Technophile Monkey

If you think music sounds good from your PC audio outputs, you are wrong*.

Most PCs come with onboard audio circuits that, at best, sound weak. As if you’re listening to your music through balls of cotton in your ears while the neighbor’s kid is marching up and down your living room shaking a bowl full of glass shards in rhythm with the music.

But there’s a cheap way out of that. The Music Streamer by High Resolution Technologies. It’s an external USB sound interface with a very good D/A converter. This is a semi-audiophile device, several levels above consumer-grade stuff from e.g. Creative. Yet it costs only about the same as your average USB audio interface these days.

This isn’t made for 5.1 surround sound gaming, it only has two analog RCA (Cinch) outputs to hook up to your amp. Of course you can also play games in stereo on it and watch films. Both sounds crystal clear.

I’ve hooked mine up to my Synology NAS (it’s plug and play) and I’m running mpd on it, so now I can listen to my collection of FLAC audio without even switching on the PC, and I can remote control it from any Android phone, a web interface or dedicated clients like Ario or ncmpcpp.

Best purchase of the year! I’m yet again discovering new aspects of albums I’ve bought 15 years ago and have heard over a thousand times. This thing reveals more detail in my music than my CD player. It’s nearly the same sensation as I had going from shitty speakers to semi-audiophile shit.

I bought the small version for CHF 120.00 (around USD 120.00), but if your ears are good enough to hear it and your equipment is good enough to reproduce it, you can go up to USD 900.00 on one of the higher-end models.

(*Okay: If you’ve hooked up some external D/A converter via S/P-DIF or TOSLINK you can get as good or better quality. But then you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?)

Nice! They’re finally visiting Switzerland

Mongolian folk rock experts Altan Urag will be at the ISM, Rue de Lausanne 45-47, 1201, Geneva, playing a concert on Saturday, June 5. 2010, 20:00. If you don’t remember Altan Urag, they’re behind part of the Mongol soundtrack, for example, with songs like Xöx Tolboton. In Mongolia, I think they’ve already released six albums, but none of them seem to have made it to the European market. So Geneva will be a chance to buy the CD(s) and get autographs.

More info: http://www.wmasm.ch/1altanurag.php

First watch the original:

Then try this improved version:

Fucking amazing. Brett Lee? You’re a genius.

Thanks: Ruben.

I’m spamming this band all over the place, so I’ll put it here too. You probably know I’m a big fan of folk and black metal, but I can appreciate folk rock. And this weekend I discovered a most amazing band: Altan Urag. Here with their song Xöx Tolboton:

I think this stuff rocks some cocks. The Mongolian throat singing, the great sound of the Mongolian language, the fantastic array of traditional Mongolian string instruments (morin khuur, ikh khuur, bishguur, yoochin, etc.)… I’m completely in love.

I’ve downloaded their two released albums. There was no other way to get them, neither legally nor illegally. Therefore, one word to Altan Urag’s label(s): Please distribute the fucking CDs more widely. Thank you.

Roman Haefeli and band recorded a short Ubuntu song yesterday.

They lyrics are simple, so sing along: “Ubuntu – no Windows” Well, you gotta get the timing right as well, which might be harder.

After two years, I finally managed to make another mishead lyrics video

It’s Solarfall by Norwegian all-around fun troupe, Immortal.

Rumor has it that metalheads buy way more physical CDs than other people. I’ve witnessed a specialized metal CD store go bankrupt this year, and so I’m not so sure if that rumor is true.

If you want to prove or disprove this rumor, please take part in my survey. It only takes three minutes of your valuable time. Thanks!

The Reg is posting a totally interesting survey that goes some way towards confirming what we’ve been saying since 1998 or so.

When the music industry wakes up and stops being the knee-jerk lawsuit-wielding political lobbyist it is right now, we might get some constructive discussions out of them and help them save their failing business model. The study shows that most people do not “pirate” music and, guess what, the paid-for listening and download services are actually used. By real people.

Once Big Content had removed their idiotic DRM schemes, people started trusting those services and signed up, happy to pay as much (or more) for music as they did when it mostly came on CD.

Why did we see this already in the 90s and the music industry still hasn’t realized it 10 years later? It is a slow behemoth, but even many indie labels seem to be late to the party, and those should be small and agile. Maybe if they replaced the old farts in charge of the music licensing bodies, they could move faster and at least be on time for the next media shift, whenever and to whatever that will be. It would be more useful for them than playing crybaby again when history repeats.

I used to make a physical copy of all the audio CDs I buy to CD-R. Then I’d only listen to the CD-R, in fear of breaking my original discs.

Maybe you think this is madness, but I do own CDs that I’ve been listening to every month since 1989. I don’t want them to break, since they are irreplaceable. Sure, newer versions of the same albums sometimes exist, but they are usually mastered in a very bad way to turn up the loudness to all hell, so all detail that was present in the music is gone. The original CDs from the 80s and early 90s don’t have this problem, they offer much more fidelity. If you’re interested in this crazy loudness competition between studios, it’s sometimes called the Loudness Wars.

But to make the long story short: Copying to CD-R is stupid and annoying, and lossless compressed formats such as FLAC have arrived. Also, terabytes of disk space are cheap. So now I can rip the CD to FLAC and stick it on my RAID NAS, which I backup from time to time. If I ever need a physical CD copy of the music, to play on my reasonable-quality CD player, for example, I can just burn from those FLAC files as they contain pristine versions of the audio. If you use a proper audio player, you can also listen to FLAC files directly on the go, and of course on your computer or network audio player. In case you need to save space or don’t need the quality, you can encode the FLAC to Ogg or MP3 and listen to that copy on the road. All much easier than with CD-R copies!

Here’s how easy it is to rip to FLAC in any decent Linux distribution, in this example using Sound Juicer:

One click, and it rips, encodes and copies to my NAS for safekeeping.

I still have to buy the original disc and have it shipped to me, but that’s okay, I like to have a physical thing from a band in my hands, something I can hide in my sad and sunless CD archive to preserve things until the fall of mankind.

I’ve created a misheard lyrics video for Nightwish’s song Amaranth quite some time ago. It achieved about half a million views on YouTube, but now WMG (which I assume is Warner Music Group) has taken it down. I was told that some people actually sang my misheard lyrics instead of the original ones at concerts, so I’m flattered. But now the video has disappared!

Google/YouTube offers a fantastic service for such situations: AudioSwap. You can swap your movies’ audio tracks for ones that Google has officially licensed from the content owners. This creates a great opportunity for alternative video authors (including misheard lyrics authors) to put their content on YouTube, with fully licensed audio tracks.

I hope that WMG finds their sense of humor soon and licenses Nightwish’s Amaranth to Google, so that my video (and everyone else’s!) becomes available again. Misheard lyrics videos are a fun hobby, but Warner Music Group is being a spoilsport here.

The original video was at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWd6j5rphtg

Update: I’ve now circumvented the problem by placing a muted version of my video side by side with the official Nuclear Blast YouTube video of the track So you can more or less watch it again at this mashup page.