Dolmot

Something like this...

Blacklight Moments Koan - When the Silence Is re-released Zen Baboon - Suber

I don't know, maybe something to do with being on the mountain?

Yep. I was supposed to have proper holidays, but a wide variety of things seeped all over the season from both directions. Another example of things that shouldn't happen but they did anyway. Now I just hope that the latest distractions will eventually pay off. Well alright, I visited a couple of local events and had good time there. I'm also visiting a few different continents on work travels so I get to see places. Just not as extensively as on a holiday trip. Still, no chance of even a one-week festival was given this year, let alone weeks of roaming. "Maybe next year", he said, just like last year...

It may be my favourite release this year, no less.

All branches of the Ominus family tend to feature ruthless basslines that slowly but surely level rooms and their inhabitants. Ominus - Toxic Brainwaves Psychlopedia - The Gurning Point Æternum - Chainsaw More recent picks include e.g. Portamento - Sugar Shock Radical Distortion - Amorphia To me, full-on sounds like music which first and foremost tries to avoid upsetting people too much with anything that resembles a proper bass wavefront... Those are the heavy picks. Otherwise cool and interesting ones are another story.

Only if they have laser beams attached to their heads... But seriously, with 100 million killed every year, they have a better reason to be scared of us. http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/01/100-million-sharks-killed-every-year-study-shows-on-eve-of-international-conference-on-shark-protection/ Fin soup? WTF? It's like hunting American bison for its skin or rhino for its horn due to superstition or sheer idiocy. Couldn't these morons just eat each other and snort fingernail clippings for their keratin fix?

Well, I think the point was something like this. Let's start with the basics. The following three operations are supposed to be equivalent: - Doubling the magnitude (sample values) - Multiplying the signal energy by four - Increasing its power by 6 dB (OK, 10*log10(4) = 6.0206... but we can call it six.) And the same in reverse (half magnitude, quarter energy, -6 dB). Let's simplify the matter and assume that you're recording a 16-bit CD to a 24-bit wave 100% digitally in the same sample rate and at quarter magnitude so that its peaks are at 0.25 level (-12 dB). For further simplification, we'll assume that signals are stored as a sign bit and N-1 magnitude bits. The bit pattern would look like this, with the sign and the most significant bits on the left. S..XXXXX XXXXXXX XX...... After the sign bit, the leftmost two bits are hard zeros. Then you have 15 bits of magnitude information. The rightmost six could be empty, but in your case they would probably contain something from sample rate conversion and other DSP. Not any real low-energy information of the music, though, because that didn't exist in the source. But if you mix in another CD at 1/4 magnitude compared to the first one, its bits would look like this in the 24-bit recording S....YYY YYYYYYYY YYYY.... for the same reasons. Because the recorded signal is the sum of both, you'd have genuine audio content in sign and bits 4-20 (so 18 bits). S..XXZZZ ZZZZZZZZ ZZYY.... However, the bits 19-20 of the first signal are effectively quantisation noise or otherwise meaningless so they'd largely mask anything happening in the second signal. Besides, bits 4-18 and sign already contain ~96 dB of dynamic range which is enough for human hearing, and you're supposed to keep only those for a 16-bit output. The lowest bits of the second signal are masked, meaningless, and eventually discarded. This is all largely theoretical. As stated earlier, you have interpolation noise from pitching and sample rate conversions so what you get is no longer even fully accurate 16-bit information. And CDs today go through so much compression, soft-clipping and reshaping that there isn't 96 dB of actual dynamics to begin with. It can be awfully distorted by excessive processing and loudness war. You won't really get any improvement by saving the final output at over 16 bits in this kind of scenario. For intermediate work copies it may be a good idea to save at 24, though. The end result stands. There's sufficient extra at both ends. Don't worry about things happening below the first (meaningful) 16 bits. If you want perfect replication with absolutely no clipping or signal modification, normalise the peak to max sample value. Sometimes it's a good idea to shave a few odd peaks to get the "actual" signal to the full range of sample values. Some prefer even more compression or levelling to compensate incidental level variation between tracks. DC shouldn't exist in digital recordings. Use DC removal only if you have a reason to suspect it being present. It's just a mix tape. While I store my bought music in CD-quality lossless, I can happily listen to mixes recorded from worn cassettes or 112 kbps 1st generation mp3s if the content is right...

One spec page I found says "Built into the Xone:DB2 is a fantastic-sounding 24-bit/48kHz USB 2.0 audio interface, which lets you send and receive up to four stereo channels to and from your computer" which would imply that it's 24-bit fixed point you're receiving. If you use that as the recording format, in theory it's an exact match to the data transmitted via USB. 32-bit float should be just fine too. If your data is at -12 dB peak, to my best knowledge it means that approximately the highest two bits are empty but you still have 22 bits of information. In other words, if you ultimately distribute in a 16-bit format, you still shave about six bits (36 dB) of information in the final output stage. The content of those is debatable if the input was a mixture of 16-bit CDs. Of course, if one CD was playing at another -12 dB compared to the overall level, its lowest bits would produce genuine information to the lower bits of the 24-bit recording. Effects complicate the matter further. On the other hand, it's eventually lost in the output, and there's very little proof of anyone being able to hear dynamics beyond 16 bits anyway. If it all goes as intended, you have plenty of extra for processing, and the digital chain giving you potentially 22 bits is probably far better than most home mix recordings ever produced. It exceeds the source, the target, and human hearing. No reason to worry about the two-bit headroom. I'd say that at that point the real error is introduced by sample rate conversions (pitch changes, 44.1 -> 48, possibly back again) which cannot be done 100% perfectly by any means. Peak normalisation in Audacity can be done with "Amplify" too. See http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Amplify_and_Normalize for some documentation.

All Uni is cool. They had some very fresh ideas, diverging nicely from the streamlined full-on craze of the early 00s without getting stuck in the past either. If only my latest purchase would finally arrive...

What do you use to connect the CDs to the mixer and the mixer to the computer?

In reality we're just using it as a cover story. 80s already have a certain retro-cool aspect so it's OK to confess liking it. Meanwhile, we're really ashamed of that massive Britney Spears collection and definitely won't admit that one.

Speaking of 80s and classic synths... Yes, I have the 12". And I totally can't dance.

That's very nice...but quite late. I seriously tried to find proper samples to make an informed decision. Eventually I ended up downloading a warez copy just to hear what I'm buying. Then I "pre-ordered" both the CD and the vinyl. So a friendly message to Twisted (and anyone else releasing music while worrying about piracy): if you want to reduce the grey download count, how about giving good options to legit buyers? I may be a fan but not a "shell out 30e without hearing first" fan. Seriously, the only thing I need for buying is long, easily playable samples. Not 30 second clips. Not a tiny, ugly, crashing flash player hidden somewhere. Not two pages of marketing blurb about how totally awesome the release is. Just the samples, first and foremost. Thank you. The album is great, BTW.

Yes. (Gotta go now. May comment later.)

Dubmood - Lost Floppies 1 & 2.

Posting the very definition of toneless mess doesn't count as debunking, sorry, no matter how many time you do it. (Moving forward in tight circles. I don't know why. I actually have plenty of other things to do right now but...)

Where's the "I live in it" option?

Playing your 33 RPMs at 45 is always funny... OK, those BPMs don't leave that much space for very personal or characteristic manoeuvres so the genres will inevitably overlap and resemble each other. Basically... - If it's like an endless sugar overdose, it's happy hardcore or J-pop. - If the bass is phat and there are remnants of epic trance leads, it's trancecore or freeform (like in 2005). - If it's a toneless mess and called "Death Satan Holocaust 666", its darkpsy. - If there's a forest in the cover, it's forest. - If you pump up the BPM alone at all costs, it's psycore (or eventually speedcore). - If you add a bit more high-pitched sci-fi FX, it becomes high-tech? I haven't figured out the details yet. Damn, that freeform stage was possibly the best incarnation of this all. I may excavate my archives from that era again...

Once I visited a national archiving centre, where their job is to store all sorts of information "forever". Interestingly, for all print-like material the solution was microfilming. Even digital newspapers were micro-printed into physical pages. Stored in a stable climate (like underground vaults), they may have a lifespan of 1000+ years. Furthermore, it's a fully analogue micro-sized reproduction so there's no doubt whatsoever how to read it. Just zoom in and you've got it. You could also use some kind of simple encoding to store audio data in print. However, I think they just used large HD arrays as a temporary solution for audio. It requires maintenance but it also means that the storage is always "alive" so people are actively monitoring that it can be read somehow. The format is wav as it's the most straightforward to interpret. Another point I learnt is that when they have piles of audio in different formats to digitise, cassettes have the highest priority because they'll degrade over time, no matter what. CDs may be the next due to rotting. Vinyl is almost "forever" as no micro-scale process is going to eat the groove if stored properly. The only major risk is from careless handling or large scale accidents. They're not hurrying with those. It's also damn difficult to get professional quality cassette decks these days. I think they were using a discontinued model with a large yet limited stash of spare parts...

The clear plastic layer on the underside is relatively thick. It's extremely unlikely that you could scrape through it by any means of cleaning. That would quite literally require sanding the whole disk into nothing. Meanwhile, the print side has the data fairly close to it but you shouldn't be doing anything to it anyway. The most likely direction for oxidisation is from the edges. I think I've managed to salvage one used CD with toothpaste. It had scratches on the clear side. However, problems with new CDs have always turned out to be errors in master production or pressing so there's probably nothing helpful you can do by scraping the clear side (or the print side, for that matter). I believe all my attempts on those have only resulted in the same or even more errors. For valuable used CDs with visible scratches you should probably try a professional resurfacing service. They're not that expensive and you should get much better results than by DIY. Of course, that won't help either if the data layer is bad for one reason or another.

Strangely enough, the easiest way to improve most darkpsy vastly would be stripping the random noise.

Yes it is.

+2 Especially as most "darkpsy" is really just Mickey Mouse FX sprinkled with a cat-on-a-keyboard algorithm over a zero effort bassline. Usually it turns from laughable to unfunny in 15 minutes. Why are all the night slots reserved for it, then? Well, the first reason is a simple connect-the-dots exercise. It has "dark" in its name so it must be played in the dark, right? The second is that in broad daylight everyone would realise the ridiculousness. I'd prefer good music at night time too. It's the only time when there may be more people dancing than videotaping and updating their online status...

Tengri is very nice. However, I don't get where the "goa" tag is coming from. It's very much a downtempo release. It hardly exceeds 110 BPM, possibly with the exception of Dance of the Crow whose breaky rhythm may count as 140 or so. No straight trance there anyway. But within its actual genre, it's one of the better releases this year - deep, shamanistic, sort of organic, doesn't try to jump too much on Shpongle or dubstep bandwagons or whatever. It's not exactly chillout either as it's more wilderness than Ibiza. Try the samples, at least. It delivers a solid album if you like the style.