Present Perfect

So, before I shell out cold hard cash for new drives, I thought I should at least first figure out how I'm going to actually rip all my CD's.

If the goal of ripping my CD's is to have a perfect copy on disk, then certain logical conclusions present themselves.

• I should rip a CD completely as one file; this avoids problems with CD's with gapless transitions (for example, live cd's)  Besides gaps between tracks due to encoding (a lot of lossy compression methods have a windowing algorithm which causes them to actually decode some extra leading and trailing samples), there's also the fact that CD tracks are made up of sectors of 2352 audio bytes or  588 16-bit stereo samples (at 75 sectors per second), and so any audio file that's not a perfect multiple of the sector size will not be able to play back gaplessly on a CD because the sector gets zero-padded.  (Arguably they probably would be fine in separate files anyway given that I would expect a rip from CD to have exactly  a sector multiple of samples)
• Another reason to rip as one file is that I've come to believe that a good music management system should actually separate the concept of "song" from the concept of "medium".   A lot of "sound files" actually contain more than one song (think hidden track with lots of silence at the end of a regular CD track), and some sound files contain no songs at all (think spacers between songs and the hidden track).  If you don't know what I'm talking about then you haven't been sufficiently pissed off yet at how "All Apologies" comes with this incredibly long stretch of silence before a crap bonus track.
•  So if you're going to separate the concept of "audio file" and "song" anyway, why not go the whole nine yards and rip the whole CD as one track, allowing you to also re-burn a CD from that ?
• "songs" can then be defined as a start and end position in that file in the management system, defaulting to the actual cue points that the CD knows about

Of course, it's probably not going to be that easy yet to handle music like this.  I had a hard time finding any tools on Linux that would actually generate a .CUE file from a CD in my cd drive.  The closest I got was using cdrdao read-toc to generate a .toc file and then convert with cuetools.  Anyone know of other alternatives ?

Also, it didn't look like cdrdao deals with pre-gap tracks correctly.  For example, for "Any Minute Now" by Soulwax (I knew that Much Against Everyone's Advice had a pre-gap track, but that CD is locked upi in a box in Belgium.  But the internet told me that this album had one too, and lo and behold, there it was in all its crappiness), cdrdao extracts this:

CD_DA

// Track 1
TRACK AUDIO
NO COPY
NO PRE_EMPHASIS
TWO_CHANNEL_AUDIO
ISRC "BEP010400101"
SILENCE 05:29:03
FILE "data.wav" 0 04:35:07
START 05:29:03
So it marks the pre-gap as silence.  Annoying.  And also, tracks can have different pre-gap size, and it doesn't look like the .toc format takes this into account.  Does anyone know ?

(Also, I had completely forgotten about ISRC  codes, and I had *NO* idea they were actually recorded on CD tracks - not too old to learn - are FreeDB and MusicBrainz even tracking these codes ? Does anyone know of an on-line database of these things ?)

Once I know I have the tools and the format in place to make an exact copy of a CD, I can start looking at what I'll need to do to make a player support this if it doesn't yet, and maybe add GStreamer support if it's not there yet ?

To sum up - what do people use on Linux to rip a CD to one big audio file plus a .cue file that can be used to make a track-for-track identical copy of a CD, including pregaps ?

So, before I shell out cold hard cash for new drives, I thought I should at least first figure out how I'm going to actually rip all my CD's. If...

Guys missing their stove play the most beautiful guitar outros.

Guys missing their stove play the most beautiful guitar outros.

is when you like a CD so goddamn much that you have a really hard time bringing yourself to stop playing it for 10 minutes so you can rip it in sound-juicer, so you can copy it to your N800 and listen to it all the time on the way home.

Yes, finally a new album knocked Bloc Party's latest off of my all-day-long playlist, delivering me from my nightly wake-ups with mr. Party's tunes in my head.  The new album is Mintzkov's second (ignoring the name change) album, 360°.

In unrelated news, I finally took the time to update to WordPress 2.1.2.  I still think that hacking on websites has a non-flow-inducive aspect to it, but at least now with my setup where I commit to an svn dev branch until I'm happy, then svnmerge to the www branch, and having auto-updates on commit, it is bearable.  Bearable enough to fix 100 XHTML validation errors in one session.

As a side effect, comments should now be possible here.  Let's see if I can keep the spam out this time around.

is when you like a CD so goddamn much that you have a really hard time bringing yourself to stop playing it for 10 minutes so you can rip it...

Warning: random musings about music ahead. Proceed at own risk.

Last night while failing to get to sleep I discovered an extension of one of my superpowers. The superpower in question is my goodexcellentremarkableincredible/strikethrough>amazinguncanny ability to remember minute details about music I've heard or am even remotely interested in. I have a jukebox locked inside my head that can play any of the tunes I know whenever I want. (I'm not sure yet if it's a blessing or a curse after all these years, but anyway ...)

So there I was, lying awake wondering if I could conjure up the track lists to albums I own but haven't listened to in a while. And it dawned on me that I could use the jukebox to reconstruct the whole album by skipping forward to the end of each song, then listening to what comes next. So, I tested it out. First test, "Bossanova" - not listened to that for a few years.

Starting is easy. Surf's up with "Cecilia Ann (1)", entirely instrumental, and the chord dies out. The screeching guitar comes in, and then the drums start rolling over the sustained note, and in comes the power chord progression of "Rock Music(2)". Skip forward to the abrupt halt, a very short silence, and then comes the still mystifying two-times-three chord progression that uses only two notes for each. "Velouria(3)" kicked in. It ends with Kim singing Velouria, R-I-A and dies out. Drums fall in at high speed, and the guitar spits out the high-speed "Allison(4)". It ends with a few repeats of the names. Bass and drums draw out the next rhythm, and then Joey Santiago pulls out four perfect notes to kick off "Is She Weird(5)". Fast-forward, "head has no room", and two final chords. Next, airy chords ride in like a horse, and the drums break their rhythm, dropping the guitar down a note and putting it into dream mode for "Ana(6)". Fast-forward - the song ends with the same horse chords that started it and dies out.

The next song starts on a high note sliding down over a 3/5 rhythm - "All over the world(7)" has kicked in. Fast forward - "what I'm tau-au-au-au-aught". The song dies, and the sleigh bells come in, followed by a playful bass line, and then the guitar rushes down - "Dig for fire(8)". Fast-forward - the song is ending in multiple vocal lines crossing each other, until all the music stops to give away for the final "for fire". A double drum kick starts off the next one, the guitar complains, and in the distance a voice wails, until we learn that Betty always knows - "Down to the well(9)". Fast-forward - "down to the well", the guitar flourishes out the song.

Drums and bass kick off "The Happening(10). This gives me a bit more trouble, I have to skip through to the ending part where the song changes tune and becomes the story of someone driving to meet the aliens. The song dies out without a real ending. Drums kick in with a short roll before the guitars dive into the bossa nova rhythm of "Blown Away(11)". Fast-forward - "I didn't get so far", and an end note. A quick chord progression puts the next song in gear - they're going higher - it's "Hang Wire(12)". It ends on a death yell of hang wire, with 5 chords volleying off the finish. Drums fall in and a guitar kicks off the playful tune to "Stormy Weather(13)". The song comes to a stuttering and strangely tuned halt. On the next song, the guitars go starry-twinkly as a backdrop for "Havalina(14)"

Next up was "Adam and Eve" by "Catherine Wheel". First song starts with an acoustic slide, and a naked intro song. It's untitled(1). Ending on "let's get started." One chord is struck and left to ring, until it's cut short by the bass line pulling up, and the guitar starts sounding like a piece of plastic being flapped up and down - it's "Future Boy(2)". Fast-forward and the song ends where it feels good to me, and the drums finish off with some dry strokes while the chord and bass runs out. A guitar gently pulls the next track up to speed - it's "Delicious(3)". The actual song ends tree to fruit, apple to seed, and then a piano starts complaining, and there's something in the belly. Next song starts with a chord, some drums rolling over it, same chord again, and then "Broken Nose(4)" starts lifiting off. At the end, the song dies out until the guitars give one final sign of life. Next track starts with some distorted power chords, which break away abruptly to leave room for the acoustic guitar intro of "Phantom of the American mother(5)". Fast forward, the song dies on the American mother. Again, some plastic is waving in the wind, and someone tries out two chords on the guitar to distract us - and suddenly a progression rolls out of an acoustic guitar - "Ma solituda(6)". Fast-forward, and "I fell down".

An electric chord bounces and dips up and down to start "Satellite(7)". Which ends on a wail of "were young young young", and the guitars finish off. A cymbal ride gently accompanies some drum strokes, until there's a second-long pause to introduce the far too many ghosts that make us rely on three notes of "Thunderbird(8)". Forward to the end, where you're making it sound absurd. A chord rolls in like a wave hitting the beach, and the lead guitar drops in, and more and more instruments start building up the sound towards the start of the vocals - "Here comes the fat controller (9)". At the end of the song, a door gets shut on the song while it's still playing, and muffles the sound. The next song starts with a cymbal roll and a chord intertwined with a lazy upwards-pointing lead guitar scrawl - It's "Goodbye(10)". It ends with a dying out distortion wave, and the silence gives away to twinkling xylophone and guitars, and here come the good times of "For Dreaming(11)", which brings back the female voice of "Delicious". The song takes a long time to die fading out, and a few lazy chords at the end of the track make for a transition to the next song, again untitled(12), as a counterpoint to the opening track. A single guitar and a single voice who's going to phone everyone he's known through the downs and the ups.

So there it is, my new completely useless superpower. I believe in RPG terms this is called "levelling up".
I'm going to try and get to sleep practicing my new-found superpower on some other albums - be sure to give it a try yourself. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's not too late to buy both these albums!

Warning: random musings about music ahead. Proceed at own risk. Last night while failing to get to sleep I discovered an extension of one of my superpowers. The superpower in...

Skip if you don't like music !

TV

Always gives me great pleasure when I hear some decent music being used in a TV show. This week treated me to Damien Rice and Grant Lee Buffalo during "House", Pixies and Embrace in "Veronica Mars" and some completely underrated Mazzy Star this morning in "The Practice".

Pop

For some reason the most memorable singles from last year were pure pop songs for me - and some of them double-hitters. There's something so infectious and well-made about most Black Eyed Peas-singles that there's just no resisting them - "Don't Lie" and "My humps" are all over the place. And though Coldplay sometimes managed to make some single choices that never gelled well with me, "Fix You" (for its momentous overhaul in the break and finale) and "Talk" (for its multitude of catchy hooks all through the song) clearly are the best songs on an otherwise disappointing album. In the case of "Talk", I've had one night where I was unable to sleep for three hours because the jukebox in my head kept playing it over and over.

And I'm having a hard time admitting this, but Shakira's "Don't bother" is wacky and off-beat enough to make it on my list of guilty pleasures.

Anyone slipping lyrics like this into the mainstream has at least one good thing going for her.

Before I lose my cool ...

Of course I haven't spent all my indie cred just yet. I don't know how I managed to miss out onThe National for almost a year (and shame on all you music radar friends I have out there - you know who you are), but their third record has been spinning for a long time now and it just keeps getting better.

Lyrics like these would even make Shakira and her small humble non-mountainy breasts blush.
Further new musical pleasure was offered by Head Automatica, Isobel Campbell, KT Tunstall (I found a video of her performing on Jools Holland - if you watch it from the start it is mindblowing), Starsailor (yeah I know - sorry), Walkmen, and - it finally clicked with me - Verve's Urban Hymns.

Concerts

The last four concerts I've been to last year I hadn't mentioned previously. All were special in some way. Bloc Party was just dead on fantastic - tight, energetic, lively, a band on the verge of making it really big and at the top of their game. Every song was made just that little bit better by increasing the speed a wee bit up to the point where you can feel the gig can explode at any moment. They completely overpowered the audience.

Coldplay was incredibly disappointing. First of all, it was a basketball stadion. Second, the Barcelona soccer players that took a seat after the opening band, Goldfrapp, was finished, got more applause than them. Even though we were not too far from the stage, people around us obviously weren't really coming for the music, since they preferred to blabber on about completely uninteresting things until there was another hit chorus to yell along out of tune to. And Coldplay didn't really play a stellar set anyway, missing most of my favourites of their debut, except for what's probably the best one, Don't Panic, from which they completely removed the guitar solo that gives the song half of its value, and they turned it into some acoustic campfire-y slowed-down version. A big letdown compared to the other two times I've seen them.

dEUS defended our national pride with vigor. Mauro Pawlowski, one of the most talented musicians in Belgium, performed excellently as the new Barman henchman, being able to carry off all of the low Trouvé and Ward growls, as well as the high Carlens whines. The set was tight and powerful - dEUS is back in form, and performing at Benecassim this summer. (Though seriously - why they have Elbow open for them instead of the other way around is beyond me)

Sigur Rós was simply otherworldly. While the concert was a little expensive because it was in a theatre, I liked their new album so much for its atmospherics and childish echoes that I really did want to see them perform it live. I was not let down - and my favourites across all albums where rendered with the force of a felt tip knife through the heart.

Prospects

I've never seen Tool perform anywhere else but at festivals. And, given that they were announced to play Werchter this year, I was assuming it would be the same again. But lo and behold, they're prepending a club tour and they're hitting the Razzmatazz in Barcelona at the end of May ! Need to get tickets ASAP.

A new Twilight Singers album is also due for May, excellent.

And one of the best news snippets I've come across is that Josh Pearson of Lift To Experience might actually release an album this year ! Listen to this random peel session (my gem of last year - crank it up because it doesn't get any louder and you need to hear the voice bleed) to listen why this gets me excited, or read the most moving music piece on any artist I've ever read.

That's it for flushing the brainial archives for now - as usual, other recommendations are welcome!

Skip if you don't like music ! TV Always gives me great pleasure when I hear some decent music being used in a TV show. This week treated me to...