material on there as it stands right now) - with it's 79 pence-per-track pricing it might well be tempting to get the credit card out and go nuts, but it has a hidden cost - we all have another job to do, which is namely to protect all those 79 pence(s) spent there. We have to remember to backup all the purchased music to something else, in addition to all the stuff already on the backup list. All this just to guard against losing it all should your computer have a fit and die on you (well the hard disk specifically I guess I mean)
Funny, but somehow I like having the physical CD on the shelf - it doesn't need any backing up, and unless I do something silly to them, the CDs will be playing for a few more years yet (despite the recent reports of the earliest 80s CDs finally giving in to bitrot). And, of course, if you import a CD to your favourite mp3-type system for playing on a portable player, you actually have a backup, of sorts, of your CD anyway! Which would almost invalidate my whole point of this post, were it not for the fact that you don't have to take this step, you could always put your purchase into a CD player and listen to it that way! (That sentence was brought to you by Stating The Bleeding Obvious, Inc)
I bought the new Beastie Boys album today, on CD, for a whole 9 pounds and 77 pence, at my local supermarket, of all places. It has 15 tracks on it. My rough maths makes that just over 65 pence a track, and I have a physical product in my hand, with artwork and liner notes, and lyrics and everything. There's even a bit of extra bonus-type media stuff included, they're probably trying to call it "an enhanced CD" but to be honest, it's not that enhanced - but that is a whole different issue. AND the CD has not had any mp3-eqsue data reduction applied - therefore I can choose to listen to it on a computer system at any bit rate I choose, beit 128K or 320K or in straight 16 bit/44.1Khz upcompressed audio. To conclude my point here - should my Powerbook should explode tomorrow, I won't have lost a penny of my 9 pounds and 77 English pence. Hmmmm.
Maybe I just come from the angle of someone that already has to back up SO MUCH music data at the moment......grrrr.......or maybe I don't.
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 8:34:53 PM
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All about mastering an album....
Being a fussy sort, I insist on mastering all Fatboy Slim tracks (for CD) myself.
I don't have to, is all my choice, and sometimes I wish I could just let it go
off to someone in a matering facility in London and be done with it. But I don't
choose to do that, so here I am surrounded by various bits of gear going through
the album track by track making it all sound nice and shiny for your delectation
and delight.
While, rather obviously, the most important equipment used in the mastering process is those dangly bits of flesh that hang off each side of your head, aka your ears [ok, technically, the little bones inside your ear are kind of useful too, yes, but let's not get that digressive this early on in the post, eh?], the quality, type and character of the studio trickery used is also a part of the equation, so here's a short rundown of the various setups I might be using over the next few days...
Pro Tools Plugins:
Various combinations of the Waves plugins, L1+ etc
(and PC-wise, something that does sound good is the Akai Quad Compressor but setting all that up etc is often something I don't do)
Hardware:
TC Electronic Finalizer Express
(this is starting to look like an advert for TCE isn't it? It's not supposed to be, despite there being quotes from a review I did of one of their products on their website)
and sometimes even just an analogue path of a couple of valve compressors and occasionally, shock horror, running the whole thing through a couple of channels of the mixing desk. Not high tech in any way, that one, but if it works, it works, and that's the important thing.
And there's some strange combinations of all the above, namely a really old Apple Macintosh 840av, with a Digidesign Session 8 card, with an even older Digidesign 882/16 interface plugged in to it. A slightly ancient 16 bit system, yes, but it does have a very specific use: it runs the 2.x versions of the Waves plugins - they have a sound all of their own (I used it for all of "You've Come A Long Way, Baby" as it happens, and that seemed to work OK!) and sometimes it's the only system that gives me the sound I'm looking for (with L1 maximizer turned up to 11!)
I often use a little bit of one units' processing to feed into another one, for example I might use a little bit of Master X then feeding into the Waves L1+, or perhaps using an order of Waves REQ, Waves Rcomp, then Master X (or T-Racks 24 perhaps). And all that is before I get it out of the Pro Tools rig and out into the physical rack containing the TC Finalizer stuff (n.b. the Master X stuff is supposed to be a total recreation of the Finalizer units in software form, well, they don't sound quite the same to me, I have to say)
The final bounce itself is always done to another Mac, via S/PDIF, running Sound Designer II. With, hopefully, the relevant amount of dithering on the way in, so I end up with a collection of properly dithered 16 bit files on there to be compiled into a CD master, with PQ encoding etc added...
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 4:55:30 PM
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Seagulls. And baby seagulls.
This is as about as much of a tangent from what I was going to write about today (i.e. mastering the album, and the process involved) as you can get, I would have thought.
Seagulls annoy me. Living in Brighton, and very near to the sea means there's an awful lot of seagulls round my way. And it seems most of them have decided to set up camp outside my bedroom window. Noisy little buggers they are too! They manage to wake me up nearly every morning with their insistent bleeting. I don't know what they find to talk about so often for so long, but it must be something reallly interesting (I had a theory once about one of them trying to find another seagull to borrow a lawnmower off, but that's a very long involved story...probably best I don't go into details really)
Anyhoo, one of them has recenly been making a ridiculous amount of racket, I was was starting to think there was something going on with it more than just the normal daytime chatter that most of the others engage in (you can tell, I'm sure, that I know nothing about birds!)
It turns out that this one is actually a new mum and has its little fluffy baby seagull in tow, and they've taken up temporary residence on a top of an old chimney stack not 20 feet from my aforementioned bedroom window:
Still don't like adult seagulls much, but the baby is quite cute, and I'll forgive the mum her shouting and screaming, for now, if all she's doing is protecting the little one.
(apologies for the slightly crap image quality, it's a bit of an involved explanation)
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 3:56:14 PM
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