David Bowie Star Special

My friend Matt passes along this Bowie DJ set from 1979:

Neil Young's PonoPlayer: The Emperor Has No Clothes

Sounds about right.

It's a great idea and I'm all for lossless audio files, but there's nothing that Pono can do that the devices that everyone already has in their pockets already. And the high res audio thing… I think I linked to this one before.

Some reading material on Pono

Some reading material on Pono

Lots of interesting articles linked-to in this post, including some of the usual insane audiophile stuff.

RIP Winamp

My first mp3 player software. It really whipped the llama's ass.

People on Reddit don't know anything about sound in films

Link

Because I couldn't be bothered to post on the forum, here are a few tips/observations:

1) Make sure that the content you're watching/listening to is properly formatted for how you're viewing it. Netflix, Blu-Ray and Cable seem to want to give you 5.1 surround sound as a default even when you only have two speakers. Double check that your output is stereo.

2) Really? Every single sound mixer in Hollywood is incompetent, and to blame for you being a fucking idiot? Do you have any idea how the motion picture business, let alone sound mixing works? Even the explanations on the thread are not entirely accurate.

3) Using your TV to handle compression seems like a good idea but it'll probably do more harm than good.

4) This is so subjective and situation dependent that this post and the Reddit thread is pretty much pointless.

Steely Dan "Hey Nineteen" Isolated Guitar

You can hear that this track was isolated using phase shifting techniques, as it's not as clean as many of the tracks you'll hear posted here. You still hear enough of Hugh's playing to appreciate his greatness.

Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture Production Blog: Steely Dan "Hey Nineteen" Isolated Guitar

How the Loudness War is crushing Dave Grohl’s analogue ambitions

[via Production Advice]

The Oldest Recording Ever

Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture Production Blog: The Oldest Recording Ever

Talk about old school, here's a captivating PBS Newshour segment about the restoration by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory...

Very interesting.

Gangnam Style production tricks in Pro Tools

via Pro Tools expert:

For some strange reason I can fathom PSY hunched over a Pro Tools rig cutting away through all hours of the night...

Mastered for iTunes

How audio engineers tweak music for the iPod age [Ars Technica]

Interesting techie article here

Drake - The Homecoming

Here's a recent show I worked on, doing audio post for Muchmusic.

The video doesn't seem to want to load in Firefox, but it works in Safari. Skip right to the end of part three for the credits ;)

Drake - The Homecoming

Modem slowed down 700%

Pretty cool.

via Wire to the Ear

Canadian indie rock Xmas

Compilation here [via Torontoist]

Check out this podcast

Here's a podcast I heard recently with a bunch of awesome tunes. It's from CBC Radio 3, and the guest host was Owen Pallet, fka Final Fantasy. A few excellent tunes here, worth checking out... at least the first half anyway.

The music starts right away so check yer speakers before clicking the link!

Time to remix Phoenix

The band takes the NIN/Radiohead route and releases the multitracks from their latest album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.

And speaking of NIN, Trent Reznor has just announced the release of The Social Network soundtrack (aka Facebook movie), coming out next week. Looks like the Ghosts experiment worked and he got the gig he was after - scoring a major motion picture.

Get that song out of your head

Interesting/funny idea, for when you get stuck with an earworm... most of the songs I've scanned through are as likely to get stuck in your head themselves... at least they'll force out the one that's already in there.

Unhear it [via Waveformless]

How to make Justin Bieber sound good

[Link]

This one might have broke the Internet this week.

Summer of mp3

Awesome music/mp3 blog Soul Sides is doing features on Summer Songs. Worth checking out.

Audio fidelity: myth vs. fact

This one's been going around, I meant to post it the other day. Outstanding article with some great points. A must read for audio fans and media peeps.

The Myth of Falling Fidelity, and Audio History Unburdened by Fact

The article is a response to a recent NYT article about how kids today are ruining music with their mp3s. Pretty typical stuff, lazy journalism at its best, as the above link shows.

So much good stuff right now...

I haven't had much time to post lately as I've been taking in all this great new music coming out these days... here's a few tracks that have caught my attention lately: