This is the stupid music item for pee-pole like me. :)65 responses total.
I looked but didn't see a stupid music question item..so here it is. anywho..im trying to identify a song I've heard, I made a mp3 of it...but it sounds like poop..I wanted to find out who sung it...the mp3 is at: http://members.fcc.net/eprom/newage.mp3 its a really short snippet (97Kb). Thanks :)
I can't place it. BTW, your MP3 is nearly inaudible..Z
Sounds very vagueely like Enigma, though it's too short a sample to be sure.
OK, I guess this is my opportunity to ask a stupid music question of a technological bent. This has been puzzling me for some time, but I didn't know who to ask. Let me present what I understand, and someone can tell me where I'm wrong. 1) File transfer programs have been around for a long time. But for most of that time, trading of music files was very rare because the files were too big. 2) Then mp3 was invented, a compression program that made files small enough to transfer. 3) Napster and other such hoohah mostly, or perhaps entirely, consist of mp3 files. 4) It is now commonly predicted, or feared, that Napster if unchecked will lead to the death of CDs and other physical musical-storage media. 5) But mp3 files, being compressed, have very low fidelity. One may accept this when one wants the equivalent of AM radio, but not for high-quality playing at home, and not for music about which one has a stronger interest than in throwaway pop songs. 6) If that is the case, then how is Napster going to drive CDs out of business?
A couple of possibilities spring to mind:
a) a large part of the revenue stream in the music industry
comes from "throwaway pop songs"
b) your reasoning about when musical consumers are willing to
tolerate compromised recording quality is probably incorrect.
most casual listeners (who make up by far the greatest number
of music consumers) are a lot less finicky than hardcore fanatics
Furthermore, there's no carved-in-stone reason why MP3s have to be
much lower quality than CDs. Currently they are because most people
don't have the time, bandwidth, or patience to push around as many
bytes as would be required for a full-quality recording. That's almost
definitely going to change.
Three words: "FM Radio FRee". Record companies have been giving it away for decades on radio. They're making such a big stink about MP3/Napster now because they want precedent, not because they think that particular service will hurt them.
I was of the understanding that MP3s were of significantly higher quality than FM radio. Who are on the top of the charts right now? Britney Spears. N'Sync. Christina Aguigggigugiuggllera. B*Boys. Which of these are not throwaway popsongs? FM Radio isn't the same thing at all. If you want to hear the latest Britney Spears on FM, you gotta wait, or call it in, you gotta put up with the DJ talking over the ends, and possibly not even playing the whole thing... and that's if you wanna hear Britney. IF you wanna hear a few more tracks off the Fuck the Pigs CD, forget it. Also, the radio version's been cleaned for FCC approval, but that's not the record company's doing. FM Radio is a form of advertising. That's why the record compaanies like it. That's where, historically, there's been struggles and scandals as to how much record companies can pressure redio stations to play their music, specifically. Napster is out of the record company's control, entirely. Not the same thinga t all, hardly even comparable.
I loved that spelling of Aguilera... =)
The type of MP3s that most people are downloading are of roughly FM radio quality. But your example of how hard it is to hear your Britney fave on the radio pales in comparison to owning and using a PC to download and use MP3 tracks.
How so? Most people who are heavy music consumers own or have access to computers with Internet connections. Granted, I'm in a poor neighborhood, so most of my neighbors don't own computers, but then, they're not heavy CD buyers either.
It's important to remember that John Q. Public is still not very computer literate.
I think the suggestion is that firing up your computer, dialling up your ISP, browsing the internet for the desired song, downloading it to your computer, finding the place on your computer where the browser stuck the downloaded file, and invoking the MP3 player to play the file is just a bit more complicated than turning on the radio and waiting..
Quite right. The record companies should wait five years until all of that involves only a few mouse clicks before interceding. Honestly, compare the ease of use of a computer now vs. five years ago, and the ubiquity of a computer. I believe the relevant phrase is "nipping it in the bud." It might still involve some technical steps now, but if Napster et al were left unchecked, the technical steps would fairly quickly work themselves out. And that also doesn't address the core point: RAdio isn't on-demand, and you can't get complete songs without some DJ talking over it. Perhaps if someone had mentioned cable music channels, which at least don't have DJs (I'm talking about the audio-only DMX channels), which have a wider variety of older music in predictable genres, so you don't have to wait nearly so long for something interesting and don't have to worry about static, but even there, record companies have control of whether or not something gets played, and under what conditions (they can't force something to get played, but they can prevent it from getting played). The current (alleged) difficulty of getting a desired song from the Internet (remembering, once again, that the prime pop music buying public is 14-29, middle income, which is also the prime computer using public for non-business applications) is irrelevant. What's relevant is that radio, TV, DMX, and any other *company* which plays music can be controlled (to some extent) by the owners of that music. This is one major reason why the record companies aren't all that crazy about local microradio stations, below the wattage of the FCC. And certainly why they're not all that crazy about Napster et al. There is at least one company that SELLS MP3s over the Internet, and I don't see the RIAA going nuts about that... it's not the issue of MP3s, it's a plain, simple issue that for some reason a growing number of otherwise educate people seem to be missing: REPRODUCING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE OWNER OF THE COPYRIGHT IS THEFT. FM Radio is ok for a plain, simple reason: the record companies say it's ok. That's not oppression, or The Man coming down on the Masses. That's the owner of the copyright saying, Hey, according to the laws of this country, this song belongs to me, and I can distribute it as I see fit.
Napster is going to be unavailable/offline as of Friday due to the court case. It will be unavailable/offline during the case, which could go on for days, weeks, months...
If mp3 files are of such quality, then why did it require the invention of mp3 to enable mass file-trading? I thought the secret of mp3 was file compression. This will surely degrade quality severely in the ears of anyone beyond a casual listener who just wants the song. Of course there are many such listeners, but there are also many who want CD-quality sound. I'd like to point out one thing about the "theft" of copyrighted material. You aren't stealing the material: the copyright owner still has it too, after all. What you're stealing is royalty payments.
What you're stealing is the right of the creator to control how their cration is distributed. It's called "intellectual property." Copyright law applies just as much to items which are given away by the creator as it does to items which are sold, and to items which are not distributed at all. Even poor-quality WAV files take up 10x the file space of comparable quality MP3 files. Tracks on commercial CDs are roughly the same size as WAV files. You can MAKE high quality (CD quality) MP3 files, but those are probably around twice the size of lower quality files, so people who are trading over the Internet, predominantly via modem (not DSL) lines, are going to prefer speed of transfer over resolution. A standard 650MB CD will hold about 74 minutes of WAV-sized files, or roughly 10MB to the minute. A CD-quality compressed MP3 file will contain roughly 1MB to the minute. I imagine FM-quality MP3s would contain roughly 1/2 MB to the minute. With a five minute song, that's a difference between 2.5MBs for an FM-quality MP3, 5MB for a CD-quality MP3, or 50MB for a WAV file
David, I think you are confusing the ideas of "audio compression" -- where the dynamic range of the music is squished -- with "computer data compression." A good data compression scheme produces no losses when the data is uncompressed. Minidiscs and the MP3 scheme use "lossy" compression, where the software makes increasingly good guesses as to what the human listener won't miss. I couldn't stand first-generation minidisc sound, but now I don't notice anything awful when I'm listening to Leslie's minidisc recordings -- they generally seem better than cassettes, even though minidisc is still using lossy compression. I haven't listened seriously to MP3 files, but when I have heard them they sound about as good as anything else I've heard come out of a computer.
Napster itself is simply a file transfer site. If they sue Napster, they have to sue any other system that allows file transfer. So, ICQ, bunches of email systems that support 3-7 meg transfers, AIM, etc... It's ridiculous.
(I'll leave my Napster comments in item:240. This is, after all, a Short Question Item. :) )
They don't have to sue anyone they don't want to sue. "Selective enforcement" applies to law enforcement, not lawsuits. The argument that the RIAA makes is that Napster hasn't done enough to prevent illegal trading of copyrighted materials. I don't see anything particularly odd or unfair about singling Naopster out, because Napster's raison d'etre is the transfer of MP3 files. ICQ allows illegal exchange of materials, but wasn't created with the purpose of file transfer of predominantlycopyrighted and commercially viable pieces in mind. The majority of people who use ICQ, or AIM, or e-mail, don't spend the bulk of their time using the software to break the law. This is vaguely how the RIAA views it: Let's say it's a college town, Ann Arbor for example. You run a club for college undergraduates. You have a big sign over the bar that says "No Alcohol. No Drugs." But you have rave music on, you encourage smoking, and people around Ann Arbor start to know your club as "The Party Club." Your friend runs a coffeehouse, like NAC. Your friend provides board games, several TVs tuned to silly sitcoms, and sells coffee and bagels. There's a quiet corner of the club, away from the windows, where some ravers figure out they can do X without being seen by random passersby. Now, how far do you honestly think you'd get with the Ann Arbor police when they raid you and find X, LSD, and underage boozing, when you say, "But people do X in my friend's cafe!" Your club becomes a target because, while you nominally attempt to prevent illicit activity, your environment encourages it. That, I believe, is the RIAA's argument. If you played rave music, encouraged smoking, but kicked out any patrons who were openly consuming illicit substances, the courts wouldn't have a leg to stand on. The RIAA's argument is that, while Mapster discourages the transfer of illegal files, they don't do enough to prevent it. Also, your other examples don't generally involve making those files public... better examples would be UseNet, or personal websites. For instance, I have some images on my website that may be copyrighted. I honestly don't know. Anybody could copy them. But even there, my ISP doesn't have a central location it could go to to get a list of all my potentially copyrighted files. Napster does. there's nothing preventing Napster from doing precisely what Metallica forced them to do -- ban all the users who had traded Metallica files. In fact, Napster did it quite readily. Ironically, the fact that they did it so quickly and readily works AGAINST them, legally, since their claim is that they were doing everything they could do BEFORE Metallica came alon. Metallica came along, said, "Do this," and Napster did it, so OBVIOUSLY they han't done everything they could do to prevent illegal file transfer. Earlier versions of the suit, or of RIAA complaints, said basically that... if Napster HAD policed thevarious servers for at least obvious copyright violations (just as if you, the club owner, had gone around kicking out at least the most blatant drug users), then the RIAA wouldn't have a leg to stand on. You, the club owner, can't do much at all about people who slip drugs into their legally-obtained Sprites without your knowledge, anymore than ICQ can do anything about people who transfer illicit files. You CAN do something about the people doing it out in the public, though, and Mapster CAN do something about it on the public servers.
Actually the legal situation for Napster is much worse than brighn describes. Napster's early publicity material said, essentially, "Come to Napster and get the good (illegal) Mp3 files, don't wade through all those boring unsigned performers on MP3.com." And the Napster internal e-mail which the RIAA introduced through discovery made it plain that Napster's intent was to build a business based on piracy.
*I'm* going on how Napster supporters are depicting the service in an effort to defend its morality... in other words, the *GOOD* PR that Napster is propogating. If that's the best defence they can come up with, and *it's* pretty bad, well, we don't really need to talk about the reality. ;}
Paul: "Intellectual property" is not "the right of the creator to control how their creation is distributed." "Intellectual property" is an umbrella term referring to copyright, trademarks, and patents as a group. You're probably thinking of "droit moral," which is the right of the creator to ensure that their work is not distorted or misrepresented, and which has some, but limited, application in U.S. law. That is not the same as contract rights to control distribution of copies, and I am not at all sure why the Napster suit hasn't been fought on contract rights grounds. I'm not free to burn CDs of your song and sell them, even if I _do_ pay you royalties, unless you give me contract rights to do so, so I'm not clear on why lack of royalties is the offense of Napster. (My objection to Napster is that it's the biggest bandwidth hog ever invented, but that's another matter.) In any case, aside from bootlegged unreleased material - which has indeed been stolen - the musicians objecting to Napster are not talking about their work being distorted (droit moral) or that they don't want it distributed that way (contract rights), but over loss of payment for their work (royalties). Ken: Your explanation leaves me even more puzzled than before. If MP3 compression is so good, then why aren't CDs being issued that way? You could fit more music on them, after all. And why is the term "lower fidelity" still constantly being used to describe it? And why did it take so long to develop? File compression is a pretty old art form by computer standards.
I've heard "intellectual property" applied outside of the realm of copyright, trademark, and patent law. I won't get into legal lingo, though, I'm not versed in it. I'm using it as a common parlance term.
I regret I'm such a poor explainer of things....
"If MP3 compression is so good, then why aren't CDs being issued that
way?" Because the CD standard ("Red Book Standard," I think it's called)
was defined in 1980 and the MP3 format did not exist then. Many people
put lots of MP3 files onto recordable CDs -- I believe you can pack about
100 pop songs onto such a CD -- but such homemade CDs cannot be played
back in "standard" audio CD players, only in computers which are programmed
to decode the MP3 format from the CD drive.
(Commercial CDs all have to stick to that 1980 standard if they are to
be played on the millions of CD players which only know that standard.
Getting beyond this standard is a fascinating market problem; there
are currently two new digital audio disk standards, DVD-Audio and
SACD, trying to tackle this topic.)
"Why is the term "lower fidelity" still constantly being used to
describe it?" Because MP3s probably are lower fidelity than CDs.
The questions then become: (1) how much lower is the fidelity?
(2) How many people notice enough to care? (3) How many people are
willing to accept the lower fidelity to get free music?
Does MP3 sound better than a commercially recorded audio cassette?
My gut feeling is yes, and yet those audio cassettes sold by the
millions until recently.
20 million Napster users seem willing to accept the limitations of the
MP3 format, either to preview music they may want to buy later on CD, or
get the tunes for free. I can understand this, since I'm downloading
lots of Real Audio stuff which is probably worse-sounding than MP3.
"Why did it take so long to develop? File compression is a pretty old
art form by computer standards." What's old is perfect compression,
where the file recovered after compression/uncompression is bit-for-bit
the same file. I'd argue this is engineering and not an art.
Lossy compression does become an art; one is making guesses about what
the listener (or viewer) won't miss if the compression process throws
it away. Lossy compression is useless for storing computer data
for archive purposes -- software backups, or tax files, say --
so it's only become useful as a tool as computers have become
entertainment devices rather than calculating machines. That's why
MP3 was late to develop.
Isn't there an upfront processing penalty for schemes liyke MP3? Several years ago I read an article about Brian Ritchie (yes, the Unix guy) working at Bell Labs to develop such compression schemes. They'd realized that as long as decoding was quick they could accept a slow encoding process. So maybe the process of encoding MP3s cheaply needed more modern hardware as well.
In reality, all digitized music is "comperessed" from the standpoint that not all of the original music (every iota) is represented. As analog gets converted to binary, something is lost (or the representation becomes SO large it's utterly unwieldly). Think of a circle drawn on a computer screen. As computers have evolved, the circle has looked more and more accurate... now, with a modern monitor and a high resolution, it's fairly difficult for the human eye to see that it's not a perfect circle... but it isn't. It's impossible for a "perfect" circle to be drawn on a pixelated screen. What's improved over time is the art of maximizing resolution while minimizing memory taken. As to the commercial MP3 issue, wouldn't it make more sense to popularize MP3 *players* first? it's not that difficult to make a CD player that plays both formats, after all, and it wouldn't have to be the case that the old CDs get phased out. Also, CDs that don't take up the whole disc could have both sorts of files on them... a CD that takes up only, say, 85% of the CD would have room for MP3 duplicates, shouldn't it? (And 85% of a 74 minute CD is, what, 64 minutes? Still longer than the standard CD.) One reason for NOT wanting that technology to become standard: When I was a kid, artists were expected to churn out about 30 minutes of music a year... by the time I was a young adult, that had become 45 minutes, and now it's around an hour. An MP3-compatible CD holds about 10 hours, 11 hours of music... great for classical music buffs (all those long operas), but what about pop music? What sort of crap would be on as filler if pop stars were expected to fill 3 hours a year?
What if record labels weren't worried about fitting to an existing medium anymore? If there wasn't a need to not "waste" the rest of a CD, maybe we'll get *less* filler.
It never seems to work that way, though... DVDs hold more than tapes, so we MUST put more on them... CDs hold more than LPs, so we MUST put more on them... Stephen King MUST BE a better writer than Dave Barry, his books are so much longer... Gotta get our money's worth, after all.
But if you download it, and longer "albums" means a longer download, then why wouldn't you just want the single? There's a real demand for singles, actually, and the record companies have been mostly ignoring it. Remember when the movie soundtracks with 1 song from each popular artist became big? And it's easier to get a song out osomebody than a whole CD (ref NIN).
re #27: component players which understand MP3 as well as the "Red Book" CD audio format have been on the market for more than a year now, though it's still not a common feature on models from the major manufacturers. Recently I've started seeing the first portable (discman sized) units that will play MP3s from CD-ROMs/CD-Rs
That's what I thought, but I don't follow home electronics, so I didn't want to make a fool of myself by saying something was on the market when it wasn't even in the works... They tried singles with CDs, and they didn't do well. I wonder how much of that was an effect of the CD-S being out at a time when CDs were twice the price of LPs and cassettes, making the CD-S only a hair cheaaper than a full-length cassette ($4.99 for the CD-S vs. $8.99 for the cassette, if I recall correctly). That, and the smaller format wasn't completely compatible with all players (the mini CD being about half the radius of the regular CD). The drawback to singles in general is laziness. The advantage of a multi-disc player/magazine is that you don't have to get up as often, but that one advantage is enough to cause a real demand for them. Imagine a 10-CD magazine filled with 10-hour CDs... continuous music for over 4 days... Never get up... must have donuts...
The big problem with CD singles was that not all players could play them. That and that they didn't really try very hard to promote singles, so not a huge amount of production and therefore higher per-unit prices.
Why are make-it-yourself CDs not doing better? A few services offer a large variety of songs, of which you pick 12 or so for the price of a standard CD, and yet the concept hasn't seemed to catch on as anything other than a fad. Is it primarily because (as with the "Pepsi points" concept) the songs offered aren't of sizable current interest, or because it's too much thought for the consumer, or because the record companies are deliberately downplaying the concept, or because there just isn't the sort of demand for it that one might expect?
Small CD-singles (CD3 format, the 3" little discs) are pretty much extinct in the US. I did see one at Borders a while back, though, can't remember the artist. However, 5" (standard physical size) CD singles seem to be alive and well, there is a whole wall of them at Tower Records in East Lansing. I don't know why make-it-yourself CDs aren't catching on either: probably it has to do with the limited number of songs available to such services.
That's my own reason for not looking into them... I think CDNow has a make-it-yourself service, and the last time I looked at the options, they were fairly paltry.
Dave Clark Five's Greatest Hits LP would fit entirely on a CD3--they hold about 20 minutes.
My Apex DVD plays MP3s put onto a CD-r disk. However, no CD like features, such as fast audible search, only forward or back a track. I'm not sure if it has to see a .MP3 as the first file to recognize that it can do something with this disk.
re #1: (it *is* short, but the end sounds familiar. do you have
anything longer, or is that the gist of the song?)
thats pretty much it, I'll have to find a clearer copy. (hmm..this could be a chicken and egg thing; to find a copy, I'd probilly need the title of the song, but to find the title, i'll need a clearer copy.)
RE#27 -- In the first paragraph you're totally wrong. There is nothing inherantly 'lossy' about A/D conversion. The theory to explain this has been around since the 1920's.
I ventured into a pop music store for the first time in a long while today. The, uh, work (it wasn't a song by any definition I have for the term) playing over the store stereo consisted of a guy screaming "I'm a liar!" and variants thereof, over a bass track. The album in the "Now Playing" bin was by Radiohead. Knowing that "Now Playing" bins are frequently in error, I am moved to ask: Was this in fact Radiohead? If so, is this what they usually sound like?
Radiohead is one of those bands who don't have a What They Usually Sound Like. But I wouldn't be surprised if that were one of their.....songs. <ducks>
I'd pretty much agreee with #43, except to add that although I quite like
Radiohead's second album ("The Bends") I found their later albums (which
received substantial critical acclaim) too discordant and unpleasant to
listen to..
#42> I would presume the song you describe would be Rollins Band's "Liar."
A fairly seminal agrorock theme; apparently you're not fond of that. Rollins
Band doesn't sound a bit like Radiohead.
Radiohead moans more than it screams, and the closest track that leaps to mind
is "Creep," which does have a very traditional stanza-chorus-stanza
architecture ("Cause I'm a creep / Yeah, I'm a loser / What that Hell am I
doing here? / I don't belong here").
I'm also not used to Radiohead having heavy bass, except heavily
synthesized... but then, that's what Kid A is (heavily synthesized).
sometimes...all i need is the air that i breath...
((I bought Radiohead's OK COMPUTER after it was highly praised by a number of people in last year's favorite album poll here on Grex. It eventually got given away to much younger Grexers.))
I definitely didn't understand the fuss over "OK COMPUTER". I'm not sure you'd like "The Bends", either, Ken, but it's a lot more listenable..
"Pablo Honey" (which has "Creep") is preferable to "Kid A", IMHO. Radiohead has gotten inaccessible, and too often critics confuse "inaccessible" and "artistic."
Paul: I don't know what "agrorock" is, but from your description what I was hearing was certainly not Radiohead. [Guessing that the agro stands for aggressive or aggravating: it was certainly both of those.]
I've heard "agrorock" in reference to post-heavy metal industrial fusion spit-and-bile but not-quite-Death-metal genre consisting most famously of Tool and Nine Inch Nails, among others. Rollins Band is postpunk (Henry Rollins also fronted the earlier Black Flag, usually genred with the Sex Pistols/Ramones school), and usually fairly mean in tempo (although many of the songs are fairly upbeat, like "Low Self Opinion" -- "Liar" and "Civilized" are definitely mean-spirited, though)... maybe a bit early to qualify as true agrorock, but it's the closest genre that comes to mind. The agro stands for aggressive.
(...and not "agricultural," despite what I thought for several years. I'm not sure where that came from. It helps that I hadn't listened to much Tool at the time, and didn't know that the term applied to NIN.)
So it's not agrowcultural?
In spirit, at least, I think it applies more to Tool (whose spit-and-bile is more outwardly focussed) than to NIN (more introverted, although Starfuckers, Inc. is VERY outwardly pissed off, and even makes reference to Carly Simon's "You're so Vain," one of the snidest songs ever written about a specific person [Warren Beatty, IIRC... at least, I think he thought the song was about him]). Agrirock, in contrast, was popularized by John Mellencamp nee Cougar nee Mellencamp, as an alternative to the remarkably similar yet starkly different Urborock of Bruce Springsteen.
Jethro Tull might be agricultural rock, considering who they're named for.
Dickens! I'd forgotten about that... pip pip!
resp:54 Carly Simon wrote the song about Mick Jagger.
I've heard the Warren Beatty explanation more often than the Jagger version.
I thought it was about James Taylor.
She wrote it about ME!
re #59: since she was married to Taylor, that'd make sense. nobody seems to agree on the intended target, though..
Mick sang backup on it, so it's prob'ly not about him.
it's prolly about herself.
Jimmy Hoffa. It's all about Jimmy Hoffa.
it's about alf.
You have several choices: