Recently in Music Category

Welcome to folks from the Blue Rodeo forums!

For A's birthday last night we went out to the Blue Rodeo concert out in Abbotsford. Had a good time, even with my allergies starting to stand up and make themselves known. I saw them back in 2002 in Vancouver, where they were great as well.

The concert itself was awesome, the opening act was Dustin Bentall, son of Barney Bentall, who I'd honestly never heard of before. Apparently Canadian Rock Royalty though. For the encores they brought out Dustin and his band as well as Barney on stage, and did a great extended version of "Try". Dustin's music was good enough I bought the CD, supporting local music and all that stuff.

All pics were with my LX3, chosen more for the colors and lighting, as sadly the only 2.5x zoom didn't give a whole lot of choice in view (I was jelous of the 18x zoom that the person beside me had!). I think the pics showed up pretty well though.

The band doing their thing.

Ohhhhh.... light show....

Jim Cuddy rockin' out.

Everyone on stage for the encore.

Click through to the image page on Flickr for my helpfully tagged who's who.

A few concert tips, learned on the fly:

• Sometimes having a faster shutter speed is worth a bit more noise. Most of these shots were ISO 200-400, with some noise cleanup afterwards. The noise sucked, but it's way more fixable in post processing than blurry band members.
  
• Your camera will lie to you about the exposure, you want to select either spot, 'center area' or a similar exposure setting and then focus on the center of the band, where it's lightest. Otherwise the camera will try to make the entire field of view (bright band area and dark theatre) into focus. You only really care about the band on stage, and generally speaking they will be bright enough that you can still get a good exposure without having to bump up the ISO of slow down the shutter speed too much.
  
• A little bit of a bump in the "clarity" setting in lightroom can give just a hint more definition in things like the heads in the foreground in the last image above. Just a hint though, or you start to lose/blur out the definition of things you care about.
  
• Shoot RAW if you can (ie: always). It'll give you the most forgiveness in post processing for dealing with lighting conditions (IE: your camera trying to figure out if the red/blue/yellow lights on stage are supposed to be white or not), noise reduction, etc.
  

I took some movie clips as well, so I'm playing with those in iMovie right now.

I have to say too, that technology is pretty awesome. While in the concert I was taking (horrible) pictures with my iPhone and posting them to facebook, able to research who Barney Bentall was on Wikipedia and could have either bought the latest CD from either of these guys and had the music loaded on my phone, or (through a few different tools) found their music on the pirate sites and had it starting to download onto my home computer. Wow, how the world has changed....

Only cause someone sent this to me today. My few quick thoughts on the video of Britney Spears' Womanizer.

• Hawt... Britney looks damn good, and naked, sweaty and covered in oil (or maybe sweat) to boot (yes, really). Guess when you're a bazillionaire you can get yourself a great personal chef and team of trainers.
  
• The actual music is standard crap, generic poppy crap. Sorry.
  
• Her voice is way over-produced and over-effected, goes with it being poppy crap though I guess. Especially after listening to a version of Hotel California by Don Felder at a radio show, live, just him and a guitar. Holy crap the music kids listen to these days is crap.
  
• Some kinda cool special affects shots... one I liked was of a guy who turns around "into" his suit. Very cool.
  
• The story of the video is hard to get, it's either about a slutty girl who is slutting it up with a bunch of guys, or getting back at guys who slutted around on her, or.... wait a minute, who really cares.
  

So yea, a naked Britney Spears in a steam room is about the only reason to watch this or listen to it. In fact, listen to it with the sound off, cause it's crap.

Grabbed on a whim, and completely expecting something like his "unique" rendition of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" or "Rocket Man", I'm honestly and completely shocked that William Shatner's music CD Has Been is actually really good.

This is pretty cool.... today (yesterday actually, I'm a day behind) on the Howard Stern show, which is my morning addiction, they featured The Fab Faux a Beatles tribute band. Not tribute in the normal sense though... they feel that like the music of Beethoven and other great composers, the aim is to recreate it as perfectly as possible. So they strive as much as possible to re-create the songs of the Beatles as accurately as possible. They have five band members and a huge amount of instruments... the keyboard player has three different keyboards, some of the members will switch off between guitar and keyboards, they have a brass section..... I just wish they still had the E-Show there so there was a video record of it. And I have to say it sounded incredible! They don't attempt to do the same vocal sound, no fake accents or funny wigs or anything, just re-creating the music as perfectly as possible. Anyway, what a great idea, and cool to listen to.

Well the M3 MP3 player looks pretty cool. Jimmac has one and enjoys it, and it looks pretty damn cool. Not quite as sleek and sexy as the iPod, and without the cool-ass wheel, or integration of the "extras" (software like notes, calendar, etc or hardware like the iTrip FM transmitter for car trips), but it has some nifty things that make me (and Cat5 probably) perk up:

• flac and ogg playback
• radio
• USB2
• acts like any other USB storage device, so it's compatible with linux, and any system that supports USB, so you can plug it in and have it as a storage device

No idea how much the little bugger costs, cause I don't read Czech :) Course, I also have no free money, so it's a bit of a moot point. Any free money is earmarked (after debts) for other horrendously expensive things.

So after some discussions with Pokernut at work about the subject of creating a high quality music library (not that this doesn't come up every few months with me and various friends and/or coworkers) and his plan is to rip everything to a lossless format so that you only have to rip your CDs once. I've ripped to mp3, to ogg, and to other formats, and it's a valid argument. If you rip to a lossless format you can convert to other formats, you have the one golden master that can be then converted to whatever file format you want, without the need to re-rip.

A good thought says I.

My problem is that I have a few different types of music and organization can be a bit of a pain. I have the following directories on my music server:

tagged

Files in mp3 (and the occasional OGG) format which I've, well, aquired from various sources. These are tagged correctly through musicbrainz and have what I consider highly accurate tag information.

complete-rip

Files which I've ripped to high quality OGG. These are tagged as well.

audiobooks

Audiobooks for the car, not really carefully tagged.

Untagged

Files that are not not available to be tagged through MusicBrainz (albums haven't been put in there yet, or my version doesn't match the MB version, complete, tagged live albums and so on). Theoretically I will look through this dir every once and a while and re-check to see if I can tag them.

unsorted

Completely untagged files from wherever, mostly new stuff that's waiting to be tagged.

Lossless

In theory the replacement for complete-rip when I re-rip my files to FLAC or lossless AAC

The question is, should I "contaminate" my aquired mp3s with my own rips (or contaminate my own rips with my aquired mp3s)? I'd like to have one place to get music for my music library.

I want to obviously separate off the unsorted directory, this is separate. The Untagged directory is a good question though.... it's got good music in there, just not with the correct id3 tags (or just not processed through MusicBrainz yet). However, the question is how to integrate the Lossless/complete-rip files and the tagged files. I want to be able to see them all so that I can go into iTunes or Rhythmbox or whatever and just add all files from one location on the fileserver so I know I'm getting all my music. Should I keep the actual directory trees separate? IE: a dir of lossless and a dir of lossy? This might make sense so that I know what's mine and what to delete if the feds come knocking on the door. Can they be combined with a symlink farm of some sort? So /Lossy/U2/War/* is linked into /tagged/U2/War.

But then there's the problem of duplicates, should I only have one copy of a song in an album, or should I keep both a lossy and lossless (one is easy to copy to my mp3 player, one is good as a master)? Maybe the lossless is kept completely separate and a high quality mp3 is created from each, and that is put in with the global collection of music? But then mp3 or ogg? Ogg is a higher listening quality, but isn't supported on my mp3 player.

Anyone else dealing with this and have any tips or pointers to organizing with this sort of mix? I guess my problem is that I want this available for anything from anywhere, instead of having a concise goal of "music to listen to at the computer" or "music to collect for my mp3 player".

Help me get this damn song out of my head!

For some reason for the last two or three days I've had the "Sulu Dance" song, a mix of some 80's song whose name I can't remember right now and some voice clips from George Takei. Hilarious. And auditorially (is that a word) addicting. Grab a copy from here and enjoy.

Suuuluuuuuuuu
Suuuuuuuuluuuuuuuu
It's the Sulu dance.....
It's the Sulu dance!

Please..... make..... it...... stop......

Friday night my buddy Shaun called up and said that the Mission Folk Festival was going on and that the headline act was the Rankin Sisters, who are good. So we headed out there after work and, after a little trouble finding it, enjoyed. The cost was $32 a person for the day, pretty high for me, but what else to do when you're already there right? The booths were the standard far of hemma tattooing, sun-dresses, and fair-food (read: unexciting and substandard) and drink (read: beer garden where they charge $4 for a can of beer).

The first couple of musical acts weren't all that exciting, they were good, don't get me wrong, just not my thing. One that was pretty interesting was a guy who played a bass guitar with a violin bow. It was a bit surreal to watch, especially if you have even the slightest inkling of what a bass guitar should sound like. The sounds that came out were almost east-indian sounding, sitar like. Pretty neat to watch.

The Rankin Sisters were what people came for, and they kicked some serious ass. Great music, great sound, and because it's a folk festival I was able to stand right next to the stage and snap pictures (once again I took only my completely manual F1.7/50mm lens). I think I got some good "concert-like" ones as well, which I'll post tomorrow, it's suddenly midnight on a work-night and I haven't even gone through what I took yet :) Ugh, I'm old!

Figured I'd see what PureTracks was all about during lunch today. For those who haven't heard of it, it's basically a Canadian (only) online music store. This means nothing to those in the states, who have things like iTunes to purchase their legal online music from, but as a Canuck who wants to buy legal online music, this is important. Read on for my review.

Brad threw me a link to this Johnny Cash video, "Hurt", which I have to say, rocks. As Brad said, 70 years old and still awsome. The music isn't his as I understand it, but I've never heard the original. I've got a few mp3s of covers he's done of various other artists, and songs he's done with non-country bands. Truely a man who knows how to move with the time.