It's 9-09-09, supposedly a significant date. Monday marked the beginning of the end for the 40th year anniversary of the Summer of Love/Hate. You know, Woodstock and the Manson murders. Love and death, what a way to end a summer. Sheesh.....

On a lighter note, someone uploaded some of my music to Last FM. Instead of getting mad about it, I just reclaimed the account and uploaded a partial album as well. But due the to fact new users are only allowed to upload so much, there's no album artwork, yet... Just look for The Aenigma on Last FM. I'm the only one with that name on the net, so far.

I was going to post this in the audio forum as a response, but, I thought fuck it.

I have both analog and digital recorders. I have a 1957 Sound of Music 4 track reel to reel recorder, and a 1961 Panasonic 2 track reel to reel. I also have a few Fostex digital recorders. Not to mention the various PC DAW's I have. From my experiences, recording to analog gives you a very warm distinct sound. Even if you're recording a softsynth to analog. You will be able to tell a distinct difference in audio quality, provided you have a good set of studio speakers. Then when you transfer it to digital, you will still be able to tell a difference. When I record straight to digital, it seems like I have to use effects to 'liven up' the sound a bit. Now, if you've never recorded to analog, then you wouldn't notice the difference. By the way, tape for reel to reels is fucking expensive, if you don't have much money, stick with digital!

I also have both analog and digital sythesizers, and many, many softsynths. The biggest difference, again, is the sound. Analogs will always have that distict warm sound, and digitals will still have their distinct digitized sound. But, neither is bad. They both compliment each other. Software synthesizers are definetly easier to program than many digital and analog synths. They're cheaper too, and there are thousands available free. The downside to softsynths are as obvious as the ones to analog and digital synths. With softsynths, you have to worry about hard drive failure, corrupted files, upgrading your hardware to meet the softwares needs(Reaktor 5 anyone?), if you play live how are you going to transport your PC/laptop safely....The only problem I have had with my digital synths is occasionally replacing a battery or dead discdrive. The analogs are a different story. Tuning them, changing fuses, making sure the pots, switches, sliders still work, and changing led lights are the least of your worries. If you have one made in a non English speaking country like me, and you have a dead key, or no power, you may be fucked. The upside to digital/analog keybords are many. You can transport them more safely, as opposed to a laptop or PC. I would much rather retune a keyboard if it gets bumped, than say replace a hard drive(been there, done that). Keyboards also last decades. Many have actually become collectors items, and their value has increased the older they get. While most softsynths become obsolete with each new version, their value doesn't increase, neither does collectability. You also don't have to worry about new operating systems, backwards compatability, etc. Just make sure you have plenty of cables:)

So I'll end it this post with this advice. If you can ever afford to record your digital music to analog, try it. At least once. You may like what you hearand you can always convert back to digital. And if you ever have the chance to get an analog synth, try playing it with your digital/soft synths. It can really add a lot of life to your music.

Sometimes I laugh to myself when I see somone post, show us a screen shot of your flp. Would anyone like to see a picture of my analog tape or the pretty .wav file it makes as it's being converted?

This is a few pieces of my collection I am currently using for an Audio Geist track. Real musicians have their own gear:) What you see in the picture is a Fostex MR 8, Korg Kaoss Pad, MicroKorg, Roland JX-305, Solaris Estradin 314 (Soviet synth made in a bomb factory!), Akai MPC1000, Yamaha DX7 II FD, Casio SK1, and a few others propped up. I bet I have a hundred miles of cables and cords.

"Digital music downloads and the stupefaction of a generation of listeners

Regardless of which company and algorithm is the best, one thing is certain. No matter how the previously discussed principles are implemented and no matter how inventive each company's programmers are, there is no way for the above principles to support the over 90 percent reduction of information required to go from a CD-quality file to a standard mp3. In other words, reducing data rates from CD quality (1411 kbits/sec.) to the standard downloadable-music-file quality (128 kbits/sec.) is impossible without a noticeable deterioration in sound quality.

In fact, the 139th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America devoted an entire session on the matter, with multiple acousticians and music researchers presenting their perceptual studies on the relationship between compression-data rates and sound quality. Based on these and other, more recent, relevant works, it appears that data rates below ~320 kbits/sec. result in clearly noticeable deterioration of perceived sound quality for all sound files with more than minimal frequency, dynamic, and spatial spread ranges. (E.g. listening to early Ramones at low or high data rates will not make as much of a difference as listening to, say, the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper" album.) Such low data rates cannot faithfully represent wide ranges of perceivable frequency, intensity, and spatial-separation changes, resulting in 'mp3s' that include only a small proportion of the sonic variations included in the originally recorded file.

As data rates drop, there is a gradual deterioration in

a) frequency resolution (loss of high frequencies, translated as loss of clarity),

b) dynamic range (small, dynamic changes become noninterpretable by the compressed file, resulting in flatter 'volume' song profiles), and

c) spatial spread (loss of cross-channel differences, resulting in either exaggeration or loss of stereo separation).

When this degradation of sound quality is combined with the fact that most young listeners get their music only online, what we end up with is a generation of listeners that is exposed to, and therefore 'trained' in, an impoverished listening environment. Prolonged and consistent exposure to impoverished listening environments is a recipe for cognitive deterioration in listening ability. That is, in the ability to focus attention on and be able to tell the difference between fine (and, if we continue this way, even coarse) sound variations.

Such deterioration will not only affect how we listen to music but also sound perception and communication in general, since our ability to tell the difference between sound sources (i.e. who said what) and sound source locations (i.e. where did the sound come from) is intricately linked to our ability to focus attention on fine sound-quality differences.

What you should do

a) Do not listen to music exclusively in mp3 (or any other compressed) format.

Go to a live concert! Listen to a CD over a good home sound system, set of headphones, or car stereo!

b) Unless a piece of music is not available in another format, do not waste your money on iTunes or any other music download service, until such services start offering data rates greater than 300 kbits/sec.

c) When you load CDs on your iPod or other devise, select the uncompressed conversion rate (e.g. .wav or .aif formats). If you don't have the hard disk space on your player to do this, convert at the highest available data rate (currently 320kBits/sec on iTunes).

d) Finally, get a good pair of headphones for your mp3 player! The headsets given out with iPods and most mp3 players are of such bad quality that they essentially create a tight bottleneck to the quality of your digital files and players. The response of these headphones has been designed to match the low quality of popular iTunes or other mp3 files (128 kbits/sec).
Mp3-player manufacturers do this for two wise (for them) reasons:

i) poor quality headsets are cheap to produce and good enough to reproduce the poor quality mp3s files you are fed, and

ii) poor quality headsets prevent you from creating/requesting music files at higher data rates because when listening over such headphones you cannot even tell the difference between good and bad sound quality.

Well, what can I say? Wake up and listen to the music!"

This is the profile for my newest ambient music project Neon Shark. Check it out.

Neon Shark Profile

I am still looking for serious individuals who want to collaborate on my Audio Geist music project. This is not Newgrounds related music, but music for an actual album. Audio Geist is experimental, so it's basically anything goes as long as I can get it to fit together. I already have two Audio Geist albums finished. It has been mainly dark ambient and industrial music, with some WTF tracks in there as well. If you are interested send me a PM.

Audio Geist Myspace page

Since starting my own record label, I hardly ever upload music here anymore. It seems hardly worth the effort, since there will always be 12 year olds, who think Fruity Loops is the be-all end-all of making music, that will zero your music with no second thoughts whatsoever. Sad really....

I am really too busy making my own music to put out. Currently it has been put out by four different labels. That's not counting the remixes I have done for other artists and compilations my music has been in. My music is currently being used as the soundtrack to a documentory film about a world famous(infamous) painter.(more on that later)

I'll still submit here and there. But my desire to do so is pretty much gone.