[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

A miniature...

 

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

The Havasupai:

 

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

The imagined xylomarimba player Noia Havasupai girl:

 

[kennychaffin]

Angelo you should put this on soundclick or one of the other streaming sites so it doesn't have to be completely downloaded before listening.

 

I'll be back after the download.

 

KAC

[kennychaffin]

Very lovely Angelo. Peaceful! Very aptly named. I could feel myself floating along above canyon country!

 

Excellent work.

 

KAC

 

P.S. the ability to have me soaring above the canyon is quite an accomplishment given my fear of heights.

[ido1957]

Excellent sounding tune, the flute ? is really cool. Nicely played/arranged too. Why is it so long though? Is this piece designed for a specific application?

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

kennychaffin:

Do you think that having a soundclick account would help to spread the music to the people? I looked at the website, but it wasn't clear to me what the deal is there. I wouldn't mind to give the music away for free as download, but thought it may get lost in the huge amount of music presented at soundclick.

 

'Very aptly named'

I'm always concerned about the meaning when giving titles in English. So you think the titel makes sense to an person with english as first language and is also correct linguistically?

 

ido1957:

The flute is real, played by a real native American, I never meet him but bought the flute performance as is, maybe shifted a note or two in order to fit the harmony.

 

The lenght is just what came naturally, respectivelly when the music was finished it was nine minutes long, nothing forced in lenght or shortened, of course optimized for keeping up the energy till the end. Did you got bored before the end?

 

'Why is it so long though? Is this piece designed for a specific application?'

The lenght came with the concept that the listener should have a nice experience. All tunes of this series are long, the latest I composed is 48 minutes. Of course this only makes sense when the suspense is keept up, this has partly to do that I plan the music that way and on the other side the listener has the time to listen. But maybe it could also be used as background music.

[rsadasiv]

Nice mellow tune. I'm more of a maximalist than a minimalist, but it reminded me of Phillip Glass in his Koyyanisqatsne period.

[blue2blue]

Very nice, Angelo -- unless something bad happens in the next four or five minutes. Lately I've been listening to a little more of this sort of more-than-ambient, instrumental electronica. At the right time, it's just right.

 

I listen to everything from Back to Coltrane as "background" music, so, to me, it's not any kind of negative or pejorative. In fact, through the nineties I did live improv creating similar music using synths, some instruments and live echo-loops, by myself and in collaboration.

 

 

With regard to Soundclick -- you have to work it. People are probably not going to just find you. But it has a lot of cool features (including an embeddable player you can put on your website, MySpace of Facebook page, etc [but which does not count toward the SC charts at the same rate, fwtw) and the fi, while not great at 128, definitely is better than at MySpace. (One thing I've found recently at SC is that if I submit a hiqh quality VBR, the 128's that their system creates sound a little better... or maybe it's simply my imagination combined with my sloth (since I'm not creating 128s for anywhere else, when I accidentally submitted a VBR and it worked and sounded like it hadn't got mangled I sort of just said, cool, better yet).

[rsadasiv]

Have you ever gotten the Facebook soundclick widget to work? I successfully added the soundclick app to my facebook page, but it only wants to play the top of the hip hop charts - not my playlist

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

I have absolutely no psycho drama when all of my music is used as background, when it left the assemblage plant, I think of it that people can do with it what ever they want

 

 

 

 

.

[kennychaffin]

You're a good man!

 

KAC

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

I heard several times that 128 kbps sounds bad; the LAME encoder at 128 kbps CBR higest quality generates artefacts which sound like wobbling in the middle of the spectrum, very annoying. The Fraunhofer is a little bettter at 128 kbps CBR, however CBR is not recommended for anything, but always VBR. However the only option for live streaming MPEG-2 is CBR.

 

The microsoft page gives good recommandation on this subject:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384539(VS.85).aspx

[blue2blue]

Have you ever gotten the Facebook soundclick widget to work? I successfully added the soundclick app to my facebook page, but it only wants to play the top of the hip hop charts - not my playlist

 

But... aren't you at the top of the hip hop charts?

 

Frankly, I've yet to see the appeal of Facebook... but after being there passively for a while I noticed a couple of old friends had found me (I guess they were bored with FB, too). But I haven't bothered putting my player on there because I'm pretty convinced it doesn't get enough traffic to be worth it. But maybe I should just for experience.

 

 

Anyhow, believe it or not, after going to considerable trouble to integrate SC's player(s) (which I really like) with my website and my MySpace pages, I noticed a big drop in my play counts at SC. Maybe it was just a coincidence -- I contacted SC and they seemed to indicate plays form the player counted but were not weighted as much for the charts -- but, anyhow, I ended up shooting a screenshot of one of the players and pasting that with a link into my various pages instead of the actual player... they click on the player image, and end up on my page at SC where I can, supposedly, get the 'full' benefit of their play.

 

Now, yes, that does sound as pathetic to me as it probably does to you. But... call me vain, call me opportunistic, call me desperate... but I figure the charts at SC are the main way anyone is going to find you there. (Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I should do some research.) I mean, besides going out and pimping for "friends" -- and no reason to think they even listen, you know... it's the whole MySpace friend-count all over again, I suspect.

 

Anyhow... I love the players and I had created 'standalone pop-up' players on my sites that had links for shuffle and playlist order and I was going to go farther and put 'stations' in them (but they changed the player interface so 'stations' don't seem to be an option anymore when creating a new player code call -- too bad, because I created two new stations: one with all my music 'sorted' on "electronic to acoustic" and another one sorted "acoustic to electronic" -- so they kind of evolve/devolve from one polar extreme to the other. (They're not quite reverses of each other -- I'm still tinkering but I wanted to get a good flow.)

 

 

Anyhow, short answer to your question: I dunno.

 

 

[blue2blue]

I heard several times that 128 kbps sounds bad; the LAME encoder at 128 kbps CBR higest quality generates artefacts which sound like wobbling in the middle of the spectrum, very annoying. The Fraunhofer is a little bettter at 128 kbps CBR, however CBR is not recommended for anything, but always VBR. However the only option for live streaming MPEG-2 is CBR. The microsoft page gives good recommandation on this subject: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384539(VS.85).aspx

 

Sure, the lower the bitrate, the lower the quality, of course. I listened to the 128 of your track and it sounded fine. I know the sonic sheen of your other work from other DLs at higher rates (and I think I even DL'd a full WAV file of one of your tracks some time ago over in Craig's forum) -- so I can see where you're coming from.

 

It's been a while since I did a my highly informal personal shootout between Fraunhofer's straight Mp3s, both CBR, VBR, and the now all but forgotten "Mp3 Pro" reduced bitrate/supposedly higher quality encodings and LAME's CBR and VBR, as well as MS's own WMA. I don't think I actually bothered with 128s. But at 192 CBR, I preferred the LAME encodings -- but you HAVE to set the the quality switches, et al, yourself, you can't just rely on the defaults to get the best quality (but slower encoding). At fast/lower quality encoding, Fraunhofer definitely took it in the Mp3 arena. But in 'super-slow' mode, I felt the LAME did best at 192 and above, particularly with VBRs. WMA did pretty well with high end definition at any comparable bitrate -- but I found myself preferring the sound of a higher bitrate VBR Mp3 over smaller WMAs... the sound is more 'solid' somehow on some highly subjective valuation.

 

But all that is really subjective. I think folks should do their own comparisons, trying to set up blind testing where they can (double blind best of all, of course).

 

Soundclick does have a $10 a month premium membership where you can upload higher bitrate files (and customize your pages, yadda yadda) but I made a rule a while back: I'm not spending any more money that I absolutely have to to give away my music. I mean... come on.

 

 

With regard to streaming mp3s... I don't know what the spec is (anymore if I ever did) but I stream VBR mp3s all the time from Archive.org and other sites. All my blog/podcast material is at Archive.org and when you upload a file they blow it into a wide variety of formats for DL or streaming, including Ogg Vorbis. But they pointedly use VBRs for some streams.

 

You might look at music.download.com, owned by CNET, which, last time I checked offered 192kbps. (I don't know if the 'reconstituted' but still laregly forgotten Mp3.com, now owned by CNET as well, offers higher bit rate. I was pretty ticked off when CNET bought the nameplate, kicked us all off, told us all Mp3.com was now only for big artist promotions and gave us the sop of music.download.com. When the losers relented and let us micro-indies back on Mp3.com, I put up one song and essentially thought, screw these clueluess boffos.)

 

 

And, for that matter, if you don't mind your track going up on the web and never coming down (you can, actually, remove or replace a track -- but it's sort of frowned upon, given the nature of Archive.org's mission), you can use Archive.org to host your material. I only use it for stuff that won't be changed or that I won't need to remove when I finally get that big label exclusive contract. [i believe the operant phrase at this point is: bwahahahahaha!!! ]

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

A programmer told me once that the server computing is capable to encode at the moment a client clicks on the selected download button, but all music is stored only in one high quality format, i.e. 14-bit/44.1 or even higher. Of course this would decuple the storage.

[blue2blue]

 

A programmer told me once that the server computing is capable to encode at the moment a client clicks on the selected download button, but all music is stored only in one high quality format, i.e. 14-bit/44.1 or even higher. Of course this would decuple the storage.

 

 

That might be or have been true of a particular site.

 

But -- to go back to the example of Archive.org -- they definitely pre-encode the different formats -- because you can see the job lists their server creates to submit to process the different file formats... also when you first upload, only your original file shows up on the Archive.org page for the recording. But as the others are processed and available, they show up as well.