Monthly Archive for October, 2005

the sound of music

Published on 30/10/2005 in everything and music. 0 Comments

Specifically, the volume of music, or the “gain”. Oh yes.

Long time readers may be aware that I employ either iTunes or my sexy phone to tend to my music needs, depending on where I happen to be. This is pretty cool, although my phone doesn’t have iTunes’ wonderful ’soundcheck’ technology, which I had totally got used to. So, I googled around, settled on MacMP3Gain, and bravely fed it my whole music library folder. I shit you not.

Now, while this certainly improves listening to musics with my phone, it’s not as good as iTunes’ soundcheck, so I’d totally like to still use that as well. The problem is getting iTunes to notice that these files have all changed now. The closest I’ve got is trashing my iTunes Library file and re-importing from the XML file, which causes iTunes to re-analyse a whole 61 tracks. Sixty-one, out of around three thousand >.<

I gather iTunes slips a chunk of metadata into files about the volume it feels they should be played, rather than keeping it all in its own database, which is pretty lame. Maybe if there were some file editor that could nuke that little string out of the file's header.... I dunno, over to you, oh mighty internets!

~edito maxissimo~
OK, so throwing music files at subethaedit shows me some interesting little strings. Right at the top of a .mp3 file there’s “iTunNORM [some hex that WP really doesn't want to let me put in here]“. And the same is visible a couple of lines down in a .m4a file as well.

Killing the strings makes the AAC file un-playable, the MP3 file plays fine, but iTunes has not forgotten its soundcheck value either. Rargh!

homo emasculens

Published on 28/10/2005 in everything. 2 Comments

There is a special strain of man, an offshoot of homo sapiens that has had his home overrun by the fairer, more duplicitous sex. It’s mostly his own doing, having married the old one and proceeded to sire the others in quick succession, and thus he is not really deserving of the full gamut of our sympathies. Even so, one cannot help but feel this was never really part of his grand plan.

Now, enter a suitor. Some well-meaning young turk with designs on one (or perhaps both, the wily cur!) of the house’s daughters. For homo emasculens a new male face about the place is a rare and wonderful event! Beer is to be proffered, toot is to be talked, thighs are to be slapped and a thoroughly manly time is to be had by all. All this puts the poor lad in a very odd situation indeed. On the one hand, here is an odd old bugger, strange in his ways and long in his tooth. A man who, if seen propping up a bar, would perhaps be given a wide berth indeed. On the other hand, he totally wants to sleep with the guy’s daughter, so what’s a boy to do?

Generally a boy is to humour the old coot past the point of all decency and get a good scolding from his embittered paramour, but hey, worse things have happened at sea. The Marie Celeste, for example.

the very latest technology

Published on 27/10/2005 in everything. 1 Comment

Did you notice the little note icon in the top-left there yet? It’s OK if you didn’t, it is pretty subtle.

I saw it on Matt’s site. It’s a WP-plugin that whips information out of my last.fm profile, which in turn is fed regularly by a diligent little iTunes plugin (or possibly a standalone app) that passes on juicy info-bytes every time a song finishes playing.

I for one am eager to see what it makes of my listening habits given a fortnight’s data, or whatever. It will surely reveal things about myself that I myself do not know!

Oh, and I totally got Front Row working on my Mini, as detailed all over the mac web. It’s pretty sweet, though it doesn’t do DVDs, which is probably a product of it having been hacked to work on any Mac. And what do you know, there’s already a bevvy of Salling Clicker solutions. \o/

Also, I should really update the little front-page thingy for this site, what with Isis having died.

would you like some toast?

Published on 23/10/2005 in everything. 3 Comments

some toast in a rack
and a giant clothes-peg

My WoW-buddy Matt graduated from livejournal this week to a self-hosted multimedia web extravaganza. It’s over at ironictoaster.com and it’s all toast-themed. I dunno, the guy must really like toast.

Actually, I could really go for some toast now. Cheese on toast, or a toasted chicken sandwich, or hot buttered toast with jam, or maybe even beans on toast? It would be pretty greedy though, I just finished off a bowl of coco-pops (in-between writing “….some toast now” and “Cheese on toast….” if you must know) so I am all breakfasted up. Also, it’d totally make more washing up, which I am not at all prepared to deal with right now. God I hate washing up. It’s a completely irrational hatred too, since it’s really fucking easy to do. I just put it off and off and build it up in my mind until I daren’t go in the kitchen for fear of the giant animated pile of crockery that wants to make a heat-proof deep serving dish from my skull, adding my uniqueness to its own. I knew I shouldn’t have bought my kitchenware from Ikea.

You know what else I hate? Well, lots of things. Or rather nothing, since hate is actually a very strong word and I’d like to think most people have never experienced actual hate in their lives, at least not by the tender age of twenty. Lots of words are being de-valued like this actually, like “awesome”. When was the last time you said that because you were actually in awe at anything? Exactly. Curse you hyperbole, curse you so you don’t get up!

So anyway, the thing that I really dislike, the thing which has been bugging me of late, I didn’t forget. It’s bass. Or rather, the love of it to the detriment of the rest of the acoustic range.

Now, I’m all for some gentle, throbbing bass (yes I said bass, not cock), it adds a wonderful richness to music and is generally a pretty OK thing. My problem lies in the amplification of a song’s low-frequencies to the point where it muffles and smothers the rest of the sound. It gets even worse in a club or bar, where the thumping is often distorted and fuzzed through speakers driven beyond their capacity. If I wanted that particular sonic experience I’d listen to my music underwater while banging my head against a rock in time to the beat.

So, the Orwellian maxim for the day: bass good, treble good, mid-range good too.

Got it? Good. Now, go select some nice headphones, turn off the x-bass and the equaliser, and soak in the delicious sounds of Goldfrapp. Go on, you’ll thank me.

Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?

Published on 13/10/2005 in everything. 2 Comments

You’d know what the title there means if you’ve ever studied Latin…. or if you saw the finalé of the last season of JLU where Bats says it to Green Arrow. Who watches the watchmen?

Of course, this isn’t a rant about how law enforcement agencies have far too much power in the name of protecting us against terrorism, I’m not one to hold such a highly developed opinion on something so pressing. No, this is actually a high-pitched fan-boy splooge on the vital matter of how very awesome the comic Watchmen is. I realise I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I wasn’t able to read when it was first run.

So, nineteen years later and I can read quite well, certainly well enough to go back to this in a couple of weeks’ time, and then again a month after that and again and again. I mean, It’s just so gloriously fucking bleak! The bitter profiles of the fragile and broken minds of these former heroes have me fucking reeling: I sometimes have to put it down, lest reading the next page too soon not give its predecessor time to sink in. That said, I’ve actually been skipping the articles and excerpts, since I’ve got a really bad case of “gotta know how it ends, NOW”. I shall savour it at the second sitting, I promise, but for now I’m greedily choking it down.

It’s a shame they didn’t use the Charlton Comics characters though – do DC sell many Blue Beetle comic books? Nite Owl certainly seems a very forced character. I like Rorschach though, and it’s clear now that the JLU show’s Question is pretty heavily based a character that Moore based on the Question of old, which is pretty fucking recursive.

Hah! Wikipedia tells me that there was an issue of The Question comic where he reads Watchmen and compares himself to Rorschach, concluding “Rorschach sucks.” Yay for recursive navel-gazing, I guess.

surfin’ safari

Published on 07/10/2005 in everything. 3 Comments

Only not!

Safari on my mac mini is acting very odd. It started early yesterday, when it could get to web-pages but not read RSS feeds. Later in the day it was unable to go to some sites but fine with others, now it’s unable to get any information from the web at all. This behaviour has spread to software update and dashboard widgets, though other applications, and even other web-browsers are perfectly happy.

Bizarre? It only gets worse! You see, my Powerbook is totally normal, so the problem is confined to the machine, not the router, the modem or my ISP.

I’ve done all the usual rain-dances (trash prefs, empty caches, repair permissions, muchos rebooting) and all to no avail! I’m using Camino right now and it’s basically all good, but it’s still an annoying development. The Apple Support forums seem to have some similar cases, but no solutions as yet.

If anybody’s had experience with this I’d appreciate an email or something, and the guys over at Apple support would probably like clueing-in as well.