Thursday, March 08, 2007
Looking down the barrel of a Jailbreak
This is my first attempt at a mash-up made from my trusty Dell pc using Adobe Audition software. The track combines the lyrics Beastie Boys'
Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun with the music and lyrics of Thin Lizzy's
Jailbreak. This may not be your type of music but
give it a listen anyway and let me know if it sounds good and is in time. Peace out.
Labels: Mash-Up, MP3
Thursday, January 25, 2007
iPod Generation
According to Nielsen SoundScan, album sales were down nearly 5% for 2006 however total music sales - offline and online - was up by 19% for the year. It seems like online music services may lead to the death of the conventional compact disc however it is not the killer the industry once wanted us to believe. Maybe the new age consumer is no longer interested in paying $15.99 for an album that only contains a couple of good tracks. Maybe we have found that if you want those 2 or 3 really good songs, why not just buy just those for $o.99 each. Ultimately the next generation is going to listen to their favorite tracks in the same way anyhow, that is on their portable mp3 device and the source of the music is nearly irrelevant.
For example, let's look at
Billboard's top selling album this week - Daughtry [which by the way
I really like]. 12 tracks long and has a list price of $18.98 but can be
bought for $13.99 at Best Buy. On the other hand you can purchase individual tracks for
$0.88 each at Walmart.com or even better you can download the entire album, including 2 bonus acoustic tracks, for only $9.44. That is only $0.67 cents per song!
Since the industry would argue that the cost of discovering, developing, recording and promoting a new artist is so high, that the cost of the album has to be such to recoup those invested costs. That seems fair however how does that explain the cost of artists that no longer have those costs or are no longer even in existence? Taking a different example,
Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album [known as IV or ZoSo] was recorded in 1970 and has sold over 22 million copies and the band has sold a total of over 84 million records since 1969. Clearly this artist and label do no have to recoup any out going costs except the physical manufacturing of the disc to be sold however today this legendary album still
sells for $13.99 at Best Buy. If the artist and labels still think selling records is important, they might want to find a way to make the whole disc comparable in price to its online equivalent.
In the meantime, Generation iPod continues to consume their music in their own way and we all stand by and watch the end of the recorded album - at least in it's physical form.
Labels: MP3, Music
Thursday, December 28, 2006
How many songs can it hold?
Can a 2GB iPod Nano hold 500 songs? How about a 4GB SanDisk Sansa player holding 64 hours of music? Neither of these statements are true or at least they need an asterisk or footnote to qualify the statements. Here is the straight dope, MP3 players are portable storage devices that have some finite capacity to store data files. They can hold X amount of data [where X = the storage capacity like 2 or 4 GB].
The iPod Nano has the
following statement when referring to storage capacity:
Song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; actual capacity varies by content.This brings up an interesting question, how long are your songs? Well that depends I guess on what you listen to. For example, if your a fan of Green Day's
Dookie album you would find 14 tracks with a total running time of 39:46. Average song length: 2:49. Now if you happen to be a fan of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album you would have 8 tracks with a total running time of 42:25. Average song length: 5:18. Almost twice as long! If my MP3's were all twice as long as yours, we would have a much different number of songs that we could store on the identical device - because it's all about storage capacity.
The SanDisk Sansa player has the
following statement regarding storage capacity:
4GB of memory plays back over 64 hours of MP3 (128 hours of WMA) music (over 960 MP3/1920 WMA songs)* - based on 128Kbps playback.
This brings up the other major factor is hours of storage,
sound quality. When a CD track is ripped into a MP3 file, it has to be encoded at a specific quality or
bitrate [or more specifically Kilobits per second - Kbps]. The typical rage of bitrate is from 128 Kbps [PC near CD quality] to 320 Kbps [HI-FI near CD quality]. Each bitrate has it's own "compression" ratio, for example 128 Kbps is 1:11 while 256 Kbps is only 1:5 so if you were to take a full CD [700 MB] of music and rip to 128 Kbps you would end up with 63.7 MB of MP3 data however if you were to use a bitrate of 256 Kbps you would have 126 MB of data - again twice as much.
If you were to mix these two concepts in the worst case scenario, the Zeppelin 256 Kbps rip would be
4 times larger than the Green Day 128 Kpbs rip - even though the Zeppelin album is only 3 minutes longer.
So how many songs [or how many hours] can your MP3 player hold? Exactly, it can store as much music as can fit into it's flash drive until it's capacity is completely utilized.
Labels: MP3, Technology
Friday, November 24, 2006
Telemarketing Defense
If you are looking for some sound bites to use when trying to rid yourself of those pesky telemarketers, check out
Sorry, Gotta Go [dot com]. This site has some very amusing mp3 tracks that you can use when dealing with those people who just don't take no for an answer or have the need to call just as sit down to eat dinner. I personally like I'm listening, At the Tone...Sit down to dinner and Your Call is very important to us. I think I need to get a few of these recorded to a portable devise for quick playback when needed. Enjoy.
Labels: Fun, MP3
