Most of the audio engineers I've met--both home and professional--are Mac people, and Avid's ProTools running on a Mac is often cited as the industry standard. But there are Windows loyalists out there.
In late 2007 I took an introductory audio production class taught by David Huber (who wrote one of the bibles on the subject, "Modern Recording Techniques") and Scott Colburn (who has produced albums by The Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and Sun City Girls, among many others). Both of them used Nuendo from Steinberg (which is basically the upmarket version of Cubase) as their primary digital audio workstation (DAW), and they ran it on a Windows PC.
Windows 7 should offer better performance for digital audio than Vista.
A Windows XP PC, that is. Both were very diplomatic when discussing software and other gear, but they expressed pretty serious reservations about Vista. Microsoft made a ton of changes in Vista that were supposed to improve performance, including moving certain audio capabilities out of the kernel, but these experts--whose livelihood depends on having a high-performing DAW--thought it was too untested and unknown.
Although they didn't say so, I imagine that the driver incompatibilities reported with other hardware could have been an absolute nightmare with all the gear in a professional recording rig. There were also reports of unstable MIDI timing, drop-outs, latency, and other problems (many of which were addressed by Service Pack 1). They weren't alone: the general advice for audio engineers on Windows was stick with XP. (If anybody had a success story using Vista to build a DAW, I'd love to hear about it in comments.)
In case you haven't heard, Microsoft releases a new version of Windows next week. I've been using the RTM version for a few weeks now and find it far more stable and inviting than Vista was at launch. (Although a colleague did uncover a gnarly power-management problem in Media Center related to a faulty audio driver.) Now, some of the audio experts are starting to weigh in, and it looks like the work Microsoft did to improve performance and compatibility with Windows 7 are paying off in the world of audio production.
Noel Borthwick, the chief technical officer for Cakewalk--which makes a wide variety of audio software for Windows, including the Sonar DAW line--has posted a blog entry describing how the new OS should dramatically reduce latency, particularly on x64 multicore processors. (Borthwick also went into more obsessive detail on Peter Kirn's Create Digital Music blog.) His conclusion: "I will be building a new DAW soon and Windows 7 X64 will be my OS of choice."
The long and short of it? If you're building a new recording system, Windows 7 sounds like a more reasonable choice than Vista. But if you've got a system that's already working well, don't mess with it--there still might be driver incompatibilities with older gear, and upgrades from Windows XP require a clean install, meaning your old settings will be lost and you'll have to reinstall your apps.
Correction, 2:34 PDT: This post incorrectly characterized the audio-related changes that Microsoft made in Windows Vista. Microsoft moved certain audio functions out of the kernel and into the user stack.
Zune HD
(Credit: Microsoft)I find it hard to evaluate an MP3 player until I've lived with it for a little while. Specifications, demos, and even quick hands-on tests don't tell you the most important thing: how does it sound? Can you listen to it for an hour? A week? The rest of your life?
On Tuesday, I spent a few hours with the 32GB versions of Microsoft's new Zune HD and Apple's latest-generation iPod Touch. To me, these are the top-of-the-line competitors in the MP3 player market--if you're a serious music listener with nearly $300 to spend, these are your two choices.
On a straight specifications basis, each of them has clear advantages.
The iPod Touch excels as a portable multifunction computer, with tens of thousands of available applications, and it's the only choice for Mac users. The Zune HD has superior music-discovery features, particularly when used with a Zune Pass subscription. Plus, it has an HD Radio and a sophisticated desktop PC client that makes iTunes look stale.
On industrial design, I think they're about even--a commendable feat for Microsoft given how far behind the previous Zunes were. On user interface, the iPod Touch may be more intuitive at first, but the Zune HD is way cooler--I love the way artist images and words scroll across the background as you play a song--and gives you far more customization over the music-playing experience. (I'm amazed that the iPod Touch still doesn't have an easy way to add songs to a now-playing queue, for instance.)
But what about the actual sound? To try them out, I ran them into the audio input jack in my car, which is how I most often listen to portable music. I turned each device up to just below maximum volume (I've heard my iPhone distort at its max), and made sure the EQ settings were completely flat.
iPod Touch
(Credit: CNET)The Zune HD sounded very crisp and clean, with clear separation in the bass, but the midrange--guitar, vocals--didn't seem full or loud enough. When I turned it up to try and get a fuller sound, the treble became overwhelming.
The iPod Touch was noticeably louder at the same volume setting on the car stereo. The trebly parts--cymbals, high-hat, the squeak of a saxophone reed--were still distinct, but the bass sounded rounder and warmer, and the midrange (the most important spectrum when choosing audio gear) shone through. It made me realize how much sound was missing when I listened to the Zune HD.
The difference became most obvious when I took a couple songs--Radiohead's "How to Disappear Completely" and Mr. Bungle's NSFW funk-bizarro song "Squeeze Me Macaroni"--and listened to them back to back on each player. On the Zune HD, the acoustic guitar in the Radiohead song sounded clinky and thin, and the percussion in the Bungle song was unbearably high-pitched. On the iPod Touch, the guitar sounded like guitar and the percussion was complementary rather than overwhelming.
A few hours later, I tried a similar test through the relatively cheap headphones that come with the Zune HD. Here, the Zune fared a bit better--it sounded louder, so I didn't need to turn it up so much that the over-boosted treble hurt my ears--but there simply wasn't as much audio information coming through, especially at the low end.
Hearing is subjective--apparently younger listeners are beginning to prefer the "sizzle" of highly compressed MP3s, and one listener's "crisp" is another's "harsh." And I'm an analog fan, with far more records than CDs in my home collection. But to me, the Zune HD sounded pretty good, while the new iPod Touch is the best-sounding MP3 player I've ever heard, comparing favorably with a decent CD player.
Your lesson? Don't just read the specs and look at the interface before you buy an MP3 player. Spend some serious time listening to it, at volume.
Last week, I expressed some doubt that Cisco Systems would be able to come up with a multiroom audio system that's usable by mere mortals. After all, home networking is still a pain to set up and debug, and Linksys isn't exactly a beloved consumer name.
(Credit:
Cisco)
Reading John Falcone's preview of the Linksys Wireless Home Audio System calmed my fears a little bit. Not only has Cisco hired some industrial and user interface designers, it has gotten a few things right that Sonos missed.
First, the Linksys system is completely wireless, while Sonos requires you to have at least one device in the Sonos network plugged into your router--either a full audio base station (redundant if you've got a computer with speakers in the same room as your router) or a wireless bridge (a seemingly unnecessary $99 expense).
Second, the Cisco system wisely includes an iPod dock, so you can beam all the music from your iPod--including DRM-protected files--around your house. Sonos accomplishes this task by connecting to the iTunes library on your main PC, but it can't play DRM-encumbered files (a problem that is going away soon). More importantly, Cisco's approach lets visitors plug their iPods into your home audio system--a great way to let your guests play DJ or share their recent discoveries.
Third, the remote has a touch-screen interface--something Sonos achieves only if you have an iPhone and download the free controller application.
Fourth, the individual base stations have small infrared remotes--one problem with the Sonos system is that you need to control volume from the universal controller, or walk over to the base station and manually adjust it.
Finally, it looks as if Cisco took my advice for Sonos and is releasing several bundles, including an entry-level one-room bundle with just an amplifier, speakers, and an infrared remote. Now, if it can just undercut Sonos on price by a few bucks--say, for example, if all the bundles are less than $1,000--it could have a winner.
Understand that I haven't had a chance to test the Linksys audio system out, and neither has CNET, so there could still be some show-stopping bugs or poor UI decisions that sink the whole product. But at least these initial announcements show that Cisco has considered the competition very carefully and isn't wading in blind.
Networking is a dark art, and putting the word "home" in front of it makes it no simpler. Debugging a home network is not for the faint of heart--the intelligence of the on-screen wizards peters out after the first few obvious fixes, and soon you're checking help forums, running ipconfig commands, and tweaking DHCP settings.
Their industrial design has gotten a lot better. But would you trust Linksys to build an easy wireless home audio system?
(Credit: Linksys)So today's news from The New York Times--that networking giant Cisco Systems is getting into the consumer electronics business--filled me with dread.
The idea of piping audio files from your computer to your home stereo or other audio devices is valid: I'm a big fan of the Sonos Multiroom Audio system, and Logitech and Apple have also made a go at it. But all three of these companies specialize in consumer products. They understand--nay, live and breathe--the process of hiding complexity under a clear user interface.
Playing music from multiple sources in a single playlist on a Sonos system is simple. Connecting a Mac or iPhone to an existing home network is almost invisibly simple.
Cisco's purchase of Linksys got the company into the consumer home-networking space. While setting up my Linksys wireless router for the first time was relatively painless, thanks to a downloadable applet, I had to use their free phone support line several times over the next few years to debug mysterious problems that cropped up.
The support itself was great--a real person always picked up immediately, and they were always able to resolve my problem eventually--but the complexity of the underyling technology just couldn't be hidden. Any support call that asks you to log into your router to check your DHCP settings is not simple, even if you are walked through the steps.
Cisco's a solid engineering company. If it manages to hire some great UI designers and brands these products appropriately--coming up with names that are more interesting than these would be a start--it has a fighting chance. If it thinks that enabling multiroom audio is just a few simple tweaks to its existing home networking products, forget about it.
Opening gift cards is always a bit of a letdown. They're great gifts--I'd much rather get a gift card than some expensive gadget that I don't want or already have, and which I'll have to return for store credit. But the moment of revelation itself? Oh, a plastic card. Kind of boring.
Until now. Beginning Tuesday, Best Buy is selling $50, $100, and $200 gift cards with a built-in mini-headphone (one-eighth-inch) jack, connecting cable and speakers. Why? Because they can! Plug any MP3 player into it and you'll be able to rock some tunes around the Christmas tree. And you know they'll sound awesome. Or at least as good as the ringer in your cellphone. (I saw this first on Engadget, which embeds a wacky online advertisement for them as well.)
Not to be topped, Target's offering gift cards that double as a digital camera. Which is great for off-the-cuff holiday-morning shots, but somehow that lacks the instant appeal of the audio gift card--you'd have to connect the camera to a computer before you could really do anything with the pics.
Prediction: these things are going to be huge. You will know somebody who gets one of them. Maybe you'll be that person.
The great draw of portable MP3 players is quantity.
I remember when my wife and I took a six-month backpacking trip back in 1999. We never even considered bringing an MP3 player, which might have had a whopping 64MB of flash memory, enough for about a hour of audio compressed at 256kbps. Instead, we brought a Discman and about two dozen CDs in a soft case. We grew extremely bored with those CDs and ended up jettisoning or trading most of them.
Today, you'd laugh if somebody told you they were considering bringing CDs on a trip--why would you, when all but the most hardcore collectors could fit their entire music collection onto a hard-drive based player like the 120GB iPod Classic? I've even taken a stand against the audiophiles who decry MP3s and compressed audio--I think portability is worth the quality loss you have to endure, as long as you occasionally listen to uncompressed (or better, live) music to remind yourself how great it can sound.
But I've always assumed that this is a temporary state of affairs. Kryder's Law--which says that density of data on magnetic discs will approximately double each year--is presumably going to continue, and advances in flash-based storage could lead to an exponential jump in capacity. Of course, we'll all be listening to lossless files on our portable player someday. Right?
That's why it surprised me when a report by Todd Bishop--a former Microsoft reporter for one of Seattle's daily papers, who recently helped start a new Seattle-based tech site called TechFlash--cited representatives from Amazon's MP3 store and Rhapsody saying that they weren't really thinking about lossless music.
Selling lossless files won't make sense for the next year or two because of space constraints and the fact that many players (such as the iPod Shuffle) can't play them. But what about in 5, 6, 10 years? Don't you think kids who grew up with compressed files would switch to better quality audio if it cost the same amount? Don't you think they would notice the difference?
I think so. And Microsoft apparently does too. A Zune representative told Bishop she has a hunch that lossless audio will become extremely important in the future (although today's Zunes don't support playback of any audio at a higher bitrate than 320kbps, meaning they won't play back any lossless files). Her stance is in keeping with Microsoft's corporate culture, which has always bet on the next generation of hardware. With the exception of Vista, which received a media drubbing in part because of the steep hardware requirements for the Premium versions, most of the time this has turned out to be the right bet.
CNET's MP3 Insider blog posted a fascinating entry the other day on how CNET Labs tests the audio response of different MP3 players. They load several files of the type that are used to test traditional stereo equipment, such as white noise and pure sine waves, then plays them back into an audio analyzer, which reports numbers for qualities such as signal-to-noise ratio and total harmonic distortion. Two Creative players come out on top, the iPod Classic in the middle, and Microsoft's Zune in seventh place due to fairly mediocre harmonic distortion scores.
As Donald Bell correctly points out, numbers lie: some of the best sounding MP3 players actually boost or depress certain frequencies to make up for the fact that you're probably listening to a digitally compressed file through a middling audio processor and cheap earbuds, with lots of ambient noise around you. (Good audio engineers tell you the same thing: level meters, for example, aren't the final arbiter of whether there's unacceptable distortion on a recording--your ears are.)
But putting aside the subjectivity of hearing, I'm curious about the effect of different codecs--the specific technology used to create a compressed digital sound file. Presumably, CNET Labs uses uncompressed WAV files to check the hardware. But I wonder if they've ever done tests--subjective or objective--of different types of compressed files against one another, like SoundExpert has done. I've long read that MP3 offers the lossiest compression, but is there a noticeable difference between AAC and Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Ogg at the same bitrate? And one step beyond that: does one player sound better with a particular codec than others?
Subjectively, I prefer WMA files over AAC files on my Zune. My iPods (a new Shuffle and fourth-generation 20GB unit) can't play WMA files, but when I convert those files to AAC using iTunes, they don't sound as good as the AAC files I rip from scratch, even though the converted files have a higher bitrate. MP3s don't sound as good as either AAC or fixed-bitrate WMA, but actually seem to sound better than variable-bitrate WMA. And MP3s seem to sound best on my fourth-generation iPod. Go figure.
Last fall, Steve Ball, Microsoft's program manager for sound in Vista, posted a blog entry explaining some of the reasons why Windows audio can be glitchy. (That was supposed to be "Part 1" of a series; we're still waiting for Part 2.)
(Credit:
Microsoft)
Today, Guardian writer Tim Anderson picks up the thread with an article called "Why Vista Sounds Worse." In addition to citing Ball's blog posting, he talks to the CTO for Cakewalk (a division of Roland that makes consumer and professional audio software) and an engineer at Steinberg (which makes the popular Cubase and Nuendo digital audio workstation programs). The basic story: Microsoft changed the audio architecture for Vista in some fundamental ways, introducing new APIs and driver models for audio devices. Some vendors didn't have time to adjust to the new technology, but continue to use older technology that Vista still supports through emulation software. Emulation equals worse performance. That tends to mean more audio glitches. (If you want to go much deeper, Create Digital Music posted an excellent in-depth interview with Cakewalk CTO Noel Borthwick a couple weeks ago.)
Interestingly, two of my audio production teachers are longtime PC devotees who prefer Steinberg's Nuendo software (they use v3). I didn't expect this, given that I've often heard that Mac+ProTools is the default platform for pro audio. But even with their PC preference, both of them have said numerous times that there's no way they'll move to Vista until some underlying issues are resolved. In general, because the interplay between pro audio hardware and software is so complicated, there's little incentive for engineers to replace systems that work well--if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But in this case, even if their PCs went belly up tomorrow, they'd stick with XP.
Yesterday, Microsoft's program manager for sound in Windows Vista (what a great title!), Steve Ball, posted a blog entry explaining why audio playback sometimes gets glitchy in Windows.
There's an air of post-facto justification about the posting--it basically reminds us that a PC is doing a lot more things simultaneously than, say, a $20 CD player--but toward the end of the post, he notes that it's common for certain older device drivers to lock out the CPU for 10 milliseconds to 50ms, causing an obvious problem.
I'd be curious to know what some of those devices are. Perhaps he'll give us hints in his follow-up, in which he promises to explain some of the work in Vista that is meant to address these audio glitches.
As with many blog postings, some of the most interesting information comes in the comments. One user claims that WinAmp automatically moves its priority to "High," so it "wins" any competition for certain computing resources; there's also the beginning of a debate over buffering, which would solve some glitches but might cause greater latency, a problem for communications applications.
San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joel Selvin mourns the loss of audio quality in our iPod-obsessed culture.
He's right: MP3 files and other forms of data-compressed audio, such as AAC (used by Apple's iTunes) and Windows Media Audio, don't contain as much audio data as an uncompressed song on a CD. For long-time music listeners such as Selvin, the difference is striking. (Note that he's talking about data compression, not the audio compression that's misused to "punch up" many modern recordings.)
The first time I heard a CD full of burned MP3 files back in 1999, I was struck at how flat and lifeless the music sounded. It was almost like listening to a Xerox copy of the music rather than the music itself.
The feeling is even worse if it's music you've recorded. After spending weeks getting tones (which includes the painstakingly dull process of hearing the drummer hit the same drum over and over and over again for several hours), fine-tuning the sound of each part with the perfect combination of instruments and amplifiers and offboard effects, playing several times to get the perfect take, overdubbing extra parts and haggling over the perfect mix, you end up with a streaming MP3 that sounds like a radio broadcast from Mars played on a cheap transistor radio.
But I also recall the first time I heard a CD back in the early 1980s, and how sterile it sounded compared with the vinyl records I was accustomed to (and still prefer). And no recording will sound as vibrant as live music.
The point is, music can serve many purposes. When I listen to an MP3 file over my car stereo, it might not sound as good as a clean vinyl record on a high-end stereo system, but the setting's different: maybe it's a sunny day, and there's no traffic, and I haven't heard this particular song in so long that I almost forgot why I liked it in the first place. It's not exactly background music, but it's more of a soundtrack to my day than an activity in itself.
Or, when I hook my iPod up to my small Bose system for a dinner party, it's meant to be a backdrop for food and conversation, the real stars of the show. If it's the right crowd on the right night, we'll end up downstairs, listening to the real thing on vinyl.
I'd feel sorry if I imagined that there were kids who'd never heard anything but compressed music, but I'm not sure that these kids exist or will ever exist.
Like John Cage knew, music exists all around us every day. Natural-born audiophiles will seek out live music, buy CDs and maybe a turntable--and perhaps even learn to play an instrument.
For the rest of the world, music never would have been much more than background material anyway. With compressed audio files, they have access to more of it than ever before. Perhaps one of the countless tracks they've burned from their little-used CD collection will hit them just right one day and spark them to investigate further.
