malvasia bianca

Some songs from Striking 12 came up in shuffle mode on the way to day care earlier this week, and Miranda decided she wanted to listen to more of it. So we’ve been making our way through the album.

Some rhymes I was amused by, both from “Resolution”:

What’s there to celebrate about?
I’d rather stay at home and grout
My shower stall than watch the ball:
I won’t go out.

I ask you: what’s not to enjoy?
My cat, my couch, no hoi polloi.
I don’t need my coat, just my remote
And my La-Z-Boy.

A very good band, to the extent that I find them rather frustrating: there are stretches where I love the lyrics (for both wordplay and story reasons), where I love the tunes, where I love the instrumentation, where I love the way they use their voices. And even stretches where they put all that together. But there are also a surprising number of songs (given the quality of their peaks) that just don’t click for me. If they were just a bit more consistent, I would be happy to shout their name from the rooftops; as is, I’ll happily recommend Striking 12, at least. (Their latest, A Little Midsummer Night’s Music, didn’t do anything for me on first hearing, alas.)

Forget Halo 3, GTA IV, and all that: it’s starting to look like the real reason I’ll get an Xbox 360 this year is that there’s an RPG coming out for it starring Frederic Chopin. Yes, that Chopin. From IGN’s capsule summary:

Three hours prior to [his death], Chopin saw a dream of a fairy-tale land populated by people with incurable diseases but also magical powers.

Now, I ask you: who wouldn’t want an RPG with that as its premise?

(Speaking of works about Chopin, of the first things Liesl and I went to together was a showing of Impromptu. We were supposed to go with our friend Jim Blandy, but somehow he neglected to show up. At first, we assumed he was setting us up, but no, he just forgot…)

I’ve finished my somewhat quixotic effort of backing up my CD collection. (Or rather ours: most of them I bought, a few Liesl bought. Miranda’s are, alas, not backed up.) They’re all backed up both on-site and off-site, with the sole exception of Rongchun Zhao: Master of the Erhu. Which last is a pity, since it’s a rather good CD, and it doesn’t seem to be currently available anywhere. (Here’s a video of one of the songs.) Ah well; I’ll have to go out and buy another 8 or 9 CDs, at which point I’ll have an excuse to burn another DVD backup. In the meantime, that CD is stored (lossily) on the iPod in my pocket, so I’ll probably still have a copy if the house burns down.

The full list of artists is below; I’m happy with it. I’m not quite as big a Stravinsky fan as all that, I just have a big boxed set of performances of his music that he conducted, and Wagner only gets so high because I’m counting on a per-disc basis (15 = the Ring), but in general it’s not too misleading.


panini$ ls */* | cut -f2 -d/ | cut -f1 -d- | uniq -c | sort -rn | more
62 bach
29 beethoven
28 stravinsky
27 shostakovich
24 britten
22 mahler
15 wagner
14 beatles
11 gronemeyer
11 freberg
11 anderson
10 brubeck
10 berio
9 guthrie
6 schoenberg
6 janacek
6 bartok
5 lang
5 handel
5 bruckner
4 thomson
4 porter
4 martin
4 dylan
4 brahms
3 webern
3 webber
3 u2
3 strauss
3 simon
3 schumann
3 rameau
3 offenbach
3 oberlin
3 mussorgsky
3 lehrer
3 hindemith
3 gubaidulina
3 groovelily
3 flanders
3 dvorak
3 davis
3 costello
3 charming
3 andrews
2 walton
2 they
2 sweet
2 ravel
2 ragin
2 namco
2 mozart
2 modern
2 lutoslawski
2 lennon
2 klezmer
2 gluck
2 eisenberg
2 dahlstrom
2 coltrane
2 bobs
2 biber
2 bernstein
2 berg
2 amos
1 zhao
1 zero
1 zemlinsky
1 zappa
1 willan
1 weill
1 weavers
1 watson
1 valdes
1 tsuji
1 tonic
1 thomas
1 tavener
1 sweelinck
1 sondheim
1 siberry
1 seeger
1 schmidt
1 saint
1 rush
1 rogers
1 respighi
1 red
1 public
1 prokofiev
1 prince
1 powell
1 picker
1 peace
1 part
1 orff
1 mouth
1 mountain
1 morris
1 messiaen
1 makeba
1 louis
1 lipitone
1 leroux
1 lauridsen
1 indigo
1 horowitz
1 guem
1 grieg
1 gospel
1 funaro
1 elizabeth
1 deep
1 debussy
1 davies
1 copland
1 cooper
1 carter
1 camper
1 bush
1 blue
1 blades
1 ben
1 africa
1 adventures
1 advent
1 adams


I learned about the band GrooveLily from an episode of Next Big Hit. I wasn’t paying too much attention when the song, “No Room In Your Bag”, started: a patter song over a drum backing. But then some chords on the piano came in, the instrumentation started getting richer (electric violin, yay), and I started realizing that I rather liked the lyrics. (Not to mention the singer’s sliding into falsetto.)

Quite a song; it’s stuck in my head since. I hesitate to link to a myspace page, but it seems to be the best place to listen to the song. (There’s also a live version available on the band’s web site, but the instrumentation is worse, so I won’t link to it here.) About marriage, gender structures, jobs, academia (in part), art, kids: all things that are dear to my heart.

And about making choices, choices with serious consequences, yet not being paralyzed by the consequences of those choices. The title of the song comes from the chorus:

You make a choice, you make a call.
You may rise, you may fall.
You will pay for what you get.
You’ve got no room in your bag for regret.

So: you make choices. They have consequences, potentially serious ones, and won’t always turn out the way you expect. But, if they don’t, wishing you’d chosen differently isn’t going to do squat for you.

I’m not sure why this is rattling around in my head so much right now. I don’t want to give my readers the impression that my life was full of bad choices, choices with unpleasant consequences, because that simply isn’t true: I’m quite happy with the way that basically all of my major life choices have turned out. (And I don’t spend time worrying about the minor ones, either!) But the meme does seem to be showing up in my environment a fair amount; one bit I may post about later, but I’m also thinking of a discussion on the XP mailing list about the prime directive for retrospectives.

Some people like the directive, some people don’t, and I’m not sure myself which side I come down on, but we can all agree that certain aspects are positive. It’s not that you don’t look at the effects of your past choices - if you’re not going to do that, then you’re not holding a retrospective! But that doesn’t mean that you should spend your time beating yourself up over bad consequences. (Or beating other people up, which seems to be more the thrust of the prime directive: don’t waste your energy on blame.) Make a good effort to learn what you can from the past, see if you can come up with a strategy to do better in some way next time, and leave it at that.

Anyways, enough on regret. I got GrooveLily’s album Are We There Yet? on the strength of that song. The album doesn’t live up to its promise, but there are several nice moments. One of my favorites, on the first track: the lyric “I’m feeling paranoid” coming up in a context where you think we’re going to get a Freud rhyme, but no: “Hanging like Harold Lloyd”. They seem to be turning to the stage more these days (or maybe they have a long stage history - I should look into their back catalog); I just finished listening to Striking 12, a charming musical based on “The Little Match Girl”. (I was amused by this Anime Music Video based on the song “Screwed-up People Make Great Art” from the album.)

Good stuff; I plan to listen to more of their music.

• As presentations about how the world is changing go, this one is well done.
• An excellent use of Post-It notes.
• An assembly line moving two inches a minute.
• Sprout is a delightful way to spend half an hour or so. You’re a seed that learns to grow up into different plants, which you use as a way to move: coconuts roll, dandelions blow on the wind, etc.
• The Super Mario Bros. theme, played by its creator.
• Lost Garden on waterfall, agile, and “stage gate”. Where the latter looks a lot like some of what’s in lean software development but not traditional agile: see the Poppendieck’s discussion of funding models and of set-based design.

There had been rumors at the end of last year that, some time this year, EMI would allow non-DRM versions of its music to be sold online, so I wasn’t completely shocked by the recent announcement. But I was still surprised, and surprised it happened so early. Nice to see one record company behaving sanely. (Or at least behaving in the way I’d like them to; the jury is certainly still out on whether or not it will help their business goals.)

The details are a little interesting: bundling no DRM with a higher quality and a higher price point. The higher price point is obvious enough, and I’m glad it’s only for singles instead of albums; I’m curious how the higher quality came to be, though. Was Apple arguing for a single price point, EMI wanted a higher one, and Apple relented if they’d raise the quality? Does somebody have an interest in muddying the experiment, to make it harder to tell the effects of no DRM alone? Had Apple been wanting to raise prices all along, and this was a way they could do it without losing face? Could it be some strange way to make it easier to track illegal copies of the non-DRM music purchased in this manner? (That would really be stretching it.) Did somebody just decide that higher bit rates are good, and this is where they’d introduce it? I’m betting that this linkage is a face-saving gesture somehow, I just can’t figure out the details.

I would say that this makes me want to go out and buy more EMI music, but it really doesn’t. For one thing, I buy music based on what I want to listen to rather than the publisher, and for another thing, my preferred medium of purchase remains CDs. This will have an effect on my purchasing habits if/when indy publishers are allowed to sell non-DRM music through iTunes, however: it occasionally happens that I learn about a band through Next Big Hit and am unable to purchase their music on a CD. Until now, that’s meant that I won’t purchase their music at all (though I might give in and sign up for one of these MP3 subscription services at some point), but I would be willing to purchase their music on iTunes under the new rules. Who knows, maybe at some point I’ll give up on my “only buy albums” philosophy, and start buying individual tracks as well.

The CD database that Max uses lists the artist for Deep Voices as “Various Whales”. Yay.

Liesl is playing through Bust-A-Move ‘99. And there’s this one song that’s the most insanely perky, catchy song ever. Dah da. Da da da dah da. Da da da da da da da dah dah dadadadah…

Wii version next month!

Elite Beat Agents is a music game for the DS. It takes its mechanics and much of its style from a Japanese game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan; apparently, however, Nintendo of America thought that my country’s youth would prefer secret agents to male cheerleaders dressed in black, and American pop to J-pop. (Imagine that.)

The cool video game bloggers all disagree with NoA on that score, and I suspected that I’d prefer the original, too, but I didn’t feel like ordering it from an import store. And the US version has gotten reasonably good reviews - clearly its sense of style hadn’t entirely vanished in translation.

I was a bit dubious about the idea of a rhythm game on the DS, but the mechanics turn out to work rather well. Numbered buttons appear on the screen, with shrinking circles surrounding them; you’re supposed to tap the buttons when the circles shrink to the size of the button. There are also some paths which you have to move your stylus along as the speed of a ball. Pretty basic stuff, kind of artificial, but I’m not sure it’s any more so than any other rhythm game out there. (It just doesn’t have an alternate controller hiding the artificial nature.)

It begins with two difficulty levels opened up; I tried the harder one. And I was glad I did: the first few songs were quite easy. Fun, though - I didn’t mind the music, and the illustrations that went along with them were pretty funny. (My favorite one is when you play Leonardo da Vinci trying to woo Mona Lisa with your fabulous drawings and inventions.) Five or six songs in, though, it starts getting harder: I was working just to survive the songs, let alone to get a good rating on them. (Depending on how you’re doing during the story interludes in the song, you’ll get a good result or a bad result in the interludes: Mona Lisa may like you or spurn you, etc.) The last three, plus the one where you’re a car company heir dressed as a ninja sneaking into your competitor’s factory to retrieve some plans, are all really tough.

After which I unlocked the third difficulty level, and had to start all over again. Again, the earlier songs were really easy, but the later levels were quite tough. This time, though, when I got frustrated with the later levels, I went back and replayed them on the second difficulty level; they’d magically gotten quite easy in the interim. Which is a good sign on the gameplay mechanics: there is a real learning curve, you do get better as you go along, and getting through the tough ones is more of a matter of skill than luck.

And by the last level on the fourth and hardest difficulty setting, I needed all the skill I could muster. I think it took me something like three hours to make it through that level, and the part of my finger where the stylus rests was starting to get sore. But I never (well, almost never) felt that it was being unfair: I just had to do a better job of memorizing the tricky bits, and not losing my concentration over the course of the four or five minutes that it took to get through the song.

Liesl likes it, too: she’s banging her head against the third difficulty level now. (Or maybe she’s just finished that, I can’t quite remember.) When I finished it, I thought I’d go out and get the Japanese version, but I’m holding off for now; I’m in the mood for more J-pop (my entire collection of which consists of the two Katamari soundtracks, plus a greatest hists collection by Tsuji Ayano containing the excellent theme song from The Cat Returns - any other recommendations?), but the one video I’ve watched of a level on the Japanese version didn’t immediately grab me. And I have enough other games on my maybe-play list that I should give other genres a try.

Recommended; not as wide a range of songs as DDR, I suppose I like the controls in Guitar Hero a bit more, but worth playing.

I’ve finally finished backing up all my CDs which are filed under the letter B. Of which there turn out to be 176, approximately a third of the collection. The distribution:

panini$ ls | cut -f1 -d- | uniq -c | sort -rn
     62 bach
     29 beethoven
     24 britten
     14 beatles
     10 brubeck
     10 berio
      6 bartok
      5 bruckner
      4 brahms
      2 bobs
      2 biber
      2 bernstein
      2 berg
      1 bush
      1 blue
      1 blades
      1 ben

Most of which are obvious, but some notes: “bach” includes two by P.D.Q. Bach; “bush” is Kate Bush, “blue” is Blue Scholars, “blades” is Ruben Blades, “ben” is Jorge Ben. (The latter two being Liesl’s, actually, so I’m less familiar with them.)

I wonder if Bach by himself will beat out all other letters of the alphabet? My guess is that S will edge him out; we shall see.

I might as well comment comment on Jobs’ recent DRM is bad letter. At first, it was really exciting. But there’s a fair amount of intellectual dishonestly there, too:

Item: The statistics are bogus. You can’t just divide the number of songs sold on iTunes by the number of iPods sold and get anything meaningful. I don’t know if they count me as having bought 3 or 4 of them; I actually own 2 (I lost one, one I got replaced under warranty). Now, I haven’t bought any songs on iTunes, but if I had, I’d put them on all of my iPods. So, if I’m a typical user, his calculation of the number of songs per iPod is off by a factor of 3 or 4.

Item: He claims that licensing FairPlay would make it less secure. I have no reason to believe that; other recent commentariess have pointed to an example of licensed DRM that hasn’t been broken any more frequently than FairPlay, that music companies have been willing to license their music for.

Item: He says he’d be happy to sell MP3s, and invites record companies to begin doing so. The thing is, there are already people who want to sell MP3s on iTunes; Apple won’t let them. If Jobs thinks MP3s are so great, he can start selling them today.

Still, I’m optimistic. For one thing, it’s nice to see somebody important publicly acting as if he wants what’s good for users. Heck, maybe he even partly believes it. For another thing, there seem to be rumors suggesting that the record companies will start making their songs available as unencrypted MP3s; this removes one barrier to that.

Looking forward to how this all plays out.

• I didn’t realize it was possible to beatbox while playing the flute.
• Gyoza stadium sounds awesome.
• Star Wars in ASCII.
• I spent a pleasant hour last weekend watching Ben and Fitz’s poisonous people talk. (And then caught myself exhibiting one of those symptoms on a mailing list last week. Sigh…)
• I suppose you’ve already seen Peter Gutmann’s cost analysis of Vista content protection, but if not, give it a read.
• I didn’t really get Line Rider the first time I saw it, but now I’m starting to understand. Also a good example of why we don’t want copyright law to get in the way of mixups.
• Map of the internet.
• The Japanese Wii safety manual.
• A nice optical illusion page.
• Go Sun!

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence.

Examples:

• We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she really loves it. She started on the DS version, but the GameCube version has been drawing her curiosity on the shelf for some time, so she started playing that, too. She prefers the latter, and, watching her play it, I’m surprised how much I agree - some of the gameplay changes are for the better, some are for the worse, but it’s just nice seeing the game on a full screen instead of a tiny one. I’ve even gone back and played a few times myself, if for no other reason than to answer letters that she’s sent me.
• She likes using computers, and wants to use both of them. So she’s quite frustrated that the mac is in for repairs (and taking longer than Apple had led me to believe) and that I’m still not letting her use the Linux box; my excuse for the latter is that I want to switch to Ubuntu first, and I have some things I need to do before doing that (rearrange filesystems, burn an Ubuntu DVD), and it would be easier to burn a DVD if my Mac were back. If it takes much longer, though, I’ll find another way: I do approve of Miranda using Linux, after all.
• She mainly uses the computer to draw, and Tux Paint will work fine on the Linux box. She’s also discovered browser games; there, the story isn’t so good, because Flash doesn’t work in 64-bit environments, and I don’t feel like going through the rigamarole of getting a 32 bit browser running there. (Java should work, though.)
• I let slip the fact that drawing tablets exist, which she’s quite curious about, but I’m going to wait a while before buying her one of those - she actually is fairly serious about her drawing, but I don’t think she’s come very close to exhausting the possibilities of analog methods, and I imagine a good tablet isn’t cheap enough to buy on a whim.
• She’d also like to have more software available. Which I’d be happy to get for her; I’m just not sure quite what she’d like the most. I just don’t have good info as to quality kids’ software. (Not that I’ve looked very hard.)
• She also is talking about how she wants to make her own games on the computer. (Her ultimate game is an improved version of Animal Crossing.) I’m happy to support that, and I’m not in a horribly bad position to help. Having said that, it’s not clear to me exactly what to start with - one simple question is, what language should she work in? Given the games she plays now, some obvious possibilities would be Java and Flash; I know nothing about the latter, though. Are its authoring tools free? I should do some research on that, and see if there are intro programming books that focus on game programming. (I would think that such a thing would exist somewhere - it must be one main reason why people become curious about programming.) Admittedly, I doubt that anything will come of this - I suspect that she’s much more interested in the fantasy of having written a game than the reality of programming, but who knows.
• She’s also getting more consistent about wanting to learn how to play an instrument. Not the piano, which is too bad; sometimes flute is the main possibility, sometimes violin. Her desires haven’t settled down enough for us to do anything about them yet, but I imagine we will at some point over the next year.

Other excellent daughter moment: we told her she could pick a DVD for Christmas (we knew she was already getting several others from relatives). At first, she wanted The Little Mermaid, but after thinking it over for a little while, she decided that she’d rather have the first volume of the anime of Hikaru no Go. She was also quite pleased with the manga of The Cat Returns, and read it through rather quickly.

Background: Miranda’s school recently changed its chorus time from lunch to after school. This means that Miranda won’t be able to participate in chorus this year, which makes all of us sad.

I was going to rant about this on the PACT mailing list, but I’ve gotten chastized recently for complaining there near the start of the school year, when there are so many new families around who still aren’t sure if they want to be in PACT or not. (Which is, I think, a sign of mild dysfunction in PACT: we should be constantly discussing things we like, things we don’t like, and ways for improvement. Go retrospectives, or something.) New PACT parents, if you’ve clicked on this link: PACT is super-tiptop-wonderful, and Castro’s actually a pretty nice place as well; neither of them are perfect, but That’s OK.

Anyways, since the point of having a blog is to be able to rant, I figured I would just move the venting part here. But I did want to warn my regular readers that they might be missing some of the context. The part of the message that I did post on the mailing list is a report of a discussion that I had with the principal on the matter. (I should emphasize that I’m quite impressed with the principal; I think she probably made the wrong choice here, but, well, that hardly makes her unique in the world.)

Context ends; rant begins:

The one thing that really bothered me about our discussion was her presenting this as a choice between curriculum versus convenience. The assumption underlying that statement is that chorus is not a natural part of the curriculum, and the only reason to hold it during school hours would be to save parents some driving. I’m not sure it’s a matter of mere convenience for parents, given the realities of work schedules, but setting that aside, I very much object to the notion that chorus should be considered a second-class member of the curriculum.

Certainly when I was growing up, chorus (and related activities, orchestra and band) were held during school hours. It’s possible my experiences were unusual, but I don’t believe they were too unusual at the time. One of the frequent laments triggered by the loss of school funding over the last decades is that arts/music programs are being pared to the bone; one of the reasons why it was supposed to be a good idea to close Slater was that it would free up more money to fund arts/music programs. So I don’t believe that I’m alone in believing that chorus (and related activities) have historically been part of school curricula, and rightly so.

I also see no reason why music should be considered so much less important than, say, reading/writing and math that we can’t spend a couple of hours a week of school time on it. I’m an ex-mathematician, so my experiences in that regard are very far on one side of the spectrum, but I nonetheless spend much more time in an average week listening to music than doing math, and I’m pretty sure that I spend more time creating music (singing, whistling, playing the piano) than doing math. Admittedly, I spend a good deal more time reading, or even writing, than either, but music is wired extremely deeply into our brains.

And, while I don’t have evidence one way or the other, I would be surprised (not shocked, but surprised) if it proved to be the case that students who participated in chorus (or other similar activities) did less well academically, or indeed didn’t do better academically, than students who didn’t participate in such activities. And, of course, our schools’ focus shouldn’t be solely on academics, but should be geared towards helping our children become the best people they can be in a broad sense.

So, from my point of view, this is not a choice between curriculum and convenience: it’s a choice between two different views of curriculum. And the wrong view won.

Then there’s the whole program improvement thing. (Context: Castro is a “program improvement” school, which means that our test scores didn’t pass muster by the powers that be.) I don’t really understand what pressures the Castro faculty are under because of this, but I’m sure they are considerable. This situation seems to me to exemplify one of the evils of our nation’s current zeal towards test-driven schooling: rich schools, where the kids do well on tests, are free to provide a broad curriculum for their students, while schools that are already less well-off have further pressures to narrow their curriculum beyond what funding constraints would force them to do.

So I can accept that, because of Castro’s PI status, some people might feel that the pragmatic thing to do would be to reschedule chorus and spend more time on the basics. But, if we’re going to do that, we should be clear what our reasons are for not holding chorus during the school day. Are we doing it because:

• We think that chorus shouldn’t be part of the school curriculum, irrespective of test-imposed pressues, or
• We think that chorus should be part of the school curriculum, but regretfully bow to external pressures?

If the former, then PI status is irrelevant, and it makes me sad that teachers at my daughter’s school feel that way. If the latter, then we should think hard about whether more courage would be appropriate here: do we really believe that chorus students do worse in school or in life, and what messages do we want to send our students?

One unfortunate aspect of the current situation is that either the decision makers haven’t consciously thought about whether the decision is made out of principle or as an accomodation; or, if they have, they haven’t communicated that to the rest of us. Or they have communicated it to the rest of us, and the communication is that they’re doing it on principle. Which I fear might be the case, as much as I would like to believe otherwise.

Another thing that bothers me: I think people should be able to choose their educational priorities whenever possible. So I’m quite happy to accept that music isn’t as important to other people as it is to me: those people may well prefer to have school time devoted to other matters. In which case, great: that’s why chorus is optional! Why not let parents vote with their feet in this matter: parents can choose to either send their child to chorus or to let their child have 25 or 40 minutes (depending on the grade) more of educational time each week? Instead, we have teachers and a principal telling us that such a choice is an inappropriate one.

(Admittedly, that argument has weak points (as of course do all my arguments): in particular, my preferred solution would make it impossible for parents to choose to get the extra instructional time and also get the chorus time by sending their child to chorus after school.)

At the end of last school year, all the schools’ choruses put on a performance. Some schools, including Slater (Miranda’s late, lamented school) had more than fifty students there (it might have been closer to a hundred than fifty). Almost all schools had at least a few dozen students there. And then there was Castro, which had a grand total of six students present at the concert, or approximately one percent of the student population. At the time, I thought that was a bit weird, but at least PACT’s presence at Castro would change that. Now, it looks to me like it wasn’t a fluke at all.

I’ve finally started backing up my CD collection, only half a year after I planned to do this. The goals are:

1. To have lossless backups, including offsite ones, of the entire collection.
2. To do whatever error correction is possible when creating the backups.

(The vast majority of the CDs are between 10 and 20 years old, and are showing their age.)

If it weren’t for the second point, I would backup the CDs by doing dd if=/dev/cdrom of=.... But I don’t trust that to produce as clear a copy as possible.

Digging around, there seem to be various tools which specialize on doing good copies: cdparanoia for Linux, Max, for MacOs, and Exact Audio Copy, for Windows. Since my CD collection is located in the room where my Mac is, Max seems like the way to go.

Unfortunately, this is where my naivete about just what is on an audio CD begins to show. My naive method produces one big file for the entire disk. Max, however, wants to generate a collection of files, one per track. My understanding is that, if I tell Max to generate WAV files, then that’s more or less the same data as the naive method (on a disk where reads are error-free). But is it exactly the same data (modulo trivial packaging), or is there some sort of extra data that I’m missing? I know CD’s contain almost no metadata, but I’m worried about stuff like gaps between tracks - iTunes has a habit of screwing that sort of thing when ripping CDs (though they claim to have improved that with the latest release), and I have several CDs (e.g. operas) where that is quite annoying, so I’m a bit worried that I’m missing something there.

Does anybody know of a good FAQ on these matters? I’m having a surprisingly hard time piecing together the information that I’m looking for: what exactly is on an audio CD, what the relationship is between that and a collection of WAV files.

Anyways, I’m glad I’ve gotten started. It may take months for me to actually finish the process, but it should be a relatively mindless one from now on. (Assuming that a collection of WAV files proves sufficient.)

What are good formats to use for purchasing and storing music and movies? I remember a time in the past where it was possible to pretend that Ogg Vorbis was a reasonable choice for many of your audio needs; that is, unfortunately, no longer the case.

Desirable qualities for a format, in no particular order:

• Quality should be as high as possible.
• File size should be as small as possible.
• The standard should be open.
• The standard should be unencumbered.
• There should be a wide range of software tools (including free ones and best-of-breed ones) to play the format, on all platforms I use.
• There should be a wide range of hardware devices (including best-of-breed ones) to play the format, in all locations where I’d like to use it (home, car, bus, jogging, …).
• There should be a wide range of software tools (including free ones and best-of-breed ones) to convert to/from the format.
• It should be possible to easily purchase content in this format.
• It should be possible to easily find free content in this format.
• I should be able to easily copy, excerpt, etc. the content for the forseeable future.
• The format should support adding metadata (titles, composer, performer, album art, …)
• The format should support aggregation (e.g. a podcast with multiple pieces of music should be a single file with indexing).

These are, of course, incompatible goals, but never mind that. Given the above, what are the conclusions?

One is that DRM is to be avoided: it fails on the copy/exceprt criteria, and probably also fails on open standard and free tools criteria. Having said that, it’s almost impossible to purchase video without some sort of basic DRM being involved. So, in some circumstances, I guess I can live with DRM, as long as tools for cracking it are widely available. Which is, fortunately, the case for DVD’s, though I’m somewhat worried that hardware might start getting in the way there. (For example, my understand is that many current DVD drives force you to respect region encoding.)

What are suitable audio formats? The aforementioned Ogg Vorbis unfortunately doesn’t look so hot to me. The big reason is that best-of-breed hardware devices don’t play it: I can’t use it on my iPod. There’s very little content available in the format. And it’s lossy, so I can’t store content in it and convert it to other formats as necessary.

Also, its main advantage over MP3s is that it’s unencumbered by patents. The problem is, in this crazy day and age, I don’t know if I can even be sure of that. There are so many overbroad software patents being granted that I can’t be confident that any decent a/v compression format couldn’t be attacked by patent trolls.

So, basically, it only helps me if I want to burn a CD and play it on a computer using particularly purist tools. And that’s a situation where I never find myself. The only Ogg Vorbis files I had on my computer were from Lambda Expressway, but now I see it’s available as MP3s, so that won’t be necessary any more.

So, in practice, there seem to be three obvious candidates for music: Audio CDs, MP3s, and AAC files. Audio CDs are widely available for purchase, playable in lots of ways, as high quality as is easily available, easily convertible to other formats. The downside is that file sizes are somewhat large, and they’re lacking in the metadata department.

MP3s are quite widely available, too. File sizes are smaller; quality is generally acceptable for my listening purposes. They’re lossy when compared to CDs, though, which makes them less suitable for archival purposes. Better than CDs for metadata, but there’s room for improvement there. Bad for aggregation. Also, it’s quite difficult to purchase MP3s; I hope that will change in coming years (decades?), but maybe I’m over-optimistic. Tons of players.

AAC is one of my current favorites: it has most of the advantages of MP3s, but does better in metadata and, especially, aggregation. So it’s a great format for podcasts. Slightly fewer players, but enough of them for my purposes. The patent situation seems somewhat better than that for MP3s, but not perfect.

MP3s and AAC suit my needs for free stuff. For purchasing, CDs are good, but it would be nice to have a format that I liked that would enable me to purchase music digitally. Unfortunately, all the choices suck: Apple’s and Microsoft’s DRM solutions are both loathsome. So, for now, I’m buying music on CDs: I’d rather do that, wait a couple of days to have it shipped to me, and rip it myself, than have music delivered quickly and painlessly in either of those formats. I have to think that this suggests that the recording industry could find a way to make more money off of me if they were willing to give up on DRM; the recording industry is not, alas, well-known for its forward-thinking business acumen.

I am a little worried that, at some point, music that I care about won’t be available on CD. Recently, for example, I wanted to get music of some of the artists I liked from Next Big Hit. They’re all independent, so it wasn’t too surprising that I couldn’t find all of them at Amazon; that’s what CD Baby is for. But I couldn’t find any of the music from one of them there, either; looking at her website, I did find her music for sale, but not on a CD, and some of it was apparently only available from iTunes.

So it sucks that new artists are getting caught up in DRM protection that’s really designed to serve (or “serve”, perhaps) the interests of large labels. Fortunately, in this case I could just e-mail the artist directly, and it turned out that she did have a few copies of her CDs left over. But a taste of a world that I’d just as soon avoid.

For video, the story is less pleasant. There’s no long-standing open format like CDs. Videos that are on the web are generally either in Quicktime (which encompasses many different formats, but these days I can usually play it under Linux) or Windows Media (which I can’t play under Linux). Actually, that’s not even true - videos are frequently hidden behind Flash front-ends to the extent that I don’t know what the underlying format is, and can’t get at the bytes short of doing a tcpdump or something. MP3s and AAC both have analogues, namely MPEG-2 and AVC (a.k.a. H.264), which are as acceptable as their audio compatriates. And there are new physical formats coming out that do look noticeably better than their predecessor, and that will probably be harder to copy and play on free players. (And there’s no reason to believe that this is the end of video formats.)

The upshot is that, for video, I just stick my head in the sand. Fortunately, most stuff on the web I click on once to watch but have no desire to save. And almost nothing I really want to watch is in Windows Media format, so I don’t have to install that viewer on my Mac. I like watching DVDs, but will happily avoid upgrading to newer formats for the indefinite future. (And I’m cautiously optimistic that the general public will be slow to adopt either of the new formats.) I haven’t yet grappled with the whole backup issue: my DVDs aren’t showing signs of age the way my CDs are, and disk space isn’t quite cheap enough for me to want to back them up wholesale anyways.

I suppose I should look on the bright side: no matter what, we live in a much better world now than when we had to deal with LPs, cassette tapes, videotapes. New media are much more robust, much easier to copy, much higher quality, much more broadly available. And the current RIAA leadership will retire eventually.

I just upgraded to iTunes 7; I wish I hadn’t. Downloading fancy album cover is nice (though I wish I hadn’t had to give a credit card number to do so); the reflected images of the album covers are a bit much, but whatever. We’ll see how gapless playback works.

Unfortunately, it turns out that a certain piece of core functionality is broken: as far as I can tell, there is no way to tell it to automatically sync most podcasts with my iPod but to let me manually manage some of them. The previous mechanism that I’d been using for this (only sync checked episodes) has gone away. (The checkboxes themselves are still there; maybe the option will be restored in a future update?) The user interface lets me drag and drop episodes, which should also work just fine, but they don’t actually show up on the iPod.

So: buggy software. If it were free software, I’d probably be able to easily find some place I could get a definitive answer and/or file a bug; with Apple, there seems to be no way to do that. There do seem to be customer forums where I can whine; not clear that doing so will help, but who knows. I do hope there will be an update fixing this soon; if not, I guess I’ll look into free software for managing the beast.

Guitar Hero is a music game that comes with a guitar-shaped controller. There are five “fret buttons” on the neck, and a strum button on the body. (It’s somewhat inconsistent on the model it uses - sometimes it pretends to be a guitar with a single string and five frets, and sometimes it pretends to be a guitar with five one-fretted strings.) Pretty standard game mechanics: a song plays, “notes” come down the screen, you have to strum when they hit the bottom while holding down the appropriate fret keys. (With a few minor twists that I won’t go into here.)

The songs are various sorts of rock music; I was only vaguely familiar with most of them, but that doubtless has more to do with my musical background than anything else. Pleasant enough, at any rate. (Miranda particularly likes singing along to “I Want to Be Sedated”.) I hadn’t played any of the songs on a real guitar (other than a few notes of that Deep Purple song); they unaccountably neglected to include “Alice’s Restaurant” as one of the choices.

Four difficulty levels; in the easiest, you only use three fret keys, in the next one, you use four, and in the last two, you use all five. I started on the easiest level, and was pretty unimpressed. A standard button-pressing game; less fun than DDR, and I didn’t like the music as much. (Not that the music was bad, just that DDR’s music is better.) Also ridiculously easy, so I thought I should give the other difficulty levels a try.

The four-fret version was a noticeable improvement. With only three buttons to press, the link between the notes that were playing and the fret buttons was somewhat tenuous. With four fret buttons, however, there weren’t so many glaring mismatches: runs of more than four notes in a single direction are a good deal rarer than runs of more than three notes, for example.

And, actually, playing the game started feeling like playing a musical instrument. To the extent that some of my musical bad habit came back to me: on difficult bits, I was gripping the neck rather too tightly, which is one reason why I could never produce a good vibrato on a violin. The five fret versions (especially the toughest level) felt even more realistic; playing five frets with only four fingers obviously presents certain difficulties, but, with a bit of practice, my fingers were sliding up and down the neck with grace. Quite a lot of fun, really.

Having said that, there were parts of the higher difficulty levels that I didn’t like nearly as much. I really enjoyed richly textured sections. Sections where the notes came faster than the rate at which I was comfortable were not so much fun. There are some techniques that relieve the need to strum all the time, but it’s not so easy (for me, at least) to do those reliably in long fast runs.

And this is where the comparison to a real musical instrument showed problems with the game. If I’m playing a piece on the piano with a tricky fast bit, I’ll concentrate for a while on that part, playing it slowly until the notes are in my fingers, after which I’ll speed up gradually. With the game, however, I didn’t have that option: I had to restart the song from the beginning, at full speed, and hope that I’d do better next time. Which is something I’ve been trained to accept in other sorts of games (albeit not without resentment - see multiple forms in final boss fights without a save point), but here, I just gave up and moved on to songs without such passages, knowing that a better world is possible.

Quite good game. I’m not planning to buy the sequel, and DDR is better, but a lot of fun none the less. Of course, maybe the lesson is that I should spend more time playing piano and less time playing video games…

Now that I’ve finished this and all the sudoku puzzles in Brain Age (good puzzles on the intermediate and advanced levels), I’m back down to only playing two games at a time. Which is much better. That should be enough until Okami comes out in early September; if I’m really lucky, the rumors of a Wii launch on October 2 will pan out. If not, I guess I’ll put more memory in the mac and get Civ 4.

The Cat Returns isn’t one of my favorite movies. I’m happy for Miranda to watch it, and I won’t normally leave the room just because she has it on, but Studio Ghibli has produced much better stuff.

The theme song, however, I totally love. (Miranda and Liesl agree with this.) Very catchy in a rather understated way; and now I know what a ukelele sounds like. It’s in Japanese, of course, and, judging from one translation of the lyrics, I’d quite possibly not like it as much if it were in English.

I got a CD of Ayano Tsuji’s which contained this song. At first, I didn’t particularly like any of the other songs on the CD, but now they’re starting to grow on me. Maybe I’ll investigate further.

(Speaking of Studio Ghibli, I just noticed that Whisper on the Heart has just been released in the US; we’ll see if I like that movie any better.)

A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going on a trip soon, and will want a car adapter for my iPod; that seemed as good an excuse as any to sign up for the service. It comes free for the first three months; we’ll see how I like it.

It’s kind of scary, actually: now, whenever I visit any page on Amazon, there’s this button on the page, and if I click on the button, the item will appear on my doorstep in a couple of days. I’m really not sure what to think about that - I’m much more in the habit of building up a little shopping cart full of stuff, thinking about it for a while. Which I can still do if I want to, but I don’t think I will want to.

While I was there, I ordered a CD. (Taverner’s Lament for Jerusalem, which I learned about from the Naxos podcast. I suspect that podcast is going to turn into a very effective way for them to advertise to me.) And I successfully resisted the urge to order two CD’s: when I finish that one, maybe I’ll order another. (Would Amazon make money if I ordered one CD a week with two-day shipping? Hmm.)

I almost resisted the urge to buy any books. But then I saw that I could pre-order the seventh volume of Hikaru No Go, and I couldn’t resist that, either. In general, I don’t approve of pre-orders, but I’m completely sure that I’ll want to read that book, and in fact will be happy to drop whatever other book I’m in the middle of reading for the thirty minutes or so that it will take me to read it.

Speaking of books, anybody know of any good TCL books? At work, we write our acceptance tests in TCL, and most of us are far from TCL experts; I certainly feel that my lack of TCL knowledge makes me inappropriately frightened of the larguage, and hurts my refactoring. I’m reading the Ruby book right now, but I should probably put some sort of TCL book next on my work reading list.

(Random coment: I just clicked on my current Amazon book recommendations, and they seem to have changed drastically - All Quiet on the Western Front is number two on the list, because I own The Communist Manifesto. Weird for a few reasons.)