"Is 'the fans always get fleeced' the rock industry's equivalent to Moore's Law?"
So, um, here's a question: at what point is a musician allowed to make money from their work? Nobody wants to buy their albums anymore; now they're "fleecing" you by charging exorbitant prices for their concerts?
I'll put it another way: screw anybody who writes an Open Source app and then wants to get paid for providing aftermarket support. I (didn't) buy the app, right? So you should come and set it up for me for free, wherever I am, and I'll pay you what I think it's worth. I hope you can afford your own plane ticket, by the way.
As both a developer and a musician, lemme clue some of you in on something: being a musician is not just doing a bunch of smack and lurching into a studio every so often. (Except for Pete Doherty.) In fact, I'd say it's a helluva lot more difficult to learn to write music well -- or even competently enough to be a pop musician -- than it does to write code well.
The notion that musicians are running around swimming in pools full of Dom Perignon and lighting their crack pipes with $100 bills, and therefore don't deserve your money, is idiotic and a product of lazy thinking. 99% of musicians make less than $1000 a month doing their jobs. Most of the other 1% make less than your average Perl programmer.
And I'm talking about famous musicians, by the way. Madonna is a millionaire, but she's been a highly successful musician for more than 20 years now. Anybody who spends 20 years marketing themselves, touring globally with a massive production setup, and consistently releasing successful product into the market ought to be a millionaire, or they're doing something very wrong. Same in music as any other type of IP work. Madonna is, in many ways, the Bill Gates of the music industry. (The merits of her music are another matter. So are the merits of Gates' software.)
I personally know a band who's opening for one of the biggest groups in the world these days, who were just on the Tonight Show, who are getting $250 per show opening for the aforementioned band. Split four ways, since there's four members.
So I fail to see how musicians are "fleecing" you by trying to hold on to the one place they can still make money, since you've clearly decided you don't want to pay them for anything else.
Oh, maybe a t-shirt at the gig that you don't want to pay to see.
I have two earrings in my left ear, a tattoo on my left shoulder and another (the Hindu word 'maya') on my right forearm, just below the crook of my elbow. I've never had a problem at any job with any of them.
Then again, I probably don't want to work at a place where they'd be a problem, because that suggests a certain conformist thinking that I don't interface with particularly well. It's not about my tats or earrings -- people hire me because I'm an original thinker, not because I'm a replaceable monkey.
Then again, I'm a web designer/developer, not an admin, so maybe different rules apply. People don't hire admins to be creative. They hire them to be precise. (That's not a slight, by the way.)
Most of my experience with cabling concerns comes from setting up music/recording gear. In this case, I tend to prefer Monster cables for XLR / 1/4" connections.
Based on simple experience, their cables tend to be a bit more solidly constructed -- which is totally irrelevant when you're going twelve inches from a DVD player to an audio receiver, but it's pretty important when you're trying to hook a guitar up to an amp. You do not want a crappy cable that snaps when you step on it in this case.
Also, I find that they have better shielding. Again, this isn't an issue with consumer-level electronics...but if you ever want to hear what I'm talking about, plug a guitar into an amp with a cheap cable and with a solid, well-shielded one. You will literally hear the difference -- less noise, less ground hum, the whole nine yards.
(I'm not suggesting that all these problems are caused or solved by cabling, but cabling is a factor.)
I think it comes down to this: in a professional situation, where bad cabling can cause expensive catastrophes, people are usually willing to pay a bit more and get better cabling. But this is not necessarily relevant in your case. I'd personally guess most of Monster's business comes from the pro market anyway; but why not make expensive RCA cables if you've got the equipment to do so?
Monster's not the best, by the way; they're the best you're going to see in a chain retail store. If you really want hardcore analog cabling, you can find people who will make it to your specifications. Unless you are U2 producing a new album, you will never, ever need to meet these people.;-)
Latency problems are the big deal in pretty much any DAW (digital audio workstation) system.
To break this down, here's the problem:
1) I play a note into my guitar. 2) That note is sent as an analog signal to my soundcard, which converts it into a digital signal. 3) That signal is processed by my DAW and whatever realtime effects I'm using, like delay or distortion, etc. 4) The signal is duly recorded to hard drive. 5) As a last priority, the processed signal is played back to me...because it's far more important for the signal to record properly than to monitor properly.
All of this, obviously, takes time -- how much depends upon both your hardware and your software. If it takes more than a couple of hundred milliseconds, it becomes pointless to monitor, because most musicians get a little irritated when it takes half a second between when they play or sing a note and when they actually hear it. (It can also create a 'chorus' effect, which I can tell you from personal experience makes it difficult to stay on key.)
This problem is usually resolved via a combination of expensive soundcards and expensive apps. Nobody in their right mind would seriously try to use a consumer-level soundcard for professional recording -- I've personally got a Digidesign MBox for running ProTools and an M-Audio Firewire 410 for everything else. These provided power for microphones and line-level instruments that need phantom power, they provide XLR and 1/4" inputs...all the important stuff.
So where am I going with this dull lesson in digital audio geekdom? Basically, the deal is this: creating a solid, crash-free, low-latency realtime digital audio production (meaning anything with live recording or realtime effects) is, technically speaking, on par with writing your own FPS 3D rendering engine from the ground up.
Actually, it's even worse, because 95% of the hardware that recording pros use is extremely specialized. I've never used a high-end or mid-level audio interface (like the MBox or the FireWire 410) that didn't have its own custom software for configuring it. They're usually ASIO compatible, but that's about it for standards compatibility. This is reflected in how they interact with software. For example, ProTools *only* works with Digidesign hardware interfaces. If I don't have my MBox plugged in, ProTools won't even start up. But it sucks for use with Cubase, because Cubase isn't optimized for the MBox's architecture.
For most OS/Linux apps, pretty good is good enough. But digital audio recording is an extremely unforgiving and precise application. Lack of VST effects and instrument support is unforgivable. Latency issues are unforgivable. In fact, for most musicians, any requirement that they RTFM or fiddle with the kernel to optimize audio I/O is totally unforgivable. Most musicians hate computers, and only use them when they have to.
I'm not saying that Wired is a crappy app, or that nobody should bother writing DAWs for Linux. I think it's a cool idea. But I also believe that recording studios will be the last people to migrate to open-source solutions, unless those open-source solutions can out-perform the existing proprietary solutions...and that just doesn't seem likely any time soon.
Remember: musicians were one the reasons that Apple survived the first 3/4s of the 1990s. A lot of recording apps were until recently only released for Windows as an afterthought. And personally, as someone who has done audio production/recording on both Mac and Windows, I won't touch a PC unless I have to. The architecture is just not as optimized for audio as Macs are. (This is not a "Macs are better than PCs thing"; I'm speaking quite literally here. The audio layer in OS X has higher CPU/memory priority than any other OS subsystem.)
But I'd love to be proven wrong. Good luck to the developers of Wired.
Out of your price range, definitely, but I have a Boblbee Metropolis hardshell backpack and it's probably the best investment I've ever made.
The Boblbee has a hard plastic casing and a padded, soft backplate/strap section. The laptop area is directly behind this backplate -- meaning that when you wear it, your laptop is as safe as it can possibly be.
It's light as hell and you can carry anything up to a 15" laptop in it -- I carry my 12" PowerBook around with me everywhere I go. The great things about the Boblbee other than the hardshell are that they're extremely lightweight, extremely ergonomic and extremely extensible -- you can get all sorts of accessory pockets and things that hook onto it. The pack itself also has little elastic catches that can narrow and widen it as necessary. I've done three-day trips with nothing but my Boblbee to carry three days worth of clothes, the PowerBook, a Palm, a couple of graphic novels (Warren Ellis rocks the hizzy), a non-electronic notebook, pens and souvenirs. All of them fit in the Boblbee.
If you've got $179, I can't recommend any backpack more highly. The only drawback is that it's a bit bulky, size-wise (but not weight-wise). But I have the biggest one, because I'm a friggin' gorilla and the smaller Boblbees looked rather effete strapped to my big goofy self.
I'm a diehard OS X convert, from many years of Windows/Linux use. I've been using free OSes since 1996 and I've never found any package management/GUI combination that makes installing and running apps as smooth as OS X. Plus...and I swear to God this is true...the Quartz rendering subsystem renders text better than any other window manager on the planet. Linux can't touch it, and neither can Windows. For somebody who writes and reads on screen an awful lot, that's pretty important.
I *would* switch if Apple ported OS X to x86; I would start buying x86 hardware again. Not for my primary machine -- I'm waaay too happy with my PowerBook for that -- but for my home server and for an XServe render farm...especially now that Logic can use a render farm to handle audio production (of which I do a lot as well).
As for the CPU clock speed argument...you're comparing RISC to CISC architecture. It's not comparable. My 867Mhz G4 is as fast as any 2Ghz Pentium 4, easily.
If you really want to have cool music, look into generative systems like Sseyo's Koan: http://www.sseyo.com/koan/koanVectorAudio_Generati veMusic.html
In other words, don't play pre-recorded music at them: have software *write* the music. This affords interesting opportunities, such as varying the style or tempo of the music the longer they're on hold (because there's nothing more irritating than bright, happy music when you've been holding for half a friggin' hour).
You could alternately check out Mperia. (Which I am the Creative Lead and co-founder of, so I'm a bit biased). We use the BitPass payment system to sell tracks for artists, who keep 70% of their profits. And there's lots of other nice features for both artists and fans of independent music -- like the ability to preview songs in either Shoutcast or Flash streaming formats, and to link up with friends and find out what they're listening to.
Unlike C|Net, we don't have limits on the number of songs artists can put up. We don't have ads. And we're actually committed to making a great online place for independent music. Being a semi-professional musician myself, I wouldn't have it any other way.
It's nice to have free downloads...but it's also nice to support artists whose work you enjoy, especially when you know that the majority of the profits are going to the people who actually made the music.
Anyway, you might want to check it out. I think it's worth taking the time to look into.
In studios, the Macs are usually on the other side of a glass partition, i.e. in the mixing room with the engineers and producers. But you don't necessarily have this luxury, unless you have someone else to hit 'record' for you.
I have a similar setup, only I'm using a PowerBook; however, my roommate's PC is the loudest thing in the world, and we had to figure this problem out, since we both record in the living room.
So here's a few tips:
1) Don't even bother trying to use room mikes in the same room with the G5. You might as well just mike the G5 itself. If you need to do room miking, you're gonna need to haul the G5 out of the room and get somebody else to engineer. Period.
2) If you're doing vocal takes, try not to use bi-directional mikes -- stick with your basic Shure-style unidirectional. Keep the G5 out of the line of audio -- you want it > 180 degrees from where the mike is pointing, i.e. you.
3) Put it under the desk. Even better, go down to Wal-Mart and pick up some of that mattress padding foam cheap. Put the G5 under the desk and Velcro the padding foam around it like a curtain (not too close, obviously, as you need air flow). You'll find that the noise won't entirely disappear...but it'll be close enough for government work.
As long as you're flying solo, you're never going to get a silent room to work in. But that's okay -- I do pretty well with my setup, and line noise isn't really a problem.
It wasn't thirty people. I called the Ford dealership here in Vegas yesterday and they were SWAMPED with calls. Several hundred, according to the girl I spoke to, and Ford wasn't the only type of car involved. (I'm the tech columnist for the Las Vegas City Life, so I have to cover these things.)
So rather than the usual retarded George Clooney jokes, how about some actual critical thinking from Slashdotters?
Okay -- there was no solar flare activity on Friday. I checked. Nor was there a lot of static electricity in the air, because it's been pouring rain for a few days. (An unusual thing in itself; we generally only get about five days of rain here annually. It's like Arrakis.)
My absolute first thought was a nuclear blast...which a couple of you mentioned as a joke, apparently not realizing that the Mercury Test Site is about sixty miles north of town. People used to sit on the casino rooftops and watch the nukes go off back in the 1950s and 60s.
A nuclear EMP could cause something like this on a large scale; problem is that most nuclear EMPs fall (according to some Googling) between the 3-30KHz range. Far as I know, this wouldn't affect higher frequency devices...but I don't claim to be an expert on electromagnetic radiation, so I might be wrong.
Problem two: whatever did this didn't burn these devices out -- it merely took them offline. Unplugging and reconnecting the car battery was a quick fix in most cases, according to the girl at Country Ford in Henderson. I was always under the impression that a nuclear EMP *fried* circuitry...but again, I could be wrong and I'd like to know if I am.
According to a link one Slashdotter posted, this happened on a national scale, not just in Vegas. But Nevada is notable for being 90% government and military owned.
I would really, really like to know what happened on Friday. I think it might be important to find out.
I use the Timbuk2 "Bolo" bag, which is the largest bag made in the world ever. It's 27" Top W x 14.5" H x 9" D x 20" Bottom W (from the site) and I use it to usually carry the following:
12" PowerBook DigiDesign MBox USB audio interface M-Audio Oxygen 8 25-key MIDI controller iPod Koss "can" headphones Moleskine 12" notebook (non-digital variety) 12V power inverter (about 6" x 1.5") Maxtor 250GB external FireWire hard drive A whole lot of audio, FireWire, USB and assorted cables and power adapters Cell phone
I keep the 12" PowerBook, iPod and their respective power adapters in a Targus laptop sleeve with shoulder strap, which is nice -- I can whip the laptop out if I need it and leave all the rest at home or in a hotel room for mobility. Timbuk2 now makes a laptop sleeve, I notice -- which I'll be ordering.
And in case you're wondering, I keep the Spyderco Civilian razor sharp knife that protects all of these items from thieves in the gun coat of my pocket. The Timbuk2's heavy duty latches make me feel pretty safe, too -- as does the chest strap, which keeps everything close.
I've carried this thing all around the country and even underground in storm drains (don't ask; check the Slashdot archives and you might find the story) and it's absolutely perfect. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Urgh...something got cut off there in the middle. We'll try this again.
I'm the community outreach homey for BitPass, the micropayment company which was mentioned on/. a couple of weeks ago -- Scott McCloud is using it to sell online comics.
I also use BitPass to sell my album, Love Songs For Bastards. You can listen to a lofi (48kbps) preview of each song, and if you like it you can buy each MP3 for 50 cents or the entire seven song EP for $3.50 -- which also includes Flash-based liner notes that look kinda cool. You can check it out to see how it works here.
So far, it's selling pretty well, all things considered -- I've made more money in two weeks of selling it online than I would have if I'd signed to a label, because I'm keeping the majority of the revenue from each sale, and I don't have to split it with anybody. Most of the people who've bought the album seem pretty happy with the payment system. If I actually had the time to promote it, I think it would do even better -- right now I'm getting sales mainly from traffic already driven to my site.
In re: value added features...well, uh, I've got Flash based liner notes. I know, I know, maybe not the most exciting thing in the world. But future releases will include music videos both QuickTime-based and Flash-based (I love the idea of abstract videos), press reviews, etc. etc. From now on, I'm not going to be releasing "albums" necessarily. When I finish recording a new song, I'll put it up on the site. If I have a bunch of songs which are somehow thematically or aurally connected, I'll release them all at once, which is sorta like releasing an album, except that you'll still be able to buy them separately.
I think this is the future of music distribution. Not just BitPass, which kicks ass, but self-release via the Net. Then again, I hate record labels.
I'm the community outreach homey for BitPass, the micropayment company which was mentioned on/. a couple of weeks ago -- Scott McCloud is using it to sell online comics.
I also use BitPass to sell my album, Love Songs For Bastards. You can listen to a lofi (48kbps) preview of each song, and if you like it you can buy each MP3 for 50 cents or the entire seven song EP for $3.50 -- which also includes Flash-based liner notes that look kinda cool. You can check it out to see how it works here.
So far, it's selling pretty well, all things considered -- I've made more money in two weeks of selling it online than I would have if I'd signed to a label, because I'm keeping the majority of the revenue from each sale, and I don't have to split it with anybody. Most of the people who've bought the album seem pretty happy with the payment system. If I actually had the time to
In re: value added features...well, uh, I've got Flash based liner notes. I know, I know, maybe not the most exciting thing in the world. But future releases will include music videos both QuickTime-based and Flash-based (I love the idea of abstract videos), press reviews, etc. etc.
From now on, I'm not going to be releasing "albums" necessarily. When I finish recording a new song, I'll put it up on the site. If I have a bunch of songs which are somehow thematically or aurally connected, I'll release them all at once, which is sorta like releasing an album, except that you'll still be able to buy them separately.
I think this is the future of music distribution. Not just BitPass, which kicks ass, but self-release via the Net. Then again, I hate record labels.
Good luck!
The greatest bit is that, when they cut over to Elijah Wood (aka Frodo Baggins) at the end, you can clearly read his lips saying "That was f***king awesome!"
In addition to the aforementioned sensible ideas: if you really want to punish the evil bastards and you own your own domain, the guy who runs my ISP taught me a great trick:
Whenever you need to sign up for something that requires actual interactivity (i.e. reading the e-mail they send you and doing something with it), simply use the name of that site as the username on the e-mail account.
For example: I own zenarchery.com. If I signed up for a Yahoo! account, I would give them the address yahoo@zenarchery.com. Or friendster@zenarchery.com, slashdot@zenarchery.com, whatever.
When you start getting spam in complete violation of their privacy policy, you know whodunit -- and you can start hitting them with the usual cease-or-I'll-totally-0wnz0r-you routine.
This has so far prevented me from getting ANY spam, and taken a few years off the life of several unscrupulous sysadmins.
Vengeance is a harsh mistress, but Lord, is she sweet. Heh heh heh.
I wrote a column about this a couple of weeks back; this is one of my current fascinations.
You can farm out the manufacture of Nike shoes to free trade zone workers in Myanmar for a thousand years, and it is unlikely that you will ever see them rise up and make better shoes -- the entire structure of the shoemaking industry is set up in such a way as to prevent this from happening.
But if an Indian or Taiwanese or Chinese programmer spends enough time writing code, he or she will learn to innovate. It's an unavoidable fact of knowledge work -- the worker will, inevitably, gain knowledge.
Of course, it is also an unavoidable fact that corporations are more likely to use outsourced overseas contract workers than Americans. Why? Because the overseas contract workers will work for a fraction of what Americans do. Does this suck? Sure. Does the fact that it sucks change anything? Not at all.
Developing nations are beginning to take an active interest in information technology as an economic solution. The most obvious reason is that IT is completely independent of natural resources. Anyone can be taught to code, even (as some people I've spoken to claim) illiterates. With the advent of wireless networking -- which is both cheap and more architecturally robust than wires, at least in places where military coups happen on a semi-regular basis), this willingness to move towards an information economy is suddenly a lot more viable than it was back in the bad old days -- y'know, five years ago -- when wiring a nation like Ghana was prohibitively expensive.
There is also the concern that the American government is overlegislating the American technology industry -- crypto as munitions, anybody? And it's certainly true that the Feds have shown a marked tendency to come down on the side of Hollywood in the Great Content Vs. Technology War. Not that this is terribly surprising -- Hollywood, unlike the software industry, has a century-long history of buying the political clout it needs.
Personally, I'm more interested in the speculations that some American companies will be increasingly setting up operations offshore to avoid the reach of Congress, the IRS and Hollywood. Anybody else ever heard the rumor that the reason Microsoft has invested so heavily in Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor is so that they could up ship and move if the federal heat got too serious? I find such a possibility fascinating, if a bit far-fetched.
It's always funny to see what people will write about others when they think nobody's looking. I expect most Slashdot reader think all alt.weekly writers are clueless Luddites. Apparently nobody considered that one of the writers of this piece might also be the paper's technology columnist and a former Mondo 2000 writer...which means, of course, that he's got Slashdot permanently on screen all day.
That, of course, would be me.
Thanks for the comments, both good and bad. This is a weird piece for me--usually I'm writing about shit like Open Source and web art and quantum computing. But it was fun to write. I've gotten almost two hundred e-mails since the Drudge Report picked it up last night...weird for a guy who's stuck in a Hee-Haw shithole like Vegas. Do you know how bad it sucks to only see other nerds three times a year (Comdex, CES, DefCon)?
This piece has gotten picked up by everyone. For those of you who thought it was boring...yeah, I know. But listen: the sitch is this. In Vegas, the homeless are pushed aside and hidden by the city, because we wouldn't want to offend the fucking tourists. It's repugnant. The fact is that this piece has done more to highlight the situation than anything else in local media--most of which is completely beholden to the gambling industry.
We went on one of the most popular drive-time radio shows this morning (KOMP 92.3) and I called the city's attitude towards the homeless contemptible. I also mentioned that our mayor, Oscar Goodman, recently claimed in a speech that there "are no homeless in Las Vegas". I suggested that, based upon this remark, Mayor Goodman might in fact be a crackhead.
He is very angry. Which means I did the right thing.
Anyway, just wanted to weigh in with my two hundred cents. But it's nice to be noticed, you know? And seriously, thanks for all the comments, positive and negative. I'm surprised Slashdot ran this at all, but it's sort of cool from my geek perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
So, um, here's a question: at what point is a musician allowed to make money from their work? Nobody wants to buy their albums anymore; now they're "fleecing" you by charging exorbitant prices for their concerts?
I'll put it another way: screw anybody who writes an Open Source app and then wants to get paid for providing aftermarket support. I (didn't) buy the app, right? So you should come and set it up for me for free, wherever I am, and I'll pay you what I think it's worth. I hope you can afford your own plane ticket, by the way.
As both a developer and a musician, lemme clue some of you in on something: being a musician is not just doing a bunch of smack and lurching into a studio every so often. (Except for Pete Doherty.) In fact, I'd say it's a helluva lot more difficult to learn to write music well -- or even competently enough to be a pop musician -- than it does to write code well.
The notion that musicians are running around swimming in pools full of Dom Perignon and lighting their crack pipes with $100 bills, and therefore don't deserve your money, is idiotic and a product of lazy thinking. 99% of musicians make less than $1000 a month doing their jobs. Most of the other 1% make less than your average Perl programmer.
And I'm talking about famous musicians, by the way. Madonna is a millionaire, but she's been a highly successful musician for more than 20 years now. Anybody who spends 20 years marketing themselves, touring globally with a massive production setup, and consistently releasing successful product into the market ought to be a millionaire, or they're doing something very wrong. Same in music as any other type of IP work. Madonna is, in many ways, the Bill Gates of the music industry. (The merits of her music are another matter. So are the merits of Gates' software.)
I personally know a band who's opening for one of the biggest groups in the world these days, who were just on the Tonight Show, who are getting $250 per show opening for the aforementioned band. Split four ways, since there's four members.
So I fail to see how musicians are "fleecing" you by trying to hold on to the one place they can still make money, since you've clearly decided you don't want to pay them for anything else.
Oh, maybe a t-shirt at the gig that you don't want to pay to see.
Gee, thanks.
I have two earrings in my left ear, a tattoo on my left shoulder and another (the Hindu word 'maya') on my right forearm, just below the crook of my elbow. I've never had a problem at any job with any of them.
Then again, I probably don't want to work at a place where they'd be a problem, because that suggests a certain conformist thinking that I don't interface with particularly well. It's not about my tats or earrings -- people hire me because I'm an original thinker, not because I'm a replaceable monkey.
Then again, I'm a web designer/developer, not an admin, so maybe different rules apply. People don't hire admins to be creative. They hire them to be precise. (That's not a slight, by the way.)
Most of my experience with cabling concerns comes from setting up music/recording gear. In this case, I tend to prefer Monster cables for XLR / 1/4" connections.
;-)
Based on simple experience, their cables tend to be a bit more solidly constructed -- which is totally irrelevant when you're going twelve inches from a DVD player to an audio receiver, but it's pretty important when you're trying to hook a guitar up to an amp. You do not want a crappy cable that snaps when you step on it in this case.
Also, I find that they have better shielding. Again, this isn't an issue with consumer-level electronics...but if you ever want to hear what I'm talking about, plug a guitar into an amp with a cheap cable and with a solid, well-shielded one. You will literally hear the difference -- less noise, less ground hum, the whole nine yards.
(I'm not suggesting that all these problems are caused or solved by cabling, but cabling is a factor.)
I think it comes down to this: in a professional situation, where bad cabling can cause expensive catastrophes, people are usually willing to pay a bit more and get better cabling. But this is not necessarily relevant in your case. I'd personally guess most of Monster's business comes from the pro market anyway; but why not make expensive RCA cables if you've got the equipment to do so?
Monster's not the best, by the way; they're the best you're going to see in a chain retail store. If you really want hardcore analog cabling, you can find people who will make it to your specifications. Unless you are U2 producing a new album, you will never, ever need to meet these people.
Latency problems are the big deal in pretty much any DAW (digital audio workstation) system.
To break this down, here's the problem:
1) I play a note into my guitar.
2) That note is sent as an analog signal to my soundcard, which converts it into a digital signal.
3) That signal is processed by my DAW and whatever realtime effects I'm using, like delay or distortion, etc.
4) The signal is duly recorded to hard drive.
5) As a last priority, the processed signal is played back to me...because it's far more important for the signal to record properly than to monitor properly.
All of this, obviously, takes time -- how much depends upon both your hardware and your software. If it takes more than a couple of hundred milliseconds, it becomes pointless to monitor, because most musicians get a little irritated when it takes half a second between when they play or sing a note and when they actually hear it. (It can also create a 'chorus' effect, which I can tell you from personal experience makes it difficult to stay on key.)
This problem is usually resolved via a combination of expensive soundcards and expensive apps. Nobody in their right mind would seriously try to use a consumer-level soundcard for professional recording -- I've personally got a Digidesign MBox for running ProTools and an M-Audio Firewire 410 for everything else. These provided power for microphones and line-level instruments that need phantom power, they provide XLR and 1/4" inputs...all the important stuff.
So where am I going with this dull lesson in digital audio geekdom? Basically, the deal is this: creating a solid, crash-free, low-latency realtime digital audio production (meaning anything with live recording or realtime effects) is, technically speaking, on par with writing your own FPS 3D rendering engine from the ground up.
Actually, it's even worse, because 95% of the hardware that recording pros use is extremely specialized. I've never used a high-end or mid-level audio interface (like the MBox or the FireWire 410) that didn't have its own custom software for configuring it. They're usually ASIO compatible, but that's about it for standards compatibility. This is reflected in how they interact with software. For example, ProTools *only* works with Digidesign hardware interfaces. If I don't have my MBox plugged in, ProTools won't even start up. But it sucks for use with Cubase, because Cubase isn't optimized for the MBox's architecture.
For most OS/Linux apps, pretty good is good enough. But digital audio recording is an extremely unforgiving and precise application. Lack of VST effects and instrument support is unforgivable. Latency issues are unforgivable. In fact, for most musicians, any requirement that they RTFM or fiddle with the kernel to optimize audio I/O is totally unforgivable. Most musicians hate computers, and only use them when they have to.
I'm not saying that Wired is a crappy app, or that nobody should bother writing DAWs for Linux. I think it's a cool idea. But I also believe that recording studios will be the last people to migrate to open-source solutions, unless those open-source solutions can out-perform the existing proprietary solutions...and that just doesn't seem likely any time soon.
Remember: musicians were one the reasons that Apple survived the first 3/4s of the 1990s. A lot of recording apps were until recently only released for Windows as an afterthought. And personally, as someone who has done audio production/recording on both Mac and Windows, I won't touch a PC unless I have to. The architecture is just not as optimized for audio as Macs are. (This is not a "Macs are better than PCs thing"; I'm speaking quite literally here. The audio layer in OS X has higher CPU/memory priority than any other OS subsystem.)
But I'd love to be proven wrong. Good luck to the developers of Wired.
The Boblbee has a hard plastic casing and a padded, soft backplate/strap section. The laptop area is directly behind this backplate -- meaning that when you wear it, your laptop is as safe as it can possibly be.
It's light as hell and you can carry anything up to a 15" laptop in it -- I carry my 12" PowerBook around with me everywhere I go. The great things about the Boblbee other than the hardshell are that they're extremely lightweight, extremely ergonomic and extremely extensible -- you can get all sorts of accessory pockets and things that hook onto it. The pack itself also has little elastic catches that can narrow and widen it as necessary. I've done three-day trips with nothing but my Boblbee to carry three days worth of clothes, the PowerBook, a Palm, a couple of graphic novels (Warren Ellis rocks the hizzy), a non-electronic notebook, pens and souvenirs. All of them fit in the Boblbee.
If you've got $179, I can't recommend any backpack more highly. The only drawback is that it's a bit bulky, size-wise (but not weight-wise). But I have the biggest one, because I'm a friggin' gorilla and the smaller Boblbees looked rather effete strapped to my big goofy self.
I'm a diehard OS X convert, from many years of Windows/Linux use. I've been using free OSes since 1996 and I've never found any package management/GUI combination that makes installing and running apps as smooth as OS X. Plus...and I swear to God this is true...the Quartz rendering subsystem renders text better than any other window manager on the planet. Linux can't touch it, and neither can Windows. For somebody who writes and reads on screen an awful lot, that's pretty important.
I *would* switch if Apple ported OS X to x86; I would start buying x86 hardware again. Not for my primary machine -- I'm waaay too happy with my PowerBook for that -- but for my home server and for an XServe render farm...especially now that Logic can use a render farm to handle audio production (of which I do a lot as well).
As for the CPU clock speed argument...you're comparing RISC to CISC architecture. It's not comparable. My 867Mhz G4 is as fast as any 2Ghz Pentium 4, easily.
If you really want to have cool music, look into generative systems like Sseyo's Koan: http://www.sseyo.com/koan/koanVectorAudio_Generati veMusic.html
In other words, don't play pre-recorded music at them: have software *write* the music. This affords interesting opportunities, such as varying the style or tempo of the music the longer they're on hold (because there's nothing more irritating than bright, happy music when you've been holding for half a friggin' hour).
Unlike C|Net, we don't have limits on the number of songs artists can put up. We don't have ads. And we're actually committed to making a great online place for independent music. Being a semi-professional musician myself, I wouldn't have it any other way.
It's nice to have free downloads...but it's also nice to support artists whose work you enjoy, especially when you know that the majority of the profits are going to the people who actually made the music.
Anyway, you might want to check it out. I think it's worth taking the time to look into.
In studios, the Macs are usually on the other side of a glass partition, i.e. in the mixing room with the engineers and producers. But you don't necessarily have this luxury, unless you have someone else to hit 'record' for you.
I have a similar setup, only I'm using a PowerBook; however, my roommate's PC is the loudest thing in the world, and we had to figure this problem out, since we both record in the living room.
So here's a few tips:
1) Don't even bother trying to use room mikes in the same room with the G5. You might as well just mike the G5 itself. If you need to do room miking, you're gonna need to haul the G5 out of the room and get somebody else to engineer. Period.
2) If you're doing vocal takes, try not to use bi-directional mikes -- stick with your basic Shure-style unidirectional. Keep the G5 out of the line of audio -- you want it > 180 degrees from where the mike is pointing, i.e. you.
3) Put it under the desk. Even better, go down to Wal-Mart and pick up some of that mattress padding foam cheap. Put the G5 under the desk and Velcro the padding foam around it like a curtain (not too close, obviously, as you need air flow). You'll find that the noise won't entirely disappear...but it'll be close enough for government work.
As long as you're flying solo, you're never going to get a silent room to work in. But that's okay -- I do pretty well with my setup, and line noise isn't really a problem.
Hope that helps.
Josh Ellis
Creative Lead
Mperia.com
It wasn't thirty people. I called the Ford dealership here in Vegas yesterday and they were SWAMPED with calls. Several hundred, according to the girl I spoke to, and Ford wasn't the only type of car involved. (I'm the tech columnist for the Las Vegas City Life, so I have to cover these things.)
So rather than the usual retarded George Clooney jokes, how about some actual critical thinking from Slashdotters?
Okay -- there was no solar flare activity on Friday. I checked. Nor was there a lot of static electricity in the air, because it's been pouring rain for a few days. (An unusual thing in itself; we generally only get about five days of rain here annually. It's like Arrakis.)
My absolute first thought was a nuclear blast...which a couple of you mentioned as a joke, apparently not realizing that the Mercury Test Site is about sixty miles north of town. People used to sit on the casino rooftops and watch the nukes go off back in the 1950s and 60s.
A nuclear EMP could cause something like this on a large scale; problem is that most nuclear EMPs fall (according to some Googling) between the 3-30KHz range. Far as I know, this wouldn't affect higher frequency devices...but I don't claim to be an expert on electromagnetic radiation, so I might be wrong.
Problem two: whatever did this didn't burn these devices out -- it merely took them offline. Unplugging and reconnecting the car battery was a quick fix in most cases, according to the girl at Country Ford in Henderson. I was always under the impression that a nuclear EMP *fried* circuitry...but again, I could be wrong and I'd like to know if I am.
According to a link one Slashdotter posted, this happened on a national scale, not just in Vegas. But Nevada is notable for being 90% government and military owned.
I would really, really like to know what happened on Friday. I think it might be important to find out.
I use the Timbuk2 "Bolo" bag, which is the largest bag made in the world ever. It's 27" Top W x 14.5" H x 9" D x 20" Bottom W (from the site) and I use it to usually carry the following:
12" PowerBook
DigiDesign MBox USB audio interface
M-Audio Oxygen 8 25-key MIDI controller
iPod
Koss "can" headphones
Moleskine 12" notebook (non-digital variety)
12V power inverter (about 6" x 1.5")
Maxtor 250GB external FireWire hard drive
A whole lot of audio, FireWire, USB and assorted cables and power adapters
Cell phone
I keep the 12" PowerBook, iPod and their respective power adapters in a Targus laptop sleeve with shoulder strap, which is nice -- I can whip the laptop out if I need it and leave all the rest at home or in a hotel room for mobility. Timbuk2 now makes a laptop sleeve, I notice -- which I'll be ordering.
And in case you're wondering, I keep the Spyderco Civilian razor sharp knife that protects all of these items from thieves in the gun coat of my pocket. The Timbuk2's heavy duty latches make me feel pretty safe, too -- as does the chest strap, which keeps everything close.
I've carried this thing all around the country and even underground in storm drains (don't ask; check the Slashdot archives and you might find the story) and it's absolutely perfect. I can't recommend it highly enough.
We already are.
(Joshua Ellis, BitPass-enabled musician).
I'm the community outreach homey for BitPass, the micropayment company which was mentioned on
I also use BitPass to sell my album, Love Songs For Bastards. You can listen to a lofi (48kbps) preview of each song, and if you like it you can buy each MP3 for 50 cents or the entire seven song EP for $3.50 -- which also includes Flash-based liner notes that look kinda cool. You can check it out to see how it works here.
So far, it's selling pretty well, all things considered -- I've made more money in two weeks of selling it online than I would have if I'd signed to a label, because I'm keeping the majority of the revenue from each sale, and I don't have to split it with anybody. Most of the people who've bought the album seem pretty happy with the payment system. If I actually had the time to promote it, I think it would do even better -- right now I'm getting sales mainly from traffic already driven to my site.
In re: value added features...well, uh, I've got Flash based liner notes. I know, I know, maybe not the most exciting thing in the world. But future releases will include music videos both QuickTime-based and Flash-based (I love the idea of abstract videos), press reviews, etc. etc. From now on, I'm not going to be releasing "albums" necessarily. When I finish recording a new song, I'll put it up on the site. If I have a bunch of songs which are somehow thematically or aurally connected, I'll release them all at once, which is sorta like releasing an album, except that you'll still be able to buy them separately.
I think this is the future of music distribution. Not just BitPass, which kicks ass, but self-release via the Net. Then again, I hate record labels.
Good luck!
I'm the community outreach homey for BitPass, the micropayment company which was mentioned on /. a couple of weeks ago -- Scott McCloud is using it to sell online comics.
I also use BitPass to sell my album, Love Songs For Bastards. You can listen to a lofi (48kbps) preview of each song, and if you like it you can buy each MP3 for 50 cents or the entire seven song EP for $3.50 -- which also includes Flash-based liner notes that look kinda cool. You can check it out to see how it works here.
So far, it's selling pretty well, all things considered -- I've made more money in two weeks of selling it online than I would have if I'd signed to a label, because I'm keeping the majority of the revenue from each sale, and I don't have to split it with anybody. Most of the people who've bought the album seem pretty happy with the payment system. If I actually had the time to
In re: value added features...well, uh, I've got Flash based liner notes. I know, I know, maybe not the most exciting thing in the world. But future releases will include music videos both QuickTime-based and Flash-based (I love the idea of abstract videos), press reviews, etc. etc.
From now on, I'm not going to be releasing "albums" necessarily. When I finish recording a new song, I'll put it up on the site. If I have a bunch of songs which are somehow thematically or aurally connected, I'll release them all at once, which is sorta like releasing an album, except that you'll still be able to buy them separately.
I think this is the future of music distribution. Not just BitPass, which kicks ass, but self-release via the Net. Then again, I hate record labels.
Good luck!
The greatest bit is that, when they cut over to Elijah Wood (aka Frodo Baggins) at the end, you can clearly read his lips saying "That was f***king awesome!"
In addition to the aforementioned sensible ideas: if you really want to punish the evil bastards and you own your own domain, the guy who runs my ISP taught me a great trick:
Whenever you need to sign up for something that requires actual interactivity (i.e. reading the e-mail they send you and doing something with it), simply use the name of that site as the username on the e-mail account.
For example: I own zenarchery.com. If I signed up for a Yahoo! account, I would give them the address yahoo@zenarchery.com. Or friendster@zenarchery.com, slashdot@zenarchery.com, whatever.
When you start getting spam in complete violation of their privacy policy, you know whodunit -- and you can start hitting them with the usual cease-or-I'll-totally-0wnz0r-you routine.
This has so far prevented me from getting ANY spam, and taken a few years off the life of several unscrupulous sysadmins.
Vengeance is a harsh mistress, but Lord, is she sweet. Heh heh heh.
I wrote a column about this a couple of weeks back; this is one of my current fascinations.
You can farm out the manufacture of Nike shoes to free trade zone workers in Myanmar for a thousand years, and it is unlikely that you will ever see them rise up and make better shoes -- the entire structure of the shoemaking industry is set up in such a way as to prevent this from happening.
But if an Indian or Taiwanese or Chinese programmer spends enough time writing code, he or she will learn to innovate. It's an unavoidable fact of knowledge work -- the worker will, inevitably, gain knowledge.
Of course, it is also an unavoidable fact that corporations are more likely to use outsourced overseas contract workers than Americans. Why? Because the overseas contract workers will work for a fraction of what Americans do. Does this suck? Sure. Does the fact that it sucks change anything? Not at all.
Developing nations are beginning to take an active interest in information technology as an economic solution. The most obvious reason is that IT is completely independent of natural resources. Anyone can be taught to code, even (as some people I've spoken to claim) illiterates. With the advent of wireless networking -- which is both cheap and more architecturally robust than wires, at least in places where military coups happen on a semi-regular basis), this willingness to move towards an information economy is suddenly a lot more viable than it was back in the bad old days -- y'know, five years ago -- when wiring a nation like Ghana was prohibitively expensive.
There is also the concern that the American government is overlegislating the American technology industry -- crypto as munitions, anybody? And it's certainly true that the Feds have shown a marked tendency to come down on the side of Hollywood in the Great Content Vs. Technology War. Not that this is terribly surprising -- Hollywood, unlike the software industry, has a century-long history of buying the political clout it needs.
Personally, I'm more interested in the speculations that some American companies will be increasingly setting up operations offshore to avoid the reach of Congress, the IRS and Hollywood. Anybody else ever heard the rumor that the reason Microsoft has invested so heavily in Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor is so that they could up ship and move if the federal heat got too serious? I find such a possibility fascinating, if a bit far-fetched.
We shall see.
Just responses to comments, here.
;-)
1) We didn't refer to it as spelunking. We were not in caves. We were, in fact, aware of this.
2) I carried a kukri 'cause it's what I had to carry. And it looked cool.
3) I don't know why it ended up on here. But it's funny that it did.
4) I know how Jon Katz feels now. Boy, oh boy.
5) I refuse to take stylistic criticisms from people who learned to write prose from reading manpages.
6) Having slashdot and the Drudge Report link to you means never having to worry about excess Yahoo! Mail server space again.
It's always funny to see what people will write about others when they think nobody's looking. I expect most Slashdot reader think all alt.weekly writers are clueless Luddites. Apparently nobody considered that one of the writers of this piece might also be the paper's technology columnist and a former Mondo 2000 writer...which means, of course, that he's got Slashdot permanently on screen all day.
That, of course, would be me.
Thanks for the comments, both good and bad. This is a weird piece for me--usually I'm writing about shit like Open Source and web art and quantum computing. But it was fun to write. I've gotten almost two hundred e-mails since the Drudge Report picked it up last night...weird for a guy who's stuck in a Hee-Haw shithole like Vegas. Do you know how bad it sucks to only see other nerds three times a year (Comdex, CES, DefCon)?
This piece has gotten picked up by everyone. For those of you who thought it was boring...yeah, I know. But listen: the sitch is this. In Vegas, the homeless are pushed aside and hidden by the city, because we wouldn't want to offend the fucking tourists. It's repugnant. The fact is that this piece has done more to highlight the situation than anything else in local media--most of which is completely beholden to the gambling industry.
We went on one of the most popular drive-time radio shows this morning (KOMP 92.3) and I called the city's attitude towards the homeless contemptible. I also mentioned that our mayor, Oscar Goodman, recently claimed in a speech that there "are no homeless in Las Vegas". I suggested that, based upon this remark, Mayor Goodman might in fact be a crackhead.
He is very angry. Which means I did the right thing.
Anyway, just wanted to weigh in with my two hundred cents. But it's nice to be noticed, you know? And seriously, thanks for all the comments, positive and negative. I'm surprised Slashdot ran this at all, but it's sort of cool from my geek perspective.
Cheers,
Dr. Joshua Ellis