2 posts tagged “music”

How did I miss this CD by former Pink Floyd band member Roger Waters? The ideas in this concept album are as important today as when the CD was first released in 1992. Oh, and the music is pretty good too. 

While I am a bit of a fan of Pink Floyd and Roger Waters I somehow missed the release of this album. I doubt that I heard this CD and then and forgot about it because it's so powerful. Anyway a few weeks ago Adam Curry mentioned it in his podcast The Daily Source Code so I added it to my wanted list at Swap A CD and shortly thereafter it was being mailed to me. Technology is great when it works, isn't it?

The basic idea of this concept album is that a small group of powerful people are using the mass media and religion to placate and distract people while they line their pockets and fill their bank accounts at the expense of society and the planet. Reality, what a concept!

A few songs really drive this idea home. In What God Wants (Parts 1, 2 & 3) God wants a whole host of unholy things from various currencies, gold and silver to television, war and crack. And from It's A Miracle :

Miraculous you call it babe
You ain't seen nothing yet
They've got Pepsi in the Andes
McDonalds in Tibet

However a few bits of harsh reality do get through the opiate of mass media. From Watching TV :

We were watching TV
In Tiananmen Square
Lost my baby there
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes

But ultimately in the final track, Amused to Death, the future doesn't look good.

We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over

. . . This species has amused itself to death
Amused itself to death

Musically if you like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall then you will probably like this CD as well.  The catchiest song is What God Wants. The refrain (sung by a few female back-up singers) "What God wants, God gets, God help us all" has been stuck in my head for days now. Also guitarist Jeff Beck contributes some very nice melodic solos throughout the album. Who needs David Gilmour, right Roger?

Sadly I don't think things are any different today, the internet has not changed a thing. Today people can be more informed than ever before but seem to choose mindless escapism above all else almost exclusively. People know more about Brad and Angelina's twins than what their governments and businesses are doing in their name in the far reaches of the world.  I'm afraid we are still amusing ourselves to death.

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Note: cross posted to my Newsvine column .

Both Ogg Vorbis and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) are audio files that have better sound quality than MP3. Furthermore Ogg Vorbis, while a compresed file like MP3, requires less memory per given song than MP3. FLAC's superior sound quality comes a price, it produces much larger files than Ogg or MP3.

Earlier this week I got Roger Waters' CD Amused to Death (CD review coming Monday) and I used the occasion to finally set up my Windows Vista PC to rip and play Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. This was not hard to do at all. The latest version WinAmp natively rips and plays FLAC. It also plays Ogg Vorbis and a plug-in allows WinAmp to rip CDs into Ogg Vorbis. The plug-in, Ogg-Vorbis encoder v1-1, is available from the WinAmp web site and I had no problem installing it or the WinAmp app itself on Vista (32 bit, SP1).

Is Sound Quality Really Better Than MP3s?
I'm no audiophile but to me MP3s have always sounded tinny and less full-sounding than CDs. Ogg Vorbis sounds better than MP3 and FLAC sounds great to me.

File Sizes Compared
I ripped the Roger Waters CD into Ogg and FLAC using the default sound quality settings in WinAmp, here are the file sizes: 75 MB in Ogg Vorbis and 354 MB in FLAC. 

If I remember correctly then MP3s are a little over 1 MB per minute. The CD is approximately 72 minutes long so Ogg Vorbis is right around that rate.  However FLAC is almost 5 times as big as the Ogg rip. 

Streaming Ogg
I have always been more of a steamer of online music rather than a ripper and downloader of music. Unfortunately few online radio stations stream in Ogg Vorbis. Virgin Radio UK plays today's hits and classic tracks, it also streams in Ogg (Virgin ogg stream). For classical music there is WCPE (ogg stream). The Icecast Directory has a number of internet radio stations which stream in Ogg. Now if Radio Paradise, one of my favorite online radio stations, would just stream in Ogg.

Downloading Ogg and FLAC
Jamendo has free Ogg downloads in a number of musical styles. Several recording artists sell at least some of their music in FLAC including Nine Inch Nails, the Eagles and the Philadelphia Orchestra.   

Portable Players for Ogg & FLAC
A few portable music players from iRiver, Yepp and SanDisk play Ogg Vorbis, here's a list to check out. For FLAC SourceForge has a hardware list .

Why MP3s?
First mover advantage and inertia. Over a decade ago in the days before broadband and huge hard drives, WinAmp and Napster helped establish MP3s as the defacto standard for digital music. Today most people are used to MP3 and have acquired a large collection of music in MP3 so they are reluctant to change.

So is it Ogg or FLAC for me?
Both! I will probably rip most of my CDs into Ogg Vorbis however my classical CDs I will most likely rip into FLAC. Also I will download in Ogg from web sites that offer Ogg (for free) and if I buy any music online then I will prefer FLAC. I still have not found any web sites selling music in Ogg Vorbis. FLAC files may be big but hard drives have gotten even bigger. I still have hundreds of gigabytes of space on my PC and I can easily add an eSATA hard drive if I need more space. MP3s still have a place for me since most podcasts are in MP3 and for some reason a lot of people still seem to like paying MP3 royalty fees rather than use Ogg Vorbis, which is totally free.

The rest of the world may like MP3s but I'll use Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, thank you very much.