About the Musical Projects

Fantastic Urbanites: progressive rock.

Pitch Phork: rock with some jazzy twang.

Vicious Cycle: rock, hard rock, and progressive rock, with an occasional jazzy-funky side.

Xavier <X>: Only me, and mostly progressive-rock with strong funk and jazz influences.

In my opinion, neutrality on the internet is more important to Americans than the war in Iraq, or any other public issue for that matter. The Internet is currently wide open for us to receive virtually any and all information about any topic. In this way, we are free to decide emphatically for ourselves on any issues.

The media companies, and other big conglomerates, are lobbying the U.S. Government to get control over the Internet by having tiered costs based on Internet speed. These tiered charges are for content providers (in essence, websites). At first, this seemed fair, but it's not. Big companies with big money will scratch each others’ backs in ways that limit the website/content providers who don’t have the big money.

It's hard enough to find the real unbiased truth of what’s going on in the world, even with the internet, but think of how hard it would be if the Internet was controlled in such a way to allow the big media companies to benefit the most.

Think of how much our perspective of the world has changed, and how much our ability to learn about any topic has changed since the Internet became available.

In my opinion, the Internet’s mass availability was the first time America’s First Amendment had truly been made available to the public. The Internet has put us one step closer to the true idealistic Democracy.


This is merely a summary of what the lobbyists are trying to do, and in my words. Don't let them take OUR connection away and make it theirs! Please research this further!

Start with the FAQ:

• Save The Internet: FAQ
  
  
• PBS: Net Neutrality
  
  
• Google: Net Neutrality
  
  
• Hands Off: Blog
  
  
• Common Cause: Net Neutrality
  
  
• We Are The Web
  
  
• Electronic Freedom Foundation: Free Speech
  
  
• Save The Internet

I'm always on the lookout for new music to listen to. Namely, talented musicians writing interesting and unusual music that one wouldn't normally hear on the radio. That is all subjective of course. And I do respect and enjoy music I hear on the radio, but I find it to be too repetitive in many aspects. I'm basically looking for non-pop music that might qualify as pop-music if the music on-the-air wasn't so controlled and cliche'. Well, here is a list of sources that I've been exploring.

• Pandora.com is an ingenious way to find new music. Created by the Music Genome Project to give a "comprehensive analysis of music" by giving musical attributes or "genes" to songs to identify what one likes or dislikes in those songs. One enters into Pandora a song name or group name and Pandora starts playing songs with similar "genes". One then scores each song with 'like' or 'dislike' and Pandora narrows your likes down for it's future song selections. The other great thing is that it's free streaming music. Just let it play!
  
  
• Multiple online radio stream WOXY.com is a radio station that used to be on-the-air then went internet only and posted a letter on their main page stating their reasons. From what I've read elsewhere, they play the most musical variety with the least musical repetition of any radio station on the air (in the US?). They continue this now on the internet but have gone listener-supported. They do still have free LOW-SOUND-QUALITY online radio streams, and they also have their playlists online so if you hear a song you like, you can find out who the artist is quickly. Not being able to listen to this station in my car keeps me from paying the $9.95 a month. But I still find WOXY a good source for new music.
  
  
• Webjay.org and The Hype Machine are online playlist communities. Sites like these allow a way for people to share their personal playlists. The interesting spin here is that these playlists play music from any source on the internet and can even include music videos. These playlists vary a lot in number and from songs I've heard to song's I've never heard. But, maybe my local radio stations are just too conservative. So, these are good sources for me...
  
  
• Apparently, there are a number of audio bloggers who have a lot more links to external music than I have. The Tofu Hut is one of them. There you'll find a well categorized list of links.
  
  
• I've mentioned Soundclick.com before. They feature music from unsigned and signed artists. There are a lot of really good artists listed on this site -- very often with free music downloads to sample the artists' style and ability (downloads are free after creating a unobtrusive login account). Soundclick does have charts based on number of plays, where the better music rises to the top. But if you're just searching through the genres & artists, note that the basic music hosting on this site is free, so you might have to wade through a few artists that you don't like or that are obviously still getting their musicianship together. However, the search will really pay off when you find something you enjoy! It only took me a few tries...
  
  
• Singing Fish is an audio & video search engine. I haven't figured out how to find much music I haven't heard about with it, but I figured I should mention it.
  
  
• I save Allmusic.com for last because it's an industry giant's website. However, it is such a great resource it must be mentioned. They have a feature to find new music allowing you to explore by: Genre, Mood, Theme, Country, or Instrument. And even better, any group you find has a lists of: Similar Artists, Artists Influenced By, and Following Artists. Very easy to get lost finding new music here. The down side is that the song samples are of such low quality you can't distinguish Bach from Metallica, but it's a start. BTW, you have to create an unobtrusive login account to get to the more in-depth features.

VLC Media Player at videolan.org. I just found this software last weekend and I am already totally sold on it. Well, for watching movies at least. I'll give a little history to explain why.

I have 5.1 surround sound set up through a studio quality "sound card" into studio quality active monitors. This allows me to mix the music I record in my studio in surround sound.

Now, it would be a complete shame not to be able to watch a DVD movie without using this great sound system. My computer's video card hooks to my TV through S-video, which isn't as crisp and dimensional as the component output on my DVD player, but hey, I'm an audio guy. I'll fix the video later...

So, a few weeks ago, I started downloading all the trial versions of DVD playback software I could find. I also updated Windows Media Player (WMP) which also plays movies. Every one of those choices had serious issues for me.

Most of them were a crap shoot in getting them to playback in 5.1. I am talking a crap shoot each time I run any piece of software. One time it works and the next time it doesn't.

Then, when I tried to make some of the software go full-screen on either the TV or my computer monitor, the software would crash. WMP had this problem.

I expected that the 5.1 crap-shoot problem lied in having a high-end "sound-card," but then I tried VLC and things just worked!

Every time I start a movie, a 5.1 option appears in VLC's menu. I select that and I have surround. I select "fullscreen" from the VLC menu and I have a full picture. I've found that "Deinterlace: Blend" looks best on my TV, even though to the best of my knowledge one shouldn't deinterlace when playing on a picture-tube TV (where interlacing is part of it's function). Sometimes, the video dissapears when I go full-screen on the TV, but VLC doesn't freeze up and selecting "Deinterlace: Blend" makes the video instantly re-appear.

My "sound-card" doesn't provide a volume control in it's driver since it functions as reference instrumentation. But, VLC provides it's own volume adjustment where most other DVD playback software I tried relied on a sound-card driver for volume control. Also, VLC is the only DVD playback software I found that had a functional sound equalizer while playing DVD's. Unluckily, they are preset equalizations (not user adjustable), but I did find a few that work well for me.

All in all, VLC get's my vote, and two thumbs up!

dBpowerAMP Music Converter (DMC) Is a piece of mostly free software for windows (MP3 encoder is a trial license). It has really improved productivity for me in the studio. After installing the main program, one may install various codecs (MP4, FLAC, OGG, AIFF, WMA, etc.) from the dBpowerAMP Codec Central web page. One can then convert between any of the codecs installed. My favorite part about DMC is that it works great from internet explorer -- highlight a group of files, alternate-click on them, and run DMC to convert them all!

I've never done or heard of any sound quality comparisons, either technical or subjective, between this and other converters. However, I have no complains in that department concerning DMC.

MD5Summer is a piece of free software for windows that I use to keep an eye on backups I've made to CD and DVD. It reads files in and calculates a check sum. This checksum can later be used to see if the file has been corrupted after transferring over the internet, or just sitting on your computer for years (disk drive goes bad, destructive virus, etc). MD5 checksums are common in the open source software community (Linux, BSD, etc.), in fact MD5Summer is open source software.


I back up studio projects and final mixes to DVD because hard drives run out of space fast when you are dealing with music and video a lot. It is more cost effective to store dormant data on DVD's than hard drives, although it takes more time and effort. Also, consumer hard drives have a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of about 10 years, from the numbers I've seen. Consider this MTBF operating the drive constantly within it's normal limitations. Even if the MTBF it is longer, there are mechanical parts that wear out and electrical parts that can fail due to ESD, power surges, lightening, and so on, in unusual but not unheard of cases.

DVD's and CD's are expected to have a life of 60-100 years. DVD's sister, the CD, has been known to fail within a year. However, the why in those cases seems to always lead to mishandling. These media have their limitations also; heat, cold, humidity, and chemicals can cause problems with these media, and in combination issues with them occur more rapidly. From the research I've done I feel safe by not using CD-labels, writing on the disks with water based inks (NOT Sharpies), and storing the backups in a location with "normal" temperature & humidity.

How I use MD5Summer:

I put all the files going to a DVD in one folder on my hard drive and use MD5Summer to create checksums for all files (~4.5 gigs of data takes a while). Then I write to DVD all those files and the file MD5Summer created (contains the checksums). Once written to DVD, I run MD5Summer again checking the files on the DVD. On rare occasion, I have found errors! If all checks good I indicate this on the DVD and include the date, then I delete the files from my hard drive.

I buy batches of 25 or 50 DVD's at a time. Considering that if one DVD in a batch has issues, it is more likely that others in that batch will have issues too, since they were made at the same time (hopefully?). I note which batch each DVD belongs to. Once a year I go back and check a few random DVD's, with MD5Summer, from each batch and note that no issues found. If I ever find issues, hopefully it will only be with a file or two, so it won't be a great loss. At that point there will probably be a better medium to store data on -- I'll just move all the data from that DVD batch to that new medium. Hopefully, it will all fit on 1 piece of media instead of 50!