Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Record label EMI this week announced that it will begin selling on-the-spot recordings of concerts.

The name of the initiative, Abbey Road Live, is a bit misleading--it doesn't have anything to do with the Beatles album or the recording studio after which it was named.

Rather, EMI is using its Abbey Road brand to indicate that these aren't low-quality bootlegs but professional multitrack recordings, mixed and mastered on the spot, and sold on CDs, DVDs, or flash drives to fans at the venue. EMI also said on Wednesday that it plans to make the recordings available as streams or downloads, so fans can access them from home.

Instant concert recording isn't new: EMI sub-label Mute Records has had a similar program in place since 2004--according to the press release, 10 percent of fans at a recent Blur concert downloaded the show afterward--and Willie Nelson has been selling flash drives with on-the-spot concert recordings for several years.

But having a large record label like EMI on board legitimizes the practice. It's a no-brainer way for live acts to earn some extra cash--and great for fans as well. I can think of many concerts I've attended, after which I would gladly have paid another $20 for a recording. This should become standard operating practice in the next couple of years.

For several years now, musical artists have been experimenting with selling flash drives of concert recordings immediately after the show, but the Flaming Lips--whose latest tour starts this Saturday in Del Mar, Calif.--are taking it to the obvious next level.

Buy a ticket, and they'll send you a download code for six songs--three new ones from their upcoming album "Embryonic" (nice album cover!) and three B sides from old singles. After the show, they'll send you another link to download a recording of the show you attended. It's a great way to build on the already impressive devotion afforded to one of the most sonically groundbreaking bands ever to grace a major label. I wish more artists would do the same--it might justify those insane ticket prices.

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Arthur C. Clarke is credited with saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but when it comes to music, the older gear is more miraculous--and mysterious--to me. MP3 players are just special-purpose hard drives or memory sticks, Pandora and other online radio services are just twists on the streaming audio sites that first emerged in the early Web days, and every online tool for musicians simply takes an old task--recording, CD manufacturing, distribution--and moves it to the Web, gaining various efficiencies along the way. Even digital audio workstations like ProTools and Cubase are somewhat intuitive to a longtime computer user.

It's a miracle: the Goldring 1022GX.

But a turntable involves actual mechanical and electrical engineering, and, despite being a longtime vinyl buff, I find the technology remains an absolute mystery to me. A few weeks ago, the stylus on my 8-year-old turntable, a Music Hall MMF-5, was snapped off during a mad confabulation of 2 year olds. For the replacement, I upgraded from a Goldring 1012GX to a 1022GX. I also had the pretty nice folks at Hawthorne Stereo order a couple other replacement parts--an anti-skating weight that disappeared about two years ago, and the tiny metal handle used for moving the tone arm, which was snapped off by a belligerent stranger at a New Year's Party in 2003/4. (I still have a contract out on him.)

The new stylus seems to have fixed some records I thought were unplayable. The first, Do Make Say Think's "And Yet And Yet," had a persistent crackle in the left channel. The Hawthorne geniuses told me it was due to the fact that some idiot (me) played the record for the first time with the arm misaligned, which scratched out one side of the groove. I've played that record a bunch of times since, trying to adjust the weight and alignment of my old cartridge, and always got the same hiss. Not anymore. There's still the occasional crackle, but the sound quality is well within range of a typical used LP.

Then I went to play Roger Waters' "Amused to Death," a 1991 record that's too valuable to sell, but that I thought I had ruined with a water spill in 1993 or so. The first two sides have been filled with hiss and garbage noise ever since, on any turntable I've tried them on. Over the years, I've read and heard that the water probably loosened some fragments from the vinyl, which then got jammed into the grooves. I've cleaned it countless times, and gotten some relief from wet-playing, but the fundamental problem remained.

When I dropped the needle on it last night, my jaw almost hit the floor: it sounded fine, like a typical used record. No persistent hiss, just the very occasional crackle or pop. My guess is that the new 1022 has a much narrower or more precise point than the used 1012, so it's connecting with only the grooves in the record and not the residue lying slightly to either side of the groove.

The point: if you listen to vinyl on a quality turntable but are not perfectly satisfied with the sound you're getting, don't throw up your hands in frustration. Have it professionally set up and consider upgrading to a new stylus. And keep the drunks and 2 year olds away from it.

Like I did last year, I'd like to encourage and implore music fans to celebrate the second* annual Record Store Day by visiting your local record store and buying something. You might have to step away from your computer and leave your house, but people used to do this all the time and, trust me, it can be fun.

This year, dozens of high-profile artists have joined the cause by offering exclusives, including new tracks by Modest Mouse, a bunch of 10-inch vinyl releases from Radiohead, a six-pack of 7-inch singles from the Jesus Lizard, T-shirts from Death Cab for Cutie and the Grateful Dead, and plenty of other cool stuff. There will also be some very tempting giveaways--for instance, if you buy the new Wilco concert DVD, "Ashes of American Flags," on April 18, you'll get to download an entire concert for free. (For what it's worth, I still think Wilco's live album "Kicking Television" is one of the three best concert albums ever recorded, up there with The Who's "Live at Leeds" and Neil Young's "Arc/Weld.")

*Correction: I originally wrote this was the third annual RSD. The group was founded in 2007, but the first one was last year, in 2008.

I didn't imagine there was much room for innovation in USB-recording interfaces, but at the 2009 NAMM show--the annual convention for buyers and sellers of professional music gear (read: music gearhead paradise)--a couple of companies introduced some new takes on this very prosaic, but necessary, piece of gear.

The StealthPedal from IK Multimedia is a USB interface and MIDI controller that looks like a wah-wah pedal.

(Credit: IK Multimedia)

For the uninitiated: A recording interface is the bridge between your musical output and your computer. You attach it to the computer, then plug your instrument (or multiple instruments, or output of a mixing board) into it, and voila. There are countless types of interfaces at all levels of price and complexity, but for home musicians who just want a quick way to get their musical ideas down on their hard drives, an inexpensive USB interface is the way to go. M-Audio is probably the best-known brand at this level, although Tascam and Edirol (part of Roland) are somewhat common as well.

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Coolfer has an interesting post this morning, responding to Peter Kafka's suggestion that it's getting too hard to buy music because fewer retailers are stocking CDs. I think Kafka's confusing cause and effect--if retailers were still making lots of money on Britney and Rihanna, CDs would be sold front and center. But regardless of the chicken-and-egg question, Coolfer makes the very good point that most music purchasers don't seek out music and aren't willing to sift through the racks at their local record stores, but rather pick up a CD as an impulse buy on their way to the beer aisle. So what happens to those purchasers once CDs are relegated to a small corner in the back of Wal-Mart or Borders?

I look forward to an Amoeba trip like a kid looks forward to Christmas. But most towns don't have an Amoeba, and most casual music fans wouldn't stop by anyway.

(Credit: Amoeba Records)

The most likely replacement scenario, I think, will be over-the-air digital downloads: users will hear a song on the radio or in some public space and make an impulse buy from their mobile phone or other portable device. But the technology to make this process as easy as picking up a CD is still in the very early, geeks-only stages.

With an iPhone, you can make a purchase only if you've got a Wi-Fi connection, not over your service provider's cellular network. (The same holds true for the iPod Touch, since it's not a phone at all.) And identification requires a third-party app like Shazam (which just added another 2 million songs to its already impressive database). Apple could make impulse buys a lot easier if it bought Shazam, incorporated its functionality into the iTunes Wi-Fi app, and created a cellular version of the iTunes store--perhaps giving users the ability to download a very small but highly compressed version of the song over 3G, then giving them the right to "upgrade" to a better-quality file later.

The Buy From FM feature on Microsoft's Zune player is another good idea, but it only works when you're listening to the Zune's FM radio--there's no identification of audio from outside sources--and of course the Zune isn't a phone (yet), and can't connect to Wi-Fi hotspots that require a browser-based log-in. Microsoft's also making a big push for its Zune Pass, which lets you stream any song in the Zune Marketplace on demand, but like subscription services from Rhapsody, this won't appeal to impulse buyers--by definition, those folks aren't going to pay $15 a month (or whatever) for the right to listen to music.

Internet radio with click-to-buy functionality is another strong contender--think of Pandora on the iPhone. But once again, there's a disconnect between hearing, identifying, and buying (which requires a Wi-Fi connection).

Don't get me wrong--the CD still has a lot of life left in it, and specialty music stores and online retailers will continue to sell them by the tens of millions. But as smartphones become more common, somebody (probably Apple) is going to close the loop in a way that makes impulse buys of digital downloads just as easy as grabbing a CD from the rack next to the cash register. Whoever does stands to become the Tower Records--or should I say Wal-Mart music section--of the next decade.

CNET has written several times over the years about Audacity, a free, general-purpose sound-editing tool. I've known people who have used it to manipulate sound for podcasts and the like. But I'd completely forgotten about it until today.

One of my colleagues been looking for a tool to split recorded audio presentations into portions to go with the corresponding individual PowerPoint slides. I thought Apple's GarageBand might work, but he found it too opaque, and our office (like most) is PC-heavy, which would have complicated efforts to train other folks on how to do this job.

Then he downloaded Audacity, and it fit the bill perfectly. It let him see audio waveforms to figure out where the speaker stopped talking between slides, easily split the recording at those points, and clean up other extraneous noise from the track. At the same time, it didn't burden him with features more geared toward budding musicians such as built-in instrument sounds or an on-screen keyboard.

Reading through the documentation, I realized Audacity might be the perfect solution to a problem I've been facing myself. Today, I use Microsoft's Digital Media Plus Pack to record my LP records to digital format. But Microsoft discontinued that XP-only product when it released Vista and doesn't support it anymore. Worse, it records only to Windows Media Audio, which means I have to convert the files to AAC or MP3 before I can play them on my iPod.

But Audacity lets me record directly to MP3 using the LAME encoder, which I've already got installed for another audio-conversion program. Although MP3 offers sound at the same bitrate as AAC and WMA, hard drive space is now plentiful enough to encode everything at 320kbps, which is perfectly adequate for on-the-go sound.

Screenshot of Audacity running on Windows

(Credit: Audacity)

CNET Reviews posted a great article last week on the best MP3 players for people who like to record audio directly to a device without the aid of a computer. (The article referred to these people as "pirates," rather than "lawful archivers of personally owned content." Argh, mateys!) I second their strong approval of Toshiba's Gigabeat U, and generally think the Gigabeats were sorely underrated.

The iRecord Pro gives you an easy way to import audio or video from almost any source to your iPod, without a computer.

(Credit: Streaming Networks)

But what if you've already got an iPod, as sales statistics suggest more than 70 percent of you do? Streaming Networks' iRecord is the answer. Connect any device with an S-video or composite video (or audio-only) output to the iRecord, connect the iRecord's USB output to your iPod or other MP3 player, hit the record button, and you're on.

The original was released two years ago, and the iRecord Pro came out earlier this year, adding support for more devices (including the iPhone and iPod Touch), a timer that lets you set recording times, and the ability to transcode MPEG-2 video files stored on a computer to the device's preferred H.264 video format. Today, the company announced support for the iPhone 3G as well.

It's a bit expensive for an accessory--the Pro costs $259.95--but worth it if you like to grab content from a wide variety of audio and video sources for your iPhone or MP3 player, and don't want to muck around with a computer and recording software in the middle.

I had the opportunity to see Wynton Marsalis perform with the 15-piece Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra last night in Seattle, and it was an absolutely stellar performance, with great song selection (Marsalis's own "The Holy Ghost" was a standout) and some of the most incredible technical playing I've ever heard--they did Duke Ellington's "Braggin' in Brass," which contains a trombone part in which each player plays a note or two in sequence, together creating this fast complicated line. (Listen here--that part starts around the -2:06 mark.) I've heard from some jazz fans that Wynton's a little too stiff or formal for their tastes, but that wasn't my experience at all--he even walked back on stage for an impromptu second encore vamp with only the piano, bass, and drums backing him up.

I would have been happy to buy a recording of last night's performance by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (shown here).

(Credit: Wynton Marsalis Web site)

Jazz performances lend themselves to live recordings--setlists change nightly (Marsalis announces his setlist from the stage as the show goes on) and improvisation is the rule rather than a rarity. I would have been happy to buy a recording of this show or last month's Return to Forever performance. But so far, I don't see jazz musicians embracing the practice of recording their shows and selling them--something that's become pretty common with jam bands like Widespread Panic. A few acts, like Willie Nelson, even sell USB memory sticks containing a recording of the show right at the door as you're leaving.

Rights clearance might be one problem: most of the Marsalis set consisted of songs by other composers, some from the orchestra, others long-passed like Duke Ellington. Figuring out how to split the sale proceeds from a live performance among all these rights holders might be a problem--something that rock bands, who tend to perform mostly their own material, don't face. Then again, every Widespread Panic show contains at least one cover, and they seem to have figured out how to disburse the proceeds. So I hope the jazz world will begin to embrace on-the-spot live recordings soon--I want to give them more of my money, if they'll let me.