Friday, October 26, 2007
Christina Aguilera names unborn child
Christina Aguilera has named her unborn child, it has been claimed.
The 'Dirrty' singer - who is yet to publicly confirm her pregnancy - held a private baby shower for family and friends at the weekend (20.10.07) where she revealed she is naming her baby after husband Jordan Bratman.A source told In Touch Weekly magazine: "She rubs her baby bump and talks to the baby, calling it Jordy."The 26-year-old singer is almost six months into the pregnancy and is said to be expecting a boy.A source said: "Christina's friends all bought boy-themed gifts for the shower, all blue."Earlier this month, Christina, Jordan, her mother-in-law and sister-in-law all visited exclusive Los Angeles baby boutique Bel Bambini to register gifts for the baby shower.Sales assistant Crysta Smith said: "She looked beautiful. She had a little bump. She said she was so excited to be pregnant."Christina and her family chose a variety of items for her baby shower list, including blankets, diaper bags, bottles and clothing.
The 'Dirrty' singer - who is yet to publicly confirm her pregnancy - held a private baby shower for family and friends at the weekend (20.10.07) where she revealed she is naming her baby after husband Jordan Bratman.A source told In Touch Weekly magazine: "She rubs her baby bump and talks to the baby, calling it Jordy."The 26-year-old singer is almost six months into the pregnancy and is said to be expecting a boy.A source said: "Christina's friends all bought boy-themed gifts for the shower, all blue."Earlier this month, Christina, Jordan, her mother-in-law and sister-in-law all visited exclusive Los Angeles baby boutique Bel Bambini to register gifts for the baby shower.Sales assistant Crysta Smith said: "She looked beautiful. She had a little bump. She said she was so excited to be pregnant."Christina and her family chose a variety of items for her baby shower list, including blankets, diaper bags, bottles and clothing.
Bob Dylan film released at Christmas
I'm Not There is a biographical film reflecting the life of musician Bob Dylan. The iconic singer-songwriter will be depicted through seven distinct stages of his life by six different actors (Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, and Cate Blanchett). It was co-written and directed by Todd Haynes.
The film is said to tell its story using rather non-traditional techniques, much like the poetic narrative style utilized in Dylan's songwriting. "The film is going be inspired by Dylan's music and his ability to re-create and re-imagine himself time and time again," according to key producer, Christine Vachon. It was rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for language, some sexuality and nudity.The title I'm Not There is a reference to the Dylan outtake recorded during The Basement Tapes (Sessions). It was not included in the studio album The Basement Tapes and can only be found on the CD bootleg set The Genuine Basement Tapes and the later remastered version (still considered a bootleg) of that set A Tree With Roots. I'm Not There is one of the most famous and highly regarded outtakes, not just of the Basement Tapes, but Dylan’s whole career. It has never been officially released, though it is slated to appear on the film’s soundtrack.The production began filming in late July 2006 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It premiered at the 34th Telluride Film Festival on August 31st and won the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actress honors for Blanchett at the 64th Venice Film Festival. It opened in theaters in Italy on September 7, 2007. It was also part of the Toronto International Film Festival and played on September 14, 2007.The film is out on December 21st in the UK.
The film is said to tell its story using rather non-traditional techniques, much like the poetic narrative style utilized in Dylan's songwriting. "The film is going be inspired by Dylan's music and his ability to re-create and re-imagine himself time and time again," according to key producer, Christine Vachon. It was rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for language, some sexuality and nudity.The title I'm Not There is a reference to the Dylan outtake recorded during The Basement Tapes (Sessions). It was not included in the studio album The Basement Tapes and can only be found on the CD bootleg set The Genuine Basement Tapes and the later remastered version (still considered a bootleg) of that set A Tree With Roots. I'm Not There is one of the most famous and highly regarded outtakes, not just of the Basement Tapes, but Dylan’s whole career. It has never been officially released, though it is slated to appear on the film’s soundtrack.The production began filming in late July 2006 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It premiered at the 34th Telluride Film Festival on August 31st and won the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actress honors for Blanchett at the 64th Venice Film Festival. It opened in theaters in Italy on September 7, 2007. It was also part of the Toronto International Film Festival and played on September 14, 2007.The film is out on December 21st in the UK.
Duran Duran video banned
.K. TV has banned a video for Duran Duran's collaboration with Justin Timberflake as the clip was too explicit.
The video for Falling Down, which Timberlake co-wrote and produced, pokes fun of the celebrity culture in rehab. But the promo was criticised by TV censors for showing controversial scenes of semi-naked models in distress. The 80s pop sensations have had to compromise by releasing a toned down version instead.
The video for Falling Down, which Timberlake co-wrote and produced, pokes fun of the celebrity culture in rehab. But the promo was criticised by TV censors for showing controversial scenes of semi-naked models in distress. The 80s pop sensations have had to compromise by releasing a toned down version instead.
Metallica new album in February
Metallica's new studio album looks set to hit the shelves in February.
The Examiner.com spoke with Lars on the Rick Rubin produced album. Here is part of what Lars had to say:'Fans may be stunned by the decision to waive longtime producer Bob Rock for Rubin. "But for our own sanity, our own creative survival, we needed to work with a different set of circumstances and dynamics," Ulrich says. "So we've been stripped of our defense mechanisms, and it's been very invigorating to be challenged again. Rick's taken everything we've known about making records and completely turned it upside down." 'Are the songs punchier, four or five minutes long? "Well, the most of the intros are four to five minutes," he says. "I don't know — Metallica and short songs just don't go that well together. But whereas 'St. Anger' was an exercise in over-pummelling the listener, these new songs echo some of our stuff from the '80s- long, epic journeys through different musical landscapes, heavier, but a lot more melodic." The next album, set for release next February, its almost finished, with the band will be polishing up vocal mixes until December.
The Examiner.com spoke with Lars on the Rick Rubin produced album. Here is part of what Lars had to say:'Fans may be stunned by the decision to waive longtime producer Bob Rock for Rubin. "But for our own sanity, our own creative survival, we needed to work with a different set of circumstances and dynamics," Ulrich says. "So we've been stripped of our defense mechanisms, and it's been very invigorating to be challenged again. Rick's taken everything we've known about making records and completely turned it upside down." 'Are the songs punchier, four or five minutes long? "Well, the most of the intros are four to five minutes," he says. "I don't know — Metallica and short songs just don't go that well together. But whereas 'St. Anger' was an exercise in over-pummelling the listener, these new songs echo some of our stuff from the '80s- long, epic journeys through different musical landscapes, heavier, but a lot more melodic." The next album, set for release next February, its almost finished, with the band will be polishing up vocal mixes until December.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Where’s the Other Half of Your Music File?
CHANCES are that even if you have taken the plunge and started building a digital music collection, you have never had to tangle with the word “bitrate.” That may be about to change.
The Apple iTunes store, the largest seller of music downloads, began selling tracks from EMI Music yesterday without any restrictions on copying, for a slightly higher price than usual, $1.29 instead of 99 cents. To sweeten the deal, those tracks have better sound, with a bitrate of 256 kilobits per second (kbps), up from the standard 128 kbps. Apple has gone so far as to say that this results “in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording.”
So what exactly is a bitrate? Simply put, it is a measure of the amount of data used to represent each second of music. A higher number means that more sonic information can be used to recreate the sound. To careful listeners, or those with good audio equipment, more data can make a big difference.
Last fall, Dr. Naresh Patel, a physician in Fort Wayne, Ind., moved into a home he designed with his wife, Valerie. It has a home theater, complete with projector, surround-sound speakers and a high-end amplification system. The sonic centerpiece is two Bowers & Wilkins loudspeakers that cost Dr. Patel $12,000 “with a discount.”
It was all working beautifully until Dr. Patel connected his iPod to the system. Sitting down in the theater’s sweet spot to enjoy his music, he was instead appalled.
“I couldn’t believe what I heard,” he said. “You don’t need a trained ear to hear the complete lack of so many things: imaging, the width and the depth of the sound stage. It almost sounded monaural, like listening to music in mono. The clarity, silkiness, the musicality of the music, if you will, was not there.”
The problem was compression — the process of removing audio data to fit the music into a smaller file. Compressed audio making audiophiles crinkle their noses is not surprising, nor is it new. It has its roots in the debate of the 1980s, pitting the digital CD against the beloved analog vinyl record. The degradation of CD quality into something even more limited is simply proof to many fervent music listeners that Armageddon is indeed at hand.
But several factors are making the debate over sound quality and bitrates more relevant now. Digital storage is cheaper than ever, download speeds are increasingly fast and digital music files have taken the place of CDs in many home theaters and cars. Many people are specifically asking for higher-quality downloads, and Apple and other online retailers are eager to deliver them — for a higher price, of course. (The price of complete albums from iTunes in the higher-quality format will remain the same.)
Barney Wragg, who oversees EMI’s global digital music efforts, said there had been a shift in the music marketplace. “What was an entirely PC, MP3-player experience has changed; now people are wiring music via iPods into their stereos in their home and their car,” he said. “That’s what is driving the demand for increased fidelity. When I connect an iPod directly into the hi-fi in my car, I really notice the difference.”
Apart from bitrate, the sound quality of digital music is also affected by its format, which is determined by the software used to compress it, known as a codec. MP3 is one of the older techniques for compressing audio and is not widely used by online stores. Apple has chosen a newer format called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which plays on iPods and some other devices. Most other online stores use the similarly modern Windows Media Audio, or WMA, which does not play on iPods.
All three of these formats are “lossy,” meaning the encoding software surgically trims out audio information that is not easy to hear, because it is covered up by other sound or is situated at the highest and lowest ranges of human hearing. The Norah Jones track “Come Away With Me” is 33.4 megabytes when stored in an uncompressed format; the lossy compression methods bring that down to 6.1 megabytes at 256 kbps, or 3.1 megabytes at 128 kbps, regardless of the codec used. (When turning your CDs into song files on your PC, you can choose the bitrate you want in the settings of iTunes or Windows Media Player.)
Codecs do vary in quality. Mr. Wragg of EMI said that as a rule of thumb, an MP3 at 320 kbps is roughly the same as an AAC file at 256 kbps. “The difference between WMA and AAC is more difficult to say,” he added. “Each has a slightly different way of getting compression. But in double-blind tests they perform pretty similarly — bitrate for bitrate they sound similar, but some prefer one over the other.”
Until now, online retailers have dealt in 128 Kbps tracks — most retailers, that is. Two years ago, a group of audiophiles created MusicGiants, a digital download store that specializes in “lossless” files that are compressed in a way that does not discard any audio information, resulting in tracks that average 25 megabytes in size. MusicGiants now has more than 500,000 songs from most major labels.
Scott Bahneman, chief executive of MusicGiants, said that comparing lossless tracks and compressed tracks was like comparing photos taken with a high-end digital camera and those taken with a camera phone. “Every bit counts when you’re trying to get sound quality, resolution or anything else,” he said. The site’s core audience is the type of person who spends large sums of money on home theater equipment, and wants music stored as digital files rather than on CD.
Mr. Bahneman said his company planned to offer better-than-CD-quality music in files originally created for the DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD disc formats, which did not catch on with consumers. Each song will be 250 megabytes, about the same size as one episode of a sitcom on iTunes, but without the video. These “Super HD” files will have a bitrate of up to 11,000 kbps (that is, 11 megabits per second), and will be sold by the album rather than the track, at $20 each. Mr. Bahneman said that with the latest broadband services and huge hard drives, downloading and storing high-resolution audio files should not be a big hurdle.
MusicGiants’ giant files are unlikely to appeal to the masses. Most people agree that on run-of-the-mill headphones, car speakers and compact sound systems, it is not easy to tell a low bitrate from a high one, because what is lost in compression is also lost in the reproduction of sound through those kind of speakers.
To test the effect of different bitrates, I borrowed a sound system that was not an audiophile’s wildest dream, but was certainly higher quality than the gear owned by most music buyers: a Harman Kardon AVR 147 receiver ($449) and two JBL L880 speakers ($1,400 a pair), connected to an iPod via the Harman Kardon Bridge adapter ($70).
This unscientific study involved three people (including myself) who listen to music daily in a variety of formats, from FM radio to CD. I loaded an iPod with 11 versions of “Come Away With Me,” spanning various qualities of MP3 and AAC from 64 kbps to 320 kbps, as well as one in Apple’s lossless format. Sitting in the sweet spot, we each listened to the different versions, played in random sequence, trying to determine if each subsequent version was higher or lower in quality. It was a straightforward test, and the result was surprising.
The difference between 64 and 128 kbps was stark. All three of us picked up on it. As bitrates climbed above 128 kbps, however, our guesses became increasingly haphazard; none of us could determine the difference between 320 kbps and lossless. One unexpected result was that we all thought low-bitrate AAC files sounded better than low-bitrate MP3s.
Still, even if poorer-quality tracks do not sound so terrible to all listeners, the difference between 128 kbps and 256 kbps is real. Many people will spend extra money for better-quality merchandise, perhaps in anticipation of a future sound-system upgrade. You may not buy all of your downloaded tracks a second time at higher quality, but you may decide that from now on $1.29 is a fair price to pay for an improved track.
Dr. Patel said he had mixed feelings. He said he would always prefer CD quality to compressed audio, even at 320 kbps. Will the higher-quality downloads from iTunes matter? “I’ll take the best of what I can get,” he said, “but I’m not terribly excited because it’s not that much of an improvement.”
The Apple iTunes store, the largest seller of music downloads, began selling tracks from EMI Music yesterday without any restrictions on copying, for a slightly higher price than usual, $1.29 instead of 99 cents. To sweeten the deal, those tracks have better sound, with a bitrate of 256 kilobits per second (kbps), up from the standard 128 kbps. Apple has gone so far as to say that this results “in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording.”
So what exactly is a bitrate? Simply put, it is a measure of the amount of data used to represent each second of music. A higher number means that more sonic information can be used to recreate the sound. To careful listeners, or those with good audio equipment, more data can make a big difference.
Last fall, Dr. Naresh Patel, a physician in Fort Wayne, Ind., moved into a home he designed with his wife, Valerie. It has a home theater, complete with projector, surround-sound speakers and a high-end amplification system. The sonic centerpiece is two Bowers & Wilkins loudspeakers that cost Dr. Patel $12,000 “with a discount.”
It was all working beautifully until Dr. Patel connected his iPod to the system. Sitting down in the theater’s sweet spot to enjoy his music, he was instead appalled.
“I couldn’t believe what I heard,” he said. “You don’t need a trained ear to hear the complete lack of so many things: imaging, the width and the depth of the sound stage. It almost sounded monaural, like listening to music in mono. The clarity, silkiness, the musicality of the music, if you will, was not there.”
The problem was compression — the process of removing audio data to fit the music into a smaller file. Compressed audio making audiophiles crinkle their noses is not surprising, nor is it new. It has its roots in the debate of the 1980s, pitting the digital CD against the beloved analog vinyl record. The degradation of CD quality into something even more limited is simply proof to many fervent music listeners that Armageddon is indeed at hand.
But several factors are making the debate over sound quality and bitrates more relevant now. Digital storage is cheaper than ever, download speeds are increasingly fast and digital music files have taken the place of CDs in many home theaters and cars. Many people are specifically asking for higher-quality downloads, and Apple and other online retailers are eager to deliver them — for a higher price, of course. (The price of complete albums from iTunes in the higher-quality format will remain the same.)
Barney Wragg, who oversees EMI’s global digital music efforts, said there had been a shift in the music marketplace. “What was an entirely PC, MP3-player experience has changed; now people are wiring music via iPods into their stereos in their home and their car,” he said. “That’s what is driving the demand for increased fidelity. When I connect an iPod directly into the hi-fi in my car, I really notice the difference.”
Apart from bitrate, the sound quality of digital music is also affected by its format, which is determined by the software used to compress it, known as a codec. MP3 is one of the older techniques for compressing audio and is not widely used by online stores. Apple has chosen a newer format called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which plays on iPods and some other devices. Most other online stores use the similarly modern Windows Media Audio, or WMA, which does not play on iPods.
All three of these formats are “lossy,” meaning the encoding software surgically trims out audio information that is not easy to hear, because it is covered up by other sound or is situated at the highest and lowest ranges of human hearing. The Norah Jones track “Come Away With Me” is 33.4 megabytes when stored in an uncompressed format; the lossy compression methods bring that down to 6.1 megabytes at 256 kbps, or 3.1 megabytes at 128 kbps, regardless of the codec used. (When turning your CDs into song files on your PC, you can choose the bitrate you want in the settings of iTunes or Windows Media Player.)
Codecs do vary in quality. Mr. Wragg of EMI said that as a rule of thumb, an MP3 at 320 kbps is roughly the same as an AAC file at 256 kbps. “The difference between WMA and AAC is more difficult to say,” he added. “Each has a slightly different way of getting compression. But in double-blind tests they perform pretty similarly — bitrate for bitrate they sound similar, but some prefer one over the other.”
Until now, online retailers have dealt in 128 Kbps tracks — most retailers, that is. Two years ago, a group of audiophiles created MusicGiants, a digital download store that specializes in “lossless” files that are compressed in a way that does not discard any audio information, resulting in tracks that average 25 megabytes in size. MusicGiants now has more than 500,000 songs from most major labels.
Scott Bahneman, chief executive of MusicGiants, said that comparing lossless tracks and compressed tracks was like comparing photos taken with a high-end digital camera and those taken with a camera phone. “Every bit counts when you’re trying to get sound quality, resolution or anything else,” he said. The site’s core audience is the type of person who spends large sums of money on home theater equipment, and wants music stored as digital files rather than on CD.
Mr. Bahneman said his company planned to offer better-than-CD-quality music in files originally created for the DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD disc formats, which did not catch on with consumers. Each song will be 250 megabytes, about the same size as one episode of a sitcom on iTunes, but without the video. These “Super HD” files will have a bitrate of up to 11,000 kbps (that is, 11 megabits per second), and will be sold by the album rather than the track, at $20 each. Mr. Bahneman said that with the latest broadband services and huge hard drives, downloading and storing high-resolution audio files should not be a big hurdle.
MusicGiants’ giant files are unlikely to appeal to the masses. Most people agree that on run-of-the-mill headphones, car speakers and compact sound systems, it is not easy to tell a low bitrate from a high one, because what is lost in compression is also lost in the reproduction of sound through those kind of speakers.
To test the effect of different bitrates, I borrowed a sound system that was not an audiophile’s wildest dream, but was certainly higher quality than the gear owned by most music buyers: a Harman Kardon AVR 147 receiver ($449) and two JBL L880 speakers ($1,400 a pair), connected to an iPod via the Harman Kardon Bridge adapter ($70).
This unscientific study involved three people (including myself) who listen to music daily in a variety of formats, from FM radio to CD. I loaded an iPod with 11 versions of “Come Away With Me,” spanning various qualities of MP3 and AAC from 64 kbps to 320 kbps, as well as one in Apple’s lossless format. Sitting in the sweet spot, we each listened to the different versions, played in random sequence, trying to determine if each subsequent version was higher or lower in quality. It was a straightforward test, and the result was surprising.
The difference between 64 and 128 kbps was stark. All three of us picked up on it. As bitrates climbed above 128 kbps, however, our guesses became increasingly haphazard; none of us could determine the difference between 320 kbps and lossless. One unexpected result was that we all thought low-bitrate AAC files sounded better than low-bitrate MP3s.
Still, even if poorer-quality tracks do not sound so terrible to all listeners, the difference between 128 kbps and 256 kbps is real. Many people will spend extra money for better-quality merchandise, perhaps in anticipation of a future sound-system upgrade. You may not buy all of your downloaded tracks a second time at higher quality, but you may decide that from now on $1.29 is a fair price to pay for an improved track.
Dr. Patel said he had mixed feelings. He said he would always prefer CD quality to compressed audio, even at 320 kbps. Will the higher-quality downloads from iTunes matter? “I’ll take the best of what I can get,” he said, “but I’m not terribly excited because it’s not that much of an improvement.”
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Metallica music
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Metallica
Metallica dominated heavy metal music in the 1980s and 1990s, emerging as one of the top musical acts in history by the end of the century. Drummer Lars Ulrich (26 December 1963) and guitarist James Hetfield (3 August 1963) started the band in 1981. After a few line-up changes (including guitarist Dave Mustaine, who left in 1982 to form Megadeath), the band released Kill 'Em All in 1983 and toured the U.S. with Ulrich, Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett (18 November 1962) and bass player Cliff Burton (10 February 1962). In 1986 the band released Master of Puppets, signalling their development from speed metal thrashers to serious songsmiths who could pound out the heavy riffs. That same year a bus accident claimed the life of Burton, and Jason Newsted (4 March 1963) joined the band. Their major-label release ...And Justice For All was a critical and popular success (they had a top 40 hit with "One"), and the band toured relentlessly. Their so-called "black" album in 1991 included the hit song "Enter Sandman," and their exposure on MTV helped make them superstars. In 1996 they released Load, followed the next year by Reload, both top-selling albums that solidified Metallica's presence in mainstream rock. In 2000 they were in the news regularly for their legal battle with the online file sharing service, Napster, and drummer Ulrich appeared before the United States Senate, explaining to a sympathetic Orrin Hatch that file sharing was, in fact, stealing. Eventually Metallica and Napster reached an agreement, but in 2001 Jason Newsted left the band and James Hetfield entered a substance abuse rehabilitation program, leaving the band's latest recording on hold
Metallica Go Acoustic For Charity
Members of Metallica are set to play acoustic for Neil Young's annual Bridge School Benefit.
The Bridge School Benefit concerts have been running since 1986. Organised by Neil Young and his wife Pegi, the stellar line-up has previously included Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Simon & Garfunkel, David Bowie, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wilco, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson. Proceeds from each concert have gone to help The Bridge School in California support children with severe speech and physical impairments.
The 2007 event features Young, obviously, alongside Tom Waits & The Kronos Quartet, John Mayer, Regina Spektor with repeat appearances from Metallica, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Vedder with Flea and Jack Irons, and Tegan & Sara.
The 21st Annual Bridge School Benefit Concert will take place at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View in California across the weekend of October 27 and 28.
Both nights will be recorded by LiveMetallica.com and sales of downloads from the site will also go to The Bridge School.
The Bridge School Benefit concerts have been running since 1986. Organised by Neil Young and his wife Pegi, the stellar line-up has previously included Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Simon & Garfunkel, David Bowie, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wilco, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson. Proceeds from each concert have gone to help The Bridge School in California support children with severe speech and physical impairments.
The 2007 event features Young, obviously, alongside Tom Waits & The Kronos Quartet, John Mayer, Regina Spektor with repeat appearances from Metallica, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Vedder with Flea and Jack Irons, and Tegan & Sara.
The 21st Annual Bridge School Benefit Concert will take place at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View in California across the weekend of October 27 and 28.
Both nights will be recorded by LiveMetallica.com and sales of downloads from the site will also go to The Bridge School.
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