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All posts for the month March, 2007

New Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau Recording

Posted by audiosquid on March 28, 2007
Posted in: music. Leave a comment

I bought the new album by Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau, or I guess to be more specific the Metheny Mahldau Quartet. Not bad, but nothing that grabbed me right off the bat. There are some sound issues on the second track, the sound of the low bass strings on Pat’s 42 stringed guitar sounding a bit… amateur, not his playing, but that DI’d in your face farting string buzzing sound is a bit… amateur. I think I like the previous album that Pat and Brad worked on a bit better than this one, but I’m not disappointed I got it.

I still buy CD’s, and very rarely download music. Nothing wrong with the download thing, I just like to have the highest quality version I can get if I’m going to spend money on it. I am picky like that being a sound engineer. I also like having the package, the collection, and my own “master copy”. If I really like the music on the disk I’ll end up importing it into itunes, many times as an mp3 at 192k or so, which on close examination sounds inferior to the original, but for casual listening that fine, and I have the CD if I really want to get into it. And if my hard drive holding this music goes boom, I have my “master copy” to go back to.

Like many other live sound engineers these day I’m using computer file playback (or ipod for some) instead of a CD to listen to refrence material on a sound system, when I import music I’m going to use for refrence into itunes, a either import as a aiff at 16bit 44.1k (which should be an exact copy), or with apples lossless encoder. I have heard rumors engineers out their using an ipod with 128k mp3’s to listen to their reference over a pa. For walk in, sure, for reference?

In other music news, as you might see on the sidebar to the left, I’ve figured out how to add a couple of iteresting things into the blog. The first being the top 10 artists I have been listening to, via last.fm. You can click on the list if you want to find out more.

I’ve also added the box showing my google reader sharred RSS’s. RSS’s….. lots of s going on there. This is a list of RSS items I have come across that you might find interesting, if you find things that I find interesting, interesting. Basically, your bored, on the web, reading my posts, what to do next? Well, click on these and watch the time fly by…

And finally, so you can always know the current status of our nation, for your convience I have also included the terriost allert level, or whatever, brought to you be aqua teen hunger force.

Now was that some mind blogaling blogging or what??

A weekend of geeking out.

Posted by audiosquid on March 14, 2007
Posted in: compy. Leave a comment

A weekend spent learning how to get a blog working on my server. As you might notice from past posts, I had switched from a hand made blog using Freeway Express to one made using iWeb. It was very enjoyable and simple to set things up with iWeb but I ran into some limitations. I’m not using .mac to host my iWeb site, so I had to upload the entire site anytime I changed anything. There was also some post processing I would have to do to the iWeb site to make it totally ready to post.

So I started looking into other solutions. First I created a blog on blogger and thought that would be cool, but blogger 2.0 doesn’t work with Journler (at least not yet), and I still wanted to explore posting my blog and running my own server on a computer sitting here otherwise doing nothing. Then my journey began in learning wordpress, php, and mysql. The server part, getting php and mysql to work was the trickiest. While there are some somewhat clear instructions on setting up such things on a mac client,  I still had to do allot of trial and error changing of files, installing, un-installing, re-installing things. Finally in the end I got it all to work out (I think).

So I’m back to using Freeway Express to make web pages, and I’ve updated my audiojack@earthlink site and added a new site address for the new blog. So now there is the following:

www.audiojack.selfip.net – the main portal to my “web presence”, which will automatically redirect you to my earthlink hosted site

www.squidaudio.selfip.net – the new blog, if you have the old RSS address in your reader, replace it with the one you can find here

You can even make comments on my blog now to posts! (I’ll have to test that out….) The blog still needs alot of work but that will all come in due time.

In the time this weekend I wasn’t geeking out on the interveb stuff I was working on the filemaker pro touring databases, which are getting every so closer to being finished.