Digital Motion dot net

Most of us are probably dealing with this on a much smaller scale. I’ve got a bank of drives sitting around with old projects on them. I should be cycling them periodically, but I don’t always get to it. I’ve got some random old video file formats that I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to read. I’ve got stacks of minidiscs, DV and DAT tapes lying around. Plus tons of old CDRs and DVDRs will backups on them. I’ve had some scares. There was a recording session for transPacific that I’d archived to hard drive and also to about 40 DVDs. At one point, I needed some files, so I grabbed the DVDs. NONE of them worked. Luckily, the drive was still good and I was able to copy the files.

Imagine now that over in Hollywood, they are producing 100s of Gigabytes a day. What the hell do they do with it? This article from the New York times is interesting, but I’d love to see an in-depth interview with a major film studio data wrangler.

The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies – New York Times

Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups – Los Angeles Times

Dozens of striking film and TV writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers with video entertainment on the Web.

This has been expected since the strike began. The writers are frustrated with the system and realizing that they can own it all. The musicians have been living this for a while, but it takes a bit more people to produce a tv show than an album. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Look at all the episodic stuff on the web these days. Let a million small studios bloom!

Create Digital Music » Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pioneering Composer, Dies

Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends at FISTFULAYEN

I’m sorry I didn’t post a link to this sooner. This is a nice perspective on the whole digital music landscape from the boss over at Yahoo Music. We’ve heard from the major labels and we’ve heard from the retailers, but Y! has a different view which is interesting. I’ve followed this since the beginning. I started Unit Circle Rekkids right near the start of the Internet’s explosive growth period. I saw different digital solutions emerge and fall by the wayside. After getting burned on Liquid Audio (if you can imagine, back then you paid them (A LOT) for the software to encode your music so that they could sell it and take a cut).

Over the years, digital distribution has changed from an interesting idea to I think the best solution for indie music. If we can get the majors to get over themselves, I think the days of manufacturing CDs are at an end.

Beatportal has a cool preview of Live 7 up that is a bit more interesting (to my eyes) than the Ableton marketing docs…

Ableton Live 7 – sneak preview

Once in a while I would notice cdconnection popping up as a customer in my sales at cdbaby. After seeing it again this morning, I decided to check out who the heck they were. It turns out that all of the albums from my label are listed there, for sale, at nearly double the price that they are available elsewhere.

So, what cdconnection is doing is listing my albums in their inventory and when a customer buys from them, they buy from cdbaby and then mail it to their customer. This is incredible. Not that cdconnection is doing this. I mean, kudos to them for thinking this scheme up. What amazes is me is that people are buying these overpriced albums from them when they are available much cheaper even at Amazon.com, cd baby or direct from unit circle.

I just did a search on a random unit circle album and I see that cdconnection is paying for #1 placement on google for my artists and albums. The first “real” search result is Amazon. I mean how dumb do you gotta be to not notice that?

This is sort of the genius/evilness of web 2.0. With the magic of technology you can suck in the entire All Music Guide and use it to populate a database for your on-line store. Then you can go find the cheapest prices for your “inventory,” mark it up %200 and fulfill on sales only. The customer is happy, they got the record they wanted (little do they know that they are way overpaying for it), the on-line distributor is happy (a sale is a sale and they’ve already got their mark-up), even the label is happy (a sale is a sale, as long as they don’t do the math and realize that cdconnection is making more money off this sale than ANYONE else including the label/artist/whatever), cdconnection is happy (they don’t have to warehouse anything, they just resend whatever they receive, so it is a nearly pure-profit operation).

Yow.

a couple references:

• Puppies, Flowers, Rainbows and Kittens: Dear Radiohead and the rest of the music industry
• The Long Tail: Radiohead Economics
• The Long Tail: Everything in the music industry is up! (except those little plastic discs)

We’re entering a new phase of the industry and it seems like things are starting to take shape where things were very unclear before. The writing has been on the wall for a long time for the CD. Download is just easier. The CD itself spelled its own doom by downplaying the fetishism of the original vinyl albums: people used to stare at 12″ album covers, if people look at CD booklets once, they almost never look at them twice.

The question has been more about DRM and pricing since iTunes, and it still is, but the future is written on the wall. The bigger question is about the eventual structure of the music business.

Are record companies still relevant? Sure, as promotions vehicles. As talent identification agencies, not so much anymore. That is something they brought onto themselves, though. The way forward for the record labels could have been as the talent scouts. They could have taken advantage of the lowered barriers to entry and lower costs and let a lot of artists bloom. Some of these artists would become mega-stars, some would be marginally profitable and some would lose money (but less money that they would in the old days). Overall, the labels would have probably ended up more profitable and more relevant. Instead, they went the other way. They circled wagons around their big money makers and only signed artists that sounded exactly like their big money makers. Now their money makers are wondering why they have these leeches attached to their earnings when they can do it themselves and the labels are in a true pickle.

The piece of information I’m desperate for as various artists do these experiments around digital pricing is the question that isn’t asked. “Why did you chose to pay what you did?” We can all speculate, but getting the average amount someone willingly paid for a download is one thing, but knowing why they paid that is just (if not more) interesting.  Some more data points not collected: did people download the InRainbows record off bittorrent because they didn’t like giving personal information to the Radiohead store, or did the store not work for them, or was it too slow, or was it just easier since they already used bittorrent all the time anyway?

I hope that future experiments along these lines will ask some questions and tell all of us the answers.

So, I finally bought the Zoom H2. I’d been dancing around it, but I had a trip to Chicago looming and I really wanted to be able to do some location recording there. I decided to buy an H2 and see how well it worked.

Overall, I’m pretty happy. There are some good points and some bad points, but around this price point ($200), you can’t really do too much better for the features. I’ll cover those in a moment, but I do need to make on caveat: I’m using this for a bunch of different things, but mostly for doing ambiance recording and this review is based around that use case. I haven’t tried using the H2 to record a band or an instrument or anything like that. I did use it to record my talk at MAX and also a coaching session for that talk, so I can speak to it as a lecture recorder or something similar (and I will). This is also not an exhaustive review. For that I recommend the review on meefedia, which was recorded on the H2.

Now onto the good stuff.

First off: The size

The H2 next to a 80GB IPod.

The H2 on top of the 80GB IPod.

The H2 is a bit longer, a bit more narrow and double or triple the width of an IPod. This is pretty reasonable and is totally jacket-pocketable. It is also quite light weight-wise. It feels lighter than the IPod, which would make sense since it doesn’t contain a hard-drive. You can put the H2 on a bench or a chair or something and not attract a lot of attention (which I like).

Secondly: Recording Quality

With options for both compressed and uncompressed recording with sampling rates up to 96 KHz and depth up to 24 bits, you are well covered in the output area, what about the DACs themselves? I found them pretty good, reasonably flat and clean. You are obviously making a trade off in cost vs quality here, but the technology overall has improved so much over the years that the H2 sounds pretty good. Amazing, actually, for something so small. For all the sound samples below, I used the built in mics: both the front and rear mics. The mics were also decent. I have external mics that would work with the H2, but I haven’t tried them yet.

Below are some samples from some recordings I made at Millenium Park in Chicago. Unfortunately, when I made these clips in Soundtrack, it converted them all to 32bit float instead of preserving them at 24bit integer as they were recorded. Rather than convert them back to 24bit (introducing any processing that might alter their character), I deliver them as 32bit float (which is not supported by the H2). There has been no processing to them beyond the 32bit conversion.

All of these were recorded at 48KHz/24 bit using the rear microphones (120 degrees) with the exception of the 4 channel recording, all of them were also recorded with the H2 on a small tripod (not the included one).

• A maintenance cart pulls up about 10 feet away (notice the panning): 3.5MB AIFF File
• I flip the microphone from Medium sensitivity to High sensitivity as the maintenance worker is pressure washing the sidewalk: 4MB AIFF File
• A longer excerpt near the video screens/fountains near Michigan Ave: 14MB AIFF File
• A 4 channel recording made near the cafe: 4.4MB front AIFF file | 4.4MB rear AIFF file

Thirdly: REPLACEABLE BATTERIES

I don’t care if your batteries last 14 hours. If I can’t go to a store and buy some new ones when the batteries die, I’m going to seriously consider your device disadvantaged. My camera takes AAs and the H2 does as well. When I ran down the batteries right before my trip to Millenium park, I went to a corner store and bought some more. EASY. IT SHOULD ALWAYS BE THAT EASY. The lack of replaceable batteries was a disadvantage in my mind to all of the other portable recorders on the market, including the H4.

Now for the not so great stuff…

Firstly: Build Quality

At this price, you can’t ask for too much, I guess, but the plastic case and chicklet keys do not convey a sense that this device was built for durability or long life. On mine, the USB port doesn’t completely line up with the hold in the case for it. It isn’t a problem, but it isn’t screaming “quality control” either.

Secondly: The inputs and outputs are on the side of the device

This isn’t an issue unless you are someone who likes to carry the recorder around in your pocket while monitoring with earbuds and recording with an external microphone like I do. For me, it is a serious design flaw. The headphone jack is on the left side of the unit, the external mic jack is on the right side of the unit. This means that unless your headphones and your microphone have right-bend jacks (which few do), this thing will take a bunch more space in your pocket and you’ll risk damaging the jacks any time you try to remove the device or insert it into your pocket. Given the size of the thing, I don’t know what other options they had, but it is an issue anyway.

Thirdly: Usability

Contrary to other reviews, I don’t think the usability on this is that horrible. It certainly could be better, but it isn’t that hard to change settings and do typical things. A couple exceptions: the first press of record puts you into monitor mode, not record mode. This messed me up a few times as I was first using the device. I’m used to monitor mode being the weird thing. This is just a matter of training yourself. The second issue is that the startup time is a bit slow. It could be worse, but if you are carrying your H2 around and then you hear the clock start to chime and you really want to get a recording of it, you better hope that it is pretty late in the morning or night, because otherwise the H2 starts up too slow.

In summary

I’ve been looking for a while for something to replace my mini-disc as my dedicated field recorder. The H2 gives me the quality I need with the features I like at a great price. I’m keeping it.

So, Van Halen’s backing synth tracks were played back at the wrong sample rate during their biggest hit, and then it all goes horribly, beautifully wrong.

[via CreateDigitalMusic]

Shawn Fanning’s Snocap Prepares for Fire Sale – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog

The great thing about the internet is that it is really quite inexpensive to set up a global music download retail site. So inexpensive that everyone is doing it. Snocap had made the MySpace connection, but it is unclear how many downloads they actually sold. With Amazon, coming in very strong and iTunes still capturing the majority of the market, it isn’t surprising that Snocap couldn’t make a go of it.