trisweb.com

Preface: Keep in mind that the only reason I care about audio fidelity and sound quality is that I care about good music. I love music of all kinds, and I believe it deserves faithful reproduction. I make it a point never to forget why I strive for better quality audio.

The trend in recorded audio quality has been a bell curve over the last hundred years or so. From the phonograph to the LP to higher quality recording and digital mastering, to the slight step down with the move from vinyl to CD, music is moving today toward a huge decline with the advent of “perceptual compression” like mp3 and other formats. The music industry should know that it’s their fault entirely that this decline happened, and that it led to the entire mp3 revolution, the file-sharing predicament, and the eventual decline of the physical media.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure if it’s a gift or a burden, but for what it’s worth, I’ve given my little brother a weblog. Check it out. He might say something interesting. He does that once in a while I guess.

My favorite song of the day is off the new Postal Service single We Will Become Silhouettes — it’s called “Be Still My Heart,” and it gives me chills. If you liked Give Up, go grab this single just for this song. It’s like The District Sleeps Alone, except happy and optimistic instead of depressing and slow. The now playling list will say I’ve only played it once, but that’s because it doesn’t update when you play the same song over and over 15 times in a row. I might manually edit the database to reflect that…

A couple of quotes from Galen Rowell I found on a random site…

“Whenever anyone asked what camera I used, I should blithely reply: ‘Asking a photographer what model of camera he uses is like asking a writer what model of tyewriter he uses.’”

Speaking on film vs digital, Mr Rowell relates Bill Atkinson’s thought on the matter — “When I asked Bill about this confusion of medium and message, he shrugged and said that searching for grain in a digital print to validate it as photography is like listening for tape hiss in a CD to validate it as music. The noise is apart from the artistic signal, and to listen for it is not to hear the music.”

Couldn’t resist another photo (click for a larger version). Borrowed a friend’s 5 megapixel Sony camera and everything lined up for its lens. More shots soon.

Also, check out the now playing list on the sidebar. Yeah. It’s done. Friggin awesome.

I know I’ve been pretty focused on this playlist thingie, which is pretty boring, albeit the coolest thing in the world.

So I put up a new photoset. Enjoy.

Finished my CS project last night, and after an all nighter the night before, I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to work on NowPlaying. It’s really looking nice now. I integrated album art into the list, and fine-tuned the search algorithms so that it’s really amazingly accurate.

I’m not quite ready to release anything. It still needs to be tested a lot, and I’m also planning on making a simple administration interface so you can delete songs you don’t want people to see, or change the album art to something else, or delete the album art alltogether. But if you don’t pay any attention to it, it should always work. Also I need to make the bloglet, which should be easy. You’ll know when that’s ready by looking at my sidebar.

So, any comments, suggestions for the interface, etc? I know the navigation is still non-existant. I’m working on it.

Been working on the playlist program in-between a giant project at school. Somehow I find this to be more useful than a primitive lexer and parser for Python. I have a feeling Python already has a great compiler, and the world doesn’t need a badly written one.

But I don’t think the world has seen this. At least not much. Basically, I’m searching for album art through Google Images, parsing the result page sent back for all image URLs in it, grabbing the images one at a time until I find one that’s square (to a tunable tolerance), resizing it to a specified size, caching it in a specified directory (with an optional maximum number of files cached, using a least-recently-played replacement policy), and returning the resulting image. Of course, if the album already has art cached, it doesn’t go searching; and if it can’t find anything on Google Images, it uses Froogle, which is more likely to have the image if the CD’s still on sale, but the images are lower quality. If neither Google Images or Froogle finds anything, it uses a specified default image.

Whew. It’s cool. Very cool. Take a look at the album art for the most recently played album.

Eventually this will be fully integrated into the playlist program, with the additional function to show a “bloglet” display for your sidebar or anywhere else. You’ll be able to simply tell it the width you want the bloglet to be (along with the margin for the images), the number of images to display, the configuration (eg: 4 images in a 2×2 block, or 6 images in a 2×3, etc), and the criteria (eg: most played songs, most recent albums, etc.). It will then produce a nice little DIV right into your page with images resized to fit. It will rock, to say the least. Expect more soon.