It’s an article from the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, titled “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”. Here’s a short review:

It’s author, Joe Gross, makes a very elaborate study on modern record loudness levels and tries to answer the question as to how and why does today’s popular music can be exhausting to us, the listeners.

Joe touches the subject on both sides: from the music enthusiast’s and from the sound engineer’s (a.k.a. “the expert’s”) point of view.

Read on for some interesting excerpts from the mentioned article…

“(…) there are millions of copies of CDs being released that are physically exhausting listeners, most of whom probably don’t know why their ears and brains are feeling worn out.”

“For the past 10 or so years, artists and record companies have been increasing the overall loudness of pop and rock albums, using ever increasing degrees of compression during mastering, altering the properties of the music being recorded. Quiet sounds and loud sounds are now squashed together, decreasing the recording’s dynamic range, raising the average loudness as much as possible.”

“The idea is that louder recordings automatically sound better on low-quality reproduction systems, but this isn’t really true in practice. MP3 players such as iPods have their own compressors and limiters, further reducing the dynamic range of recordings, as do computers. A CD doesn’t have to be mastered loud; the iPod can make it as loud as everything else it plays.”

“(…) It is entirely possible that anyone younger than 18 reading this has no idea what we’re talking about. They may not bother to buy CDs anymore, such is the availability of MP3s single downloads. To them, popular music has always been hyper-compressed, square-wave stuff, able to punch through background noise with a single snare drum hit, clipping all over the place.

The article’s very long, but very well written and although it mentions things like: dynamics compression, sound clipping and RMS, you don’t need to be very familiar to all the technical knowledge beforehand, because the author explains it all rather nicely so that every reader can understand.

So, after saying that, click here to go and read the whole article.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

This time, the “Bond car” is a prestigious Aston Martin DBS. It ain’t exactly “gadget packed” (I only saw a high-tech retractable glove box, in which Bond kept his silenced hand gun, a set of drugs and a portable defibrilator). There’s also a nice nostalgic car aspect, because for a couple of scenes Bond drives the Aston Martin DB5 from the late 60’s (I guess this was also a Bond-mobile in one of the previous movies, but I can’t recall which. Maybe you can tell me ?). But the weirdest thing for me was that in one scene Bond drove a guess what ? A FORD MONDEO ! I literally broke into a heavy laugh when I saw this. Apparently, Ford payed a huge sum in order to place that boring car in the movie. As a matter of fact, I’ve done some researching and I came up with Ford’s statement from their website regarding this matter:

“When filmmakers approached Ford, Mondeo’s design was just a sketch on the drawing board. The result was a misty blue five-door Mondeo equipped with a sports body kit that hinted at what the new model would look like in ‘07. It took crews several weeks to build the vehicle by hand. It is basically a body shell, without amenities like air-conditioning, and an engine just big enough to go 30 mph.”

Funny, isn’t it ? It makes you wonder to what heights can carmakers leap in order to promote a product (and a still-in-prototype-phase one at that!).

The film locations are quite beautiful. Bond visits the Bahamas, Prague, Montenegro, London, Venice and some other lovely places.

One thing that bugs me from head to toe about this movie is the music. In my opinion, it’s THE worst Bond score ever. It’s not as captivating and special as any of the former movies. Even the intro theme sucks. The intro animations themselves weren’t very high tech. They reminded me of the many short “demoscene” clips which were made by semi-pro 3D animators on Amiga home computers back in the early 90’s … And I’m really not joking here …

Anyway, these are just small details and out of an overall perspective I can safely say that “Casino Royale” is a good and pretty well made movie. Maybe it will break the recent popularity loss from the previous 2 movies. Even my girlfriend was pretty reluctant to see the movie, cause she had a kind of “James Bond movie? You gotta be kidding me!” type of stance. But I convinced her by saying that I’ve still got one “Get out of Jail” card, because she once dragged me to this shitty Polish movie (based on a bestseller book she liked) and since then I have yet to drag her to a crap movie of my choice ;). In the end, she liked “Casino Royale” too, so I guess you can treat that as a kind of measure of success for the movie.

On a sidenote: I decided to put the Google ads also back on the blog’s home page sidebar. They will only appear while you’re on the home page. The main goal of me placing these ads is to earn enough money for a better and more stable web hosting service and I hope that you won’t be offended much by the ads (I know that not every person likes those ads).

For some time I’ve been using Linux (for those of you who don’t know what Linux is: it’s another kind of operating system. To put it in a nutshell: consider it as a more “open” Windows), the well known Debian distribution to be exact. I’ve configured all the multimedia applications (music/video players, etc.), but I still lacked something. Then, while skipping through the available software, I stumbled upon the piece of software called “streamtuner”. That’s when I re-discovered internet radio stations…

For all of you Linux-using music lovers out there, I recommend the streamtuner software (it should be available in most distros in your package management systems and if not then here’s the program’s homepage). What does it do ? It’s author describes it simply as “a stream directory browser”. And that’s what it exactly does. It shows us a listing of radio streams from the most popular stream directories (Shoutcast, Live365 and Xiph to name a few) according to a chosen stream category or by using the built-in directory search tools. When you choose the stream of a station that you’d like to listen to, you simply select it and push the “Tune in” button on the menu bar and presto! it runs Xmms (most popular mp3 player for Linux, arguably kinda like Winamp under Windows) and it automatically plays the stream which you’ve selected. It also allows you to make bookmarks of your favourite streams, similar to the mechanism which you find in web browsers.

Last, but not least, coupled with the “streamripper” program (here’s it’s homepage, it’s also available for Windows), you can directly command it to “rip” a stream, which means that it saves the songs which are fed through the stream as mp3’s on your hard disk. This is a great and useful tool if you find a good station with a cool DJ and want to record his program for later re-listening or when you’ve gotta go somewhere, but don’t want to miss your favourite radio talkshow (just like back in the old cassette recording days …). Streamripper doesn’t need to coupled with streamtuner, Xmms, Winamp or other player, so it’s not obligatory to listen to the stream while recording.

Winamp has a tool similar to that of streamtuner, although as far as I’m aware of it’s only limited to the Shoutcast directory (which is by the way owned by the guys behind Winamp).

In order to find a radio station stream you can also simply go to the stream directory’s website (I’ve put some of the major directories URLs on the Links page). Then you only need a player (Winamp, Foobar, Xmms) in order to connect to and play the chosen radio stream.

About 6 months ago, I’ve read about a new music radio project on the Internet called “The Music Genome Project“. It’s main goal is to help people discover new music, based on the music that they like. It came forth with the Pandora Internet Radio, which is a pretty genuine website and radio indeed. It simply asks you the name of your favourite band or song and in a few moments it creates your own, personal radio station, consisting of songs which are similar in style and genre to the band/song you entered. Later, while playing the songs (it plays right out of your browser and doesn’t need an external player software) you can decide whether you like a selected song or not and depending on your decision the system remembers and tries to either continue or stop serving music similar to that song. You can also bookmark the songs into a kind of “favourites” page, although later you can’t just choose the song in that page. While playing you can’t rewind/fast forward the song or go back to the previous song. The one thing you can do here is to skip the song that’s playing right now, but that’s also somewhat limited (it skips automatically if you “decide” that you don’t like it). It’s a great tool if you get the urge to find something new to listen to, but don’t want to go around asking record shop owners for music similar to your own tastes.

OK, that’s that about internet radio streams for now. From time to time I’ll post links to my personal favourite radio station streams.