Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
I had no idea how this thread got so wrong. It's all started with what encoding to chose for Finale output, right? Lets go step by step. Metering software has two usages, one is for FOH or tuning control room, which analyze the signal coming from reference microphone. This is _analog_. FFT is used to compare the output signal on one channel and measured _analog_ signal on the other. The reference pink noise would be produced from the metering application within. Another application is to analyze the mix/master product. The plug-in is the common format since it intercept the signal in real-time within DAW. But this can be somewhat inaccurate (except TDM) since it most likely intercepting floating point signal instead of integer signal. I have dedicated metering machine which receives signal from DAW machines as digital via light pipe, 8 ch or 4 ch SMUX if double sampling rate. If you want to do the latter within one CPU, you have to make an inter- audio driver link between source application and the metering application unless metering application has a capability of playing back the sound file. Alternatively, if your sound card has digital IO, and is 24 bit then you can create digital loop to do this. Assigning audio file playback app's output to digital out, and metering software's input to digital in. This way, the bit-to-bit data should be passed on. I only know for Mac side, but MacOSX has CoreAudio framework, and there are many free apps such as Soundflower that connects them. For example, I can assign output of QuickTime to Soundflower instead of my MIO2882 +DSP interface, then assign metering software input to Soundflower. We did have a thread that there are Windows equivalent of this. I don't remember what they are called, tho. -- - Hiro Hiroaki Honshuku, A-NO-NE Music, Boston, MA http://a-no-ne.com http://anonemusic.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 8:18 Uhr A-NO-NE Music wrote: FFT is used to compare the output signal on one channel and measured _analog_ signal on the other. The reference pink noise would be produced from the metering application within. I think we both mean the same, but I'd like to point out that an analogue signal as such cannot be used in any software, it has to be digitized first, which is done through the soundcard's A/D. Software, by definition, has no concept of analogue signals. FFT works with numbers, not with analogue curves. The computer which can directly process analogue signals as such has yet to be invented. Unless I have missed an extraordinary development in the computer world. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Johannes Gebauer / 2005/09/30 / 04:32 AM wrote: I think we both mean the same, but I'd like to point out that an analogue signal as such cannot be used in any software, it has to be digitized first, which is done through the soundcard's A/D. Software, by definition, has no concept of analogue signals. Right. I didn't mean that. Bad English or lack of communication skill on my part :-) By the way, for PC soundcard, because it will never sound as good as external converter since CPU's power supply unit will introduce jitter into clock, analog loopback test is valid. David has been saying distortion introduced by soundcard is this jitter noise. If the soundcard is capable of taking external clock, this distortion will go away. -- - Hiro Hiroaki Honshuku, A-NO-NE Music, Boston, MA http://a-no-ne.com http://anonemusic.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On Sep 30, 2005, at 4:32 AM, Johannes Gebauer wrote: The computer which can directly process analogue signals as such has yet to be invented. I've got one between my ears, but it is slow, imprecise, balky, prone to freezes and difficult to upgrade, requiring many long hours of training and programming. It is also adversely affected by lack of sleep and excess of alcohol. 8-) Christopher ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 15:04 Uhr A-NO-NE Music wrote: David has been saying distortion introduced by soundcard is this jitter noise. That can be true. However, as long as we are dealing with a soundfile, and all the processing is done without ever leaving the digital domain, there is no jitter introduced. Jitter, by definition, only occurs either in A/D or in D/A conversion. Also, if, and only if, the soundcard has been doing a DA and then an AD conversion there can be all sorts of problems, not just jitter. In this respect David is correct. I just cannot understand why this double conversion would be done in the first place, and how the signal is looped back from output to input. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Johannes Gebauer / 2005/09/30 / 02:35 PM wrote: Jitter, by definition, only occurs either in A/D or in D/A conversion. To be correct, only at A/D, not at D/A, if we are talking about the jitter caused by clock. Also, if, and only if, the soundcard has been doing a DA and then an AD conversion there can be all sorts of problems, not just jitter. In this respect David is correct. I just cannot understand why this double conversion would be done in the first place, and how the signal is looped back from output to input. That's what I was trying to explain. The applications he tried does not allow otherwise, as I understand it. That's why I mentioned inter- application audio driver link, such as Soundflower or WireTap on Mac side, needs to be involved on his Windows. Are we not terribly OT yet? Is anyone else even interested in this subject? :-) -- - Hiro Hiroaki Honshuku, A-NO-NE Music, Boston, MA http://a-no-ne.com http://anonemusic.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Christopher Smith wrote: On Sep 30, 2005, at 4:32 AM, Johannes Gebauer wrote: The computer which can directly process analogue signals as such has yet to be invented. I've got one between my ears, but it is slow, imprecise, balky, prone to freezes and difficult to upgrade, requiring many long hours of training and programming. It is also adversely affected by lack of sleep and excess of alcohol. 8-) The same might be said for excess of sleep and lack of alcohol, for some of us. ;-) -- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 21:04 Uhr A-NO-NE Music wrote: That's what I was trying to explain. The applications he tried does not allow otherwise, as I understand it. That's why I mentioned inter- application audio driver link, such as Soundflower or WireTap on Mac side, needs to be involved on his Windows. However, I still see two possibilities: Either the digital signal is looped (more likely afaics, although I know nothing about PC soundcards or the Windows Audio subsystem), in which case again none of the analogue circuits are involved, and no jitter can occur; or it is looped in the analogue. This would probably require the ouput jack to be connected to the input jack physically, no? Hence my question, which David never actually understood or at least he never answered it. Are we not terribly OT yet? Is anyone else even interested in this subject? :-) Well, I was actually trying to explain to David that probably what he wanted to do could have been done quite easily. In so far it is no more OT than the original question. But I agree that the subject is getting a little un-interesting. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
I've just finished a book espousing the concept of a theistic, unconditional love and grace for ALL (Whoa!). It certainly is not easy to buy into that concept as a mere human being, but I have vowed to attempt it. Dean On Sep 29, 2005, at 6:02 PM, Randolph Peters wrote: At 1:07 AM +0200 9/30/05, Johannes Gebauer wrote: Your post, on the other hand, was, imho, completely unacceptable on a forum like this, and I really ask you to come to your senses and learn some manners. It really p§$%$sses me off how you treat others, including me, who only tried to help you. This is what kill filters are for. I've been using one on Fenton for years. -Randolph Peters ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Dear Dean, Thanks for your thoughts, but you might have the wrong idea about what a kill filter is. A kill filter means that any email coming from an author goes straight into the trash where I don't have to read it. I do this to avoid aggravation or wasting my time. It is the equivalent of turning the TV off if I don't like a show, except that the process is automatic. -Randolph Peters I've just finished a book espousing the concept of a theistic, unconditional love and grace for ALL (Whoa!). It certainly is not easy to buy into that concept as a mere human being, but I have vowed to attempt it. Dean On Sep 29, 2005, at 6:02 PM, Randolph Peters wrote: At 1:07 AM +0200 9/30/05, Johannes Gebauer wrote (about David Fenton): Your post, on the other hand, was, imho, completely unacceptable on a forum like this, and I really ask you to come to your senses and learn some manners. It really p§$%$sses me off how you treat others, including me, who only tried to help you. This is what kill filters are for. I've been using one on Fenton for years. -Randolph Peters ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On Sep 30, 2005, at 5:22 PM, Dean M. Estabrook wrote: I've just finished a book espousing the concept of a theistic, unconditional love and grace for ALL (Whoa!). It certainly is not easy to buy into that concept as a mere human being, but I have vowed to attempt it. You believe that unconditional love is possible? You are a much more committed humanist than I am, then, and I have always tried to consider myself one. Christopher (By theistic, you mean god-like love, or do you mean love from god? I assumed you meant god-like, as I am not a believer.) ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Yes, the book ... very interesting, by the way, proposes that God is the only universal entity which (who) is capable of unconditional love, and that he has it for every soul on earth, past, present and future. We can only hope to strive to do the same. The most controversial message in the book is that God's grace is for every soul on earth, no matter what they have done in their lives, or what religious path they choose to follow, or not follow ... ergo, hell is, and always will be, empty. As you can imagine, he (actually they ... two pastors wrote it in tandem) have taken a huge amount of flack. Hope this explains my comments to a degree. Take Care, Dean On Sep 30, 2005, at 5:16 PM, Christopher Smith wrote: On Sep 30, 2005, at 5:22 PM, Dean M. Estabrook wrote: I've just finished a book espousing the concept of a theistic, unconditional love and grace for ALL (Whoa!). It certainly is not easy to buy into that concept as a mere human being, but I have vowed to attempt it. You believe that unconditional love is possible? You are a much more committed humanist than I am, then, and I have always tried to consider myself one. Christopher (By theistic, you mean god-like love, or do you mean love from god? I assumed you meant god-like, as I am not a believer.) ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 3:55 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: The tools I downloaded all required me to play the file in some other program in order to get the waveform (instead of reading it directly from the file). This means that those programs were capturing the output from my soundcard, which means that this output would include the distortion introduced by the sound shape of my soundcard. I very much doubt that. Spectrum Analysis is done in the digital, not in the analogue. The software could capture the input from the soundcard, but I doubt it could capture the output, since that is going out, not in. It is possible, if unlikely, that the output is handed back to the input of the sound card, but why on earth that would be the case is a mystery to me. I saw it in the one application, where with no sound playing, there was some very low level activity in the extreme ranges of low and high. My suspicion is that the software was *adding* the input signal from the audio card. You probably could have easily switched this off. I can think of no other sensible explanation. Hang on: Do you mean you were playing back silence and got activity? That's normal, one always avoids to put complete silence ie between movements, or before the start of the piece. Instead one records silence in the recording room/studio. Such silence is not silent. But it still has nothing to do with your sound card. And, yes, to get a spectrum analyis you need to play your file (though not necessarily in real time). A Waveform is static, but a spectrum analysis can only exist in relation to continuum. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 28.09.2005 23:39 Uhr Lee Actor wrote: You are right that the software of necessity must analyze the digital stream before the D/A conversion, Johannes. However, real-time playback is not necessary to do a spectrum analysis. I realize that. However, I got the impressions that David assumed that one could make a spectrum analysis of any given point in time of an audio file. That is not the case, since frequency is dependent on time, or rather on change, not status. Whatever. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 29 Sep 2005 at 12:39, Johannes Gebauer wrote: On 28.09.2005 23:39 Uhr Lee Actor wrote: You are right that the software of necessity must analyze the digital stream before the D/A conversion, Johannes. However, real-time playback is not necessary to do a spectrum analysis. I realize that. However, I got the impressions that David assumed that one could make a spectrum analysis of any given point in time of an audio file. That is not the case, since frequency is dependent on time, or rather on change, not status. No, I had made no such assumption. I am interested only in the profile of an entire piece, as shown in the wonderful graphs that Hiro has been making. I'd like to be able to do the same thing, but none of the tools I downloaded (freeware, shareware, demos of $$$- ware) either worked or could analyze a file except by capturing playback from my soundcard (unless the UIs were just not set up in a way that allowed me to figure out how to use them to do what I wanted). I think you certainly recognize that if the spectrograph analyzer is looking at the playback of the file rather than the file itself that the result will include distortion introduced by my soundcard. Which is what I said all along, and, I thought, pretty clearly. Just goes to show that when one is speaking of a subject in which one lacks experience and expertise that it's easy to be misunderstood. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 20:29 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: I think you certainly recognize that if the spectrograph analyzer is looking at the playback of the file rather than the file itself that the result will include distortion introduced by my soundcard. David, I am still absolutely convinced that your sound card cannot have any effect on the spectrum analysis, whether the file is played back or not. This would require the software to first convert from digital to analogue, then loop it through the soundcard, and then reconvert analogue to digital. That makes absolutely no sense at all.Your soundcard almost certainly is completely out of the whole picture (except for the playback itself, you wouldn't hear anything without a soundcard). Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 29 Sep 2005 at 21:21, Johannes Gebauer wrote: On 20:29 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: I think you certainly recognize that if the spectrograph analyzer is looking at the playback of the file rather than the file itself that the result will include distortion introduced by my soundcard. I am still absolutely convinced that your sound card cannot have any effect on the spectrum analysis, whether the file is played back or not. . . . Well, this is my last statement on this subject, but in an application that does spectrographic analysis and requires that you choose an input sound device (as more than one of the programs I tested did require) it is pretty clear that the analysis app is capturing the audio output, just like Audacity and other audio capture programs. These apps lacked a FILE OPEN capability that would have allowed me to choose a file for analysis without capturing the soundcard output. . . . This would require the software to first convert from digital to analogue, then loop it through the soundcard, and then reconvert analogue to digital. That makes absolutely no sense at all.Your soundcard almost certainly is completely out of the whole picture (except for the playback itself, you wouldn't hear anything without a soundcard). Well, Johannes, you're just WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. These applications had no capability of opening a file. All they could do was listen to a stream of audio from the soundcard. Now, more than one of the apps *did* have the ability to open WAV files, but I wanted to analyze MP3 files, so those were of no use to me. Those, presumably, would not have involved my soundcard. But in the case of the ones I've been talking about, the soundcard *was* involved, whether you are able to conceive of that being the case or not. YOU ARE JUST WRONG HERE. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 22:27 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: Well, Johannes, you're just WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Thanks for keeping your voice down. (You manage to become really offensive in the course of any discussion. Why is that? Is this some kind of ego trip you have been on for the last few years? I for one am really getting sick of that!) These applications had no capability of opening a file. All they could do was listen to a stream of audio from the soundcard. So they listen for the soundcard input? How did you feed the MP3 into that? It was not clear to me that these applications could not open files. But it is still not clear to me how you actually manage to play any files through them. Now, more than one of the apps *did* have the ability to open WAV files, but I wanted to analyze MP3 files, so those were of no use to me. Those, presumably, would not have involved my soundcard. Actually, that's very easy. Just convert the MP3 to Wav. Since Wav is an uncompressed format you will not loose any more than was already lost in the MP3 file. You can still make your comparison. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 29 Sep 2005 at 23:11, Johannes Gebauer wrote: On 22:27 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: Well, Johannes, you're just WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Thanks for keeping your voice down. (You manage to become really offensive in the course of any discussion. Why is that? Is this some kind of ego trip you have been on for the last few years? I for one am really getting sick of that!) Well, for one, you've repeatedly ignored the things I've said in this thread, and repeatedly told me that I what is clearly happening in front of me on my PC is simply not happening. I find that pretty damned annoying. These applications had no capability of opening a file. All they could do was listen to a stream of audio from the soundcard. So they listen for the soundcard input? How did you feed the MP3 into that? I had to initiate playback in an MP3 player, and tell it what device to listen to. It was not clear to me that these applications could not open files. But it is still not clear to me how you actually manage to play any files through them. I said this in my first posts explaining that none of the software I'd tried worked for me. You just missed it, obviously. And your repeated insistence that I was wrong is what made me respond as above. Now you see perfectly well that I was right about the soundcard being involved, but you weren't working without that information, which I'd already provided (when I said an outside player had to be used to initiate the playback). Your certainty that you were correct, the fact that you've told me at least 3 times that my soundcard is not involved is what drove my annoyance. Now, more than one of the apps *did* have the ability to open WAV files, but I wanted to analyze MP3 files, so those were of no use to me. Those, presumably, would not have involved my soundcard. Actually, that's very easy. Just convert the MP3 to Wav. Since Wav is an uncompressed format you will not loose any more than was already lost in the MP3 file. You can still make your comparison. Well, since none of the software met my needs, I uninstalled it. I'm not interested in software that requires me to work around its limitations by doing conversions like that, when there's software that can read both directly. I've got better things to spend my time on, many of them quite time-consuming by themselves, without doing MP3-WAV conversions to use in applications that it seems to me ought to read the MP3s natively. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 29.09.2005 23:41 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: So they listen for the soundcard input? How did you feed the MP3 into that? I had to initiate playback in an MP3 player, and tell it what device to listen to. Yes, but you still haven't answered my question: how did the output get to the input? Inside or outside the computer? Ie, did you connect the output to the input? It was not clear to me that these applications could not open files. But it is still not clear to me how you actually manage to play any files through them. I said this in my first posts explaining that none of the software I'd tried worked for me. You just missed it, obviously. Well, from your post, which I just re-read just to be sure, I understood that the analysis software came as a plugin, and you used that inside other software which played back your MP3 file. That's actually the most common way for such analysis software to work these days, so it is not all that ridiculous for me to assume this was the case. In such a scenario your soundcard would indeed not have played any role in the process. Whatever the case, I really, really think that my posts were perhaps annoying to you, but in no way offensive or abusive. I was merely trying to help you. Your post, on the other hand, was, imho, completely unacceptable on a forum like this, and I really ask you to come to your senses and learn some manners. It really p§$%$sses me off how you treat others, including me, who only tried to help you. You do this at almost regular intervals. Any normal discussion you enter will almost certainly end with you offending others. It is completely unneccessary and not asked for. Sorry to others for letting off some steam. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 30 Sep 2005 at 1:07, Johannes Gebauer wrote: On 29.09.2005 23:41 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: So they listen for the soundcard input? How did you feed the MP3 into that? I had to initiate playback in an MP3 player, and tell it what device to listen to. Yes, but you still haven't answered my question: how did the output get to the input? Inside or outside the computer? Ie, did you connect the output to the input? The soundcard is INSIDE the computer. It's a device that is part of the audio interface of the computer. The spectrographic analysis application was listening to the output from this device, just as Audacity listens to the audio output from it. Since I have only one audio device in my PC, there was only one choice for the output. As to input into the soundcard, the MP3 or WAV player sends it to the audio card. The analysis programs listens to the output of that and analyzes it. That process of passing through my soundcard obviously shapes the wave according to the amount of innacuracy and distortion inherent in my sound card. It was not clear to me that these applications could not open files. But it is still not clear to me how you actually manage to play any files through them. I said this in my first posts explaining that none of the software I'd tried worked for me. You just missed it, obviously. Well, from your post, which I just re-read just to be sure, I understood that the analysis software came as a plugin, and you used that inside other software which played back your MP3 file. . . The first one I downloaded was an AU plugin, but I said in my post about it that I don't have any software that can be the host application for AU plugins, so that it was useless to me. . . . That's actually the most common way for such analysis software to work these days, so it is not all that ridiculous for me to assume this was the case. . .. Well, except for the fact that I explicitly said that I wasn't using an AU plugin because I was incapable of doing so, then your assumptions would be correct. . . . In such a scenario your soundcard would indeed not have played any role in the process. And I'd already said that I wasn't able to use an AU plugin. Whatever the case, I really, really think that my posts were perhaps annoying to you, but in no way offensive or abusive. I was merely trying to help you. But you ignored most of the crucial facts that were stated in my posts. Your post, on the other hand, was, imho, completely unacceptable on a forum like this, and I really ask you to come to your senses and learn some manners. . . . Well, perhaps I was misreading the tone of your posts, but each time you repeated the lecture about how my soundcard was not involved (despite having had the opportunity to read the facts that I'd already posted that should have given you enough information to know that my soundcard was, indeed, involved), I interpreted it with a tone that was decidedly unflattering to you. Think about how it feels to have 3 or 4 posts in a row telling you that you're wrong about what you're saying, and you'll know exactly how I felt in response to your posts. Oh, you've had those 3 or 4 posts from me telling you that you're wrong? Well, guess what -- you're experiencing pretty much exactly what it was like to receive the posts from you lecturing me on the fact that my soundcard was not involved. The only difference was that I used ALL CAPS and you didn't. . . . It really p§$%$sses me off how you treat others, including me, who only tried to help you. You do this at almost regular intervals. Any normal discussion you enter will almost certainly end with you offending others. It is completely unneccessary and not asked for. You're welcome to filter all my posts to your email client's trashcan. I see nothing wrong with my tone. I've seen far, far worse in any number of forums. And perhaps, as in the present instance, you are bringing assumptions to the discourse that are unwarranted or, as in the present instance, factually incorrect. Perhaps you misread my posts because, as in the current instance, you're not paying sufficient attention to the facts involved. Either way, your reaction to *my* posts is entirely within your control. It's not my job to tip-toe around my imaginary idea of how sensitive people reading my posts might be. And I only respond strongly when there's something to justify a response. And I post plenty in which there isn't even anything overly strong involved, just plain old answering questions. My guess is that you don't notice those because they don't stand out in your mind. But, again, it's all in your hands -- it's your reaction, and if you don't want to experience it, don't read my posts. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Johannes Gebauer Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 4:08 PM To: finale@shsu.edu Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison On 29.09.2005 23:41 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: So they listen for the soundcard input? How did you feed the MP3 into that? I had to initiate playback in an MP3 player, and tell it what device to listen to. Yes, but you still haven't answered my question: how did the output get to the input? Inside or outside the computer? Ie, did you connect the output to the input? It was not clear to me that these applications could not open files. But it is still not clear to me how you actually manage to play any files through them. I said this in my first posts explaining that none of the software I'd tried worked for me. You just missed it, obviously. Well, from your post, which I just re-read just to be sure, I understood that the analysis software came as a plugin, and you used that inside other software which played back your MP3 file. That's actually the most common way for such analysis software to work these days, so it is not all that ridiculous for me to assume this was the case. In such a scenario your soundcard would indeed not have played any role in the process. Whatever the case, I really, really think that my posts were perhaps annoying to you, but in no way offensive or abusive. I was merely trying to help you. Your post, on the other hand, was, imho, completely unacceptable on a forum like this, and I really ask you to come to your senses and learn some manners. It really p§$%$sses me off how you treat others, including me, who only tried to help you. You do this at almost regular intervals. Any normal discussion you enter will almost certainly end with you offending others. It is completely unneccessary and not asked for. Sorry to others for letting off some steam. Johannes As I posted to Kurt on this list a few days ago, Johannes, it is an utter waste of your time to attempt to help David Fenton in any way whatsoever. Do yourself a favor and ignore all his posts; each day will be a little bit brighter if you do. You are certainly not alone in the sentiments expressed above, judging from the email I've received off-list in response to my previous post on this subject. On the technical point under discussion, you are of course 100% absolutely correct. The software must listen to the digital data stream going into the sound card; the only output from the sound card is the post D/A analog waveform sent to the speakers, which of course is not available to any software (other than your generous allowance for the possibility of an external loopback to a digital input, which you were roundly ridiculed for suggesting). This is pretty basic stuff. Life is too short to waste on the arrogantly ignorant. Lee Actor Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic http://www.leeactor.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 29 Sep 2005 at 17:20, Lee Actor wrote: On the technical point under discussion, you are of course 100% absolutely correct. The software must listen to the digital data stream going into the sound card; the only output from the sound card is the post D/A analog waveform sent to the speakers, which of course is not available to any software (other than your generous allowance for the possibility of an external loopback to a digital input, which you were roundly ridiculed for suggesting). This is pretty basic stuff. You and Johannes both seem to know nothing at all about PC audio. Life is too short to waste on the arrogantly ignorant. Physician! Heal thyself! -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
At 1:07 AM +0200 9/30/05, Johannes Gebauer wrote: Your post, on the other hand, was, imho, completely unacceptable on a forum like this, and I really ask you to come to your senses and learn some manners. It really p§$%$sses me off how you treat others, including me, who only tried to help you. This is what kill filters are for. I've been using one on Fenton for years. -Randolph Peters ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
At 08:43 PM 9/29/2005, David W. Fenton wrote: On 29 Sep 2005 at 17:20, Lee Actor wrote: On the technical point under discussion, you are of course 100% absolutely correct. The software must listen to the digital data stream going into the sound card; the only output from the sound card is the post D/A analog waveform sent to the speakers, which of course is not available to any software (other than your generous allowance for the possibility of an external loopback to a digital input, which you were roundly ridiculed for suggesting). This is pretty basic stuff. You and Johannes both seem to know nothing at all about PC audio. David, I've hesitated to jump in here, because audio isn't particularly my area, but what Johnnes and Lee are saying seems quite correct to me. Think about it for a second. The software is either capturing the audio on the way to the soundcard or on the way out of the soundcard. The only thing that happens *after* the soundcard is that an analog waveform is sent to the output jack. It doesn't make sense for an app to capture that analog output; it must be capturing the digital stream on its way from the playing software *to* the soundcard. Hence it's captured before the sound card has a chance to affect it at all. Doesn't that seem correct? And if not, then how exactly does software listen to the stream traveling in a wire from the soundcard to the output jack? Aaron. ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 1:30 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: Yes, but you still haven't answered my question: how did the output get to the input? Inside or outside the computer? Ie, did you connect the output to the input? The soundcard is INSIDE the computer. It's a device that is part of the audio interface of the computer. The spectrographic analysis application was listening to the output from this device, just as Audacity listens to the audio output from it. Well, it's a waste of time, but one last try: No software can listen to the output of your soundcard. The output of your soundcard is analogue. No software of any sort could do anything with this. That's what I have been saying all along. It's you who is wrong. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On Sep 28, 2005, at 12:08 AM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: David W. Fenton / 2005/09/26 / 05:40 PM wrote: On 26 Sep 2005 at 14:29, Christopher Smith wrote: . . . All there would be left to do is to compare them with the original (presumably sixteen-bit digital.) I would suppose that the maximum of about 3 dB differences in the mid-range wouldn't be very audible. I have uploaded the source WAV here: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.zip OK, I redone the spectragraph. http://a-no-ne.com/temp/mp3Test.gif This time, I changed the scale so you can see the differences in high better. You might think 8k and above is not necessary to human ear, but this is where the time impulse lives to reproduce the depth of the image. Wow, I can really see the difference here. You are right that there is a lot of detail above 8k that is important to realism, but it is the parts above 16k that I don't think I am hearing much. One thing I see that seems to agree with what I have read about mp3 encoding is that frequencies that are much below the general level of sound get stripped out. This only APPEARS to be the case in the upper register, but In an average spectrograph like this one won't see the effects of stripping out low-level details such as transients (the fast-disappearing frequencies at the start of notes that are important to timbre perception.) I listened closely (cranking the volume a bit on my Yamaha NS10M's) and it is true that there seems to be more blurring, even in the mid-range, and that it is more pronounced in the lower-quality encoding. The upper register differences below 16k in the one piece I can hear clearly, and that is reflected in the spectrograph. Yet the mid-register differences that I can hear don't seem to be showing in the spectrograph. Nature of the method, I suppose. Maybe we would see even MORE differences reflected in a shorter sample of the music. I have heard talk of (though I haven't done a comparison myself) that with pop recordings with big bass, the low register suffers significantly with lower-rate encoding. I confess that I don't hear anything of the sort in these recordings, but then they don't have that kind of energy in the bass! In any case, both encodings beat the heck out of cassette recordings (!) and certainly are plenty good for demo purposes. Thanks for a highly illuminating look at encoding schemes. Christopher ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 28 Sep 2005 at 0:08, A-NO-NE Music wrote: David W. Fenton / 2005/09/26 / 05:40 PM wrote: On 26 Sep 2005 at 14:29, Christopher Smith wrote: . . . All there would be left to do is to compare them with the original (presumably sixteen-bit digital.) I would suppose that the maximum of about 3 dB differences in the mid-range wouldn't be very audible. I have uploaded the source WAV here: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.zip OK, I redone the spectragraph. http://a-no-ne.com/temp/mp3Test.gif This time, I changed the scale so you can see the differences in high better. You might think 8k and above is not necessary to human ear, but this is where the time impulse lives to reproduce the depth of the image. That's super! Thanks so much, Hiro. And it definitely confirms what I hear, in that it's more an ambience difference and a vague sense of harshness in the 128 that I hear. Very interesting! BTW, I assume that you produced the spectrograph with some piece of high-end audio software that you have. I Googled to see if there was any freeware/shareware to do the same thing, and couldn't find anything. Any ideas/suggestions, without spending money? -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
David W. Fenton / 2005/09/28 / 01:50 PM wrote: BTW, I assume that you produced the spectrograph with some piece of high-end audio software that you have. I Googled to see if there was any freeware/shareware to do the same thing, and couldn't find anything. Any ideas/suggestions, without spending money? I was trying to find one for you but I couldn't. The one I use is called SpectraFoo which is the standard on Mac: http://www.mhlabs.com/metric_halo/products/foo/ And one which is equivalent to Windows is Smaart: http://www.siasoft.com/ These are the only industrial standard I know of. Oh wait! Elemental audio has a free one: http://www.elementalaudio.com/products/inspector/ I just took a look, and they have Windows version, too! They just came up with InspectorXL a few weeks ago, and they are quite accurate as I demoed, while they don't have as many features as SpectraFoo and Smaart that most of us, studio engineers and FOH engineers needs. -- - Hiro Hiroaki Honshuku, A-NO-NE Music, Boston, MA http://a-no-ne.com http://anonemusic.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 28 Sep 2005 at 14:12, A-NO-NE Music wrote: David W. Fenton / 2005/09/28 / 01:50 PM wrote: BTW, I assume that you produced the spectrograph with some piece of high-end audio software that you have. I Googled to see if there was any freeware/shareware to do the same thing, and couldn't find anything. Any ideas/suggestions, without spending money? I was trying to find one for you but I couldn't. The one I use is called SpectraFoo which is the standard on Mac: http://www.mhlabs.com/metric_halo/products/foo/ And one which is equivalent to Windows is Smaart: http://www.siasoft.com/ These are the only industrial standard I know of. Well, I got the demo of that (after the suggestion below turned out to not be usable by me), and I don't know enough to figure out how to use it! I just wanted something that I'd load a file and the program would analyze the audio spectrum and give me the chance to display it in various ways. I was hoping to produce the same kind of graph you made, but for other files, but I guess that's not in the cards. Oh wait! Elemental audio has a free one: http://www.elementalaudio.com/products/inspector/ I just took a look, and they have Windows version, too! They just came up with InspectorXL a few weeks ago, and they are quite accurate as I demoed, while they don't have as many features as SpectraFoo and Smaart that most of us, studio engineers and FOH engineers needs. Well, turns out that doesn't do me any good, as I don't have an AU- compatible host application to run it in -- I need something that's a standalone application, instead of a plugin. Thanks for the suggestion, though. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Check out versiontracker.com They just had a spectrograph type app on there this week. _A From: David W. Fenton [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: finale@shsu.edu Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 15:03:36 -0400 To: finale@shsu.edu Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison On 28 Sep 2005 at 14:12, A-NO-NE Music wrote: David W. Fenton / 2005/09/28 / 01:50 PM wrote: BTW, I assume that you produced the spectrograph with some piece of high-end audio software that you have. I Googled to see if there was any freeware/shareware to do the same thing, and couldn't find anything. Any ideas/suggestions, without spending money? I was trying to find one for you but I couldn't. The one I use is called SpectraFoo which is the standard on Mac: http://www.mhlabs.com/metric_halo/products/foo/ And one which is equivalent to Windows is Smaart: http://www.siasoft.com/ These are the only industrial standard I know of. Well, I got the demo of that (after the suggestion below turned out to not be usable by me), and I don't know enough to figure out how to use it! I just wanted something that I'd load a file and the program would analyze the audio spectrum and give me the chance to display it in various ways. I was hoping to produce the same kind of graph you made, but for other files, but I guess that's not in the cards. Oh wait! Elemental audio has a free one: http://www.elementalaudio.com/products/inspector/ I just took a look, and they have Windows version, too! They just came up with InspectorXL a few weeks ago, and they are quite accurate as I demoed, while they don't have as many features as SpectraFoo and Smaart that most of us, studio engineers and FOH engineers needs. Well, turns out that doesn't do me any good, as I don't have an AU- compatible host application to run it in -- I need something that's a standalone application, instead of a plugin. Thanks for the suggestion, though. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 28 Sep 2005 at 15:37, Adriel wrote: Check out versiontracker.com They just had a spectrograph type app on there this week. I couldn't find anything recent that was not a plugin. And the only things I did find were WAV only, or I could not figure out how to analyze a file without playing it (which will muck up the analysis by being polluted with the frequency response and noise level of my computers audio system). I give up! -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 21:58 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: I couldn't find anything recent that was not a plugin. And the only things I did find were WAV only, or I could not figure out how to analyze a file without playing it (which will muck up the analysis by being polluted with the frequency response and noise level of my computers audio system). How would that work? I doubt that any software would first bring the signal into the analogue, and then back into the digital (which it has to, to do any digital analysation). I am pretty sure your computer's audio system cannot possibly polute the analysis, unless you are playing back something and feeding it back into the computer (via outboard cables, feeding the output into the input jacks). Which would be a pretty silly thing to do, unless you actually want to test your computer's audio system. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
David W. Fenton / 2005/09/28 / 03:58 PM wrote: I couldn't find anything recent that was not a plugin. And the only things I did find were WAV only, or I could not figure out how to analyze a file without playing it (which will muck up the analysis by being polluted with the frequency response and noise level of my computers audio system). Here is your Couperin of 128 vs 192 analysis. What I did was to take the left channel of 128 k and compared against the left channel of 192 k. This shows more accurate comparison. http://www.a-no-ne.com/temp/128vs192_2.gif You are right that the file still needs to be processed in real-time because the data is only reproducible in real-time, but it does not need to be actually played. I ran this analysis on my Powerbook without using any hardware. -- - Hiro Hiroaki Honshuku, A-NO-NE Music, Boston, MA http://a-no-ne.com http://anonemusic.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 28 Sep 2005 at 22:10, Johannes Gebauer wrote: On 21:58 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: I couldn't find anything recent that was not a plugin. And the only things I did find were WAV only, or I could not figure out how to analyze a file without playing it (which will muck up the analysis by being polluted with the frequency response and noise level of my computers audio system). How would that work? I doubt that any software would first bring the signal into the analogue, and then back into the digital (which it has to, to do any digital analysation). I am pretty sure your computer's audio system cannot possibly polute the analysis, unless you are playing back something and feeding it back into the computer (via outboard cables, feeding the output into the input jacks). Which would be a pretty silly thing to do, unless you actually want to test your computer's audio system. Well, it depends on how it's doing it. The only thing I could figure out how to do on the software I downloaded was real-time analysis of something playing on my PC. This, of necessity, would included the basic noise and distortion built into my PC's audio system. The software that Hiro recommended seemed to have the capability for me to profile the system so that this could be subtracted out of the analysis, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work. And none of these was what I was expecting, an analysis of the wave form without playing it back. I don't know if that would or would not require the D-to-A converter in my soundcard, but that oughtn't introduce artifacts itself, certainly not to the degree that playback does. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 22:35 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: Well, it depends on how it's doing it. The only thing I could figure out how to do on the software I downloaded was real-time analysis of something playing on my PC. This, of necessity, would included the basic noise and distortion built into my PC's audio system. No it wouldn't. It's analysing the digital code being streamed from the soundfile. Unless it is doing something very unusual there is no way the audio system inside your PC (which does everything from DA conversion onwards, but nothing before it) could have any influence on the analysis. How else would you analyse a sound file than in realtime? You cannot make a frequency analyis without playing the file, since there are no frequencies actually recorded in the file, all that is recorded is many, many, many snapshots of the soundwave. Any of these snapshots only gives the coordinates for a single point of the curve. Frequencies only come into play when the soundfile is played back or otherwise analysed with respect to time. Whatever the software is doing it is definitely dealing with the digital data, not with any analogue translation of it. Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 22:35 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: Well, it depends on how it's doing it. The only thing I could figure out how to do on the software I downloaded was real-time analysis of something playing on my PC. This, of necessity, would included the basic noise and distortion built into my PC's audio system. No it wouldn't. It's analysing the digital code being streamed from the soundfile. Unless it is doing something very unusual there is no way the audio system inside your PC (which does everything from DA conversion onwards, but nothing before it) could have any influence on the analysis. How else would you analyse a sound file than in realtime? You cannot make a frequency analyis without playing the file, since there are no frequencies actually recorded in the file, all that is recorded is many, many, many snapshots of the soundwave. Any of these snapshots only gives the coordinates for a single point of the curve. Frequencies only come into play when the soundfile is played back or otherwise analysed with respect to time. Whatever the software is doing it is definitely dealing with the digital data, not with any analogue translation of it. Johannes You are right that the software of necessity must analyze the digital stream before the D/A conversion, Johannes. However, real-time playback is not necessary to do a spectrum analysis. The sampled waveform is used as input to an algorithm known as a Discrete Fourier Transform, or DFT (the digital equivalent to an analog Fourier Transform), and what comes out of the DFT are coefficients of the amplitude of the frequency spectrum at an interval determined by the sample rate frequency. This can be easily done in real-time nowadays by any desktop PC, but when I was working in this field in the mid-70's it required extremely fast, specially built hardware (running at all of 10 MHz!) and very clever programming techniques to reduce the calculation overhead. These software techniques are collectively known as the Fast Fourier Transform, or FFT. I think the reason that PC software would do the DFT in real-time instead of directly on the data in the file is to avoid having to write a parser for different audio formats, or even for different flavors of the same format. If the samples are intercepted when they're sent to the sound card, it doesn't matter what the original audio format was. Lee Actor Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic http://www.leeactor.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 28 Sep 2005 at 23:01, Johannes Gebauer wrote: On 22:35 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: Well, it depends on how it's doing it. The only thing I could figure out how to do on the software I downloaded was real-time analysis of something playing on my PC. This, of necessity, would included the basic noise and distortion built into my PC's audio system. No it wouldn't. It's analysing the digital code being streamed from the soundfile. Unless it is doing something very unusual there is no way the audio system inside your PC (which does everything from DA conversion onwards, but nothing before it) could have any influence on the analysis. The tools I downloaded all required me to play the file in some other program in order to get the waveform (instead of reading it directly from the file). This means that those programs were capturing the output from my soundcard, which means that this output would include the distortion introduced by the sound shape of my soundcard. I saw it in the one application, where with no sound playing, there was some very low level activity in the extreme ranges of low and high. I did not find any programs that I could use that would load the waveform directly -- all the ones I found captured it from playback. So, you are simply wrong about what you're saying. How else would you analyse a sound file than in realtime? You cannot make a frequency analyis without playing the file, since there are no frequencies actually recorded in the file, all that is recorded is many, many, many snapshots of the soundwave. Any of these snapshots only gives the coordinates for a single point of the curve. But the question is how you convert the digital data into an analog waveform. That doesn't have to involve capturing the output of my soundcard -- it can be derived from analyzing the actual data itself, though, yes, it would need to be done in real time. Frequencies only come into play when the soundfile is played back or otherwise analysed with respect to time. Whatever the software is doing it is definitely dealing with the digital data, not with any analogue translation of it. Sorry, but you are just wrong about this because you are talking about what you are familiar with and not the programs that I was able to test (as opposed to the ones I couldn't use, such as the ones that were packaged as AU plugins). -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
David, At 00:40 27.09.2005, you wrote: If you truly think that you can't set pan and reverb in Finale, then it suggests to me that your statements about Finale's inadequacy for tweaking a performance are not very credible, because you clearly don't know much at all about what Finale has been able to do for more than a decade. I knew. And I even did. But in Finale 2006 you have the mixer view that lets you do everything easily, without having to put expressions and things in to do the task. And the GPO sounds are definitely better than window's GM-softsynth and the smart music softsynth. Human Playback is also a step in the right direction. I am sure some time you will have to get a new computer, and maybe you will find out how much better your stuff will sound... But to come back to the start of the discussion. I agree that your soundcard may sound better than some soft synths. I have got a 5000$ midi keyboard (workstation), and it certainly sounds better than any soundcard synths I know of. But I think, for an impression of your score, a finale playback (your listeners can always downlad Finale notepad for free) or a simple midifile (they can sound ok if well programmed) will do the job. On a modern computer the difference in sound will be about a hundred times less than the difference in file size. OK. One advantage of the mp3s in comparison to midi files and finale files - your listeners will only be able to copy your music by ear, and not by loading it into a music software...;-) Kurt ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 27 Sep 2005 at 20:03, Kurt Gnos wrote: At 00:40 27.09.2005, you wrote: If you truly think that you can't set pan and reverb in Finale, then it suggests to me that your statements about Finale's inadequacy for tweaking a performance are not very credible, because you clearly don't know much at all about what Finale has been able to do for more than a decade. I knew. And I even did. But in Finale 2006 you have the mixer view that lets you do everything easily, without having to put expressions and things in to do the task. . . . But you said it couldn't be done until recently: but... until Finale 2006 you couldn't even set panorama to a sound. That was not true, but you said it. You didn't say it could only be set in a way that to me, personally, feels clumsy and unnatural because it's done differently than the way I'm accustomed to in sequencers. Had you said that, I would have responded with remarks about how I, personally, don't find the UIs of sequencers to be intuitive or easy to use. . . . And the GPO sounds are definitely better than window's GM-softsynth and the smart music softsynth. Human Playback is also a step in the right direction. Well, that's not really relevant to the discussion. I was talking about the direction the industry had gone in terms of what gets provided for default MIDI playback. When I bought into the Turtle Beach family, it looked like the quality of generally available wavetable synths was just increasing and increasing. And TB became for a while Dell's on-board soundcard provider, so a lot of Dell machines came from the factory with TB wavetables. Although it wasn't the better sample set that I have been using in the two TB soundcards I've had, it was significantly better than the soft synths that have become common (Quicktime, MS Soft Synth, and also the Finale Soundfont). That's a different subject, as it has nothing to do with Finale's native capability to edit MIDI. It does relate to the subject of Finale 2006 now incorporating GPO, because it reflects the trend towards increasing dependence on soft synthesis at the expense of performance, utilizing the CPU instead of a dedicated DSP for sound processing. It's why Finale 2006's GPO won't run usably on a large number of computers out there (perhaps even the majority?). And I'm lamenting the direction that the industry took in this regard, because it looks like a mistake -- it's much cheaper for the PC manufacturers (they save a whole $25!), but for the end users, the cost in functionality/performance is pretty large. I am sure some time you will have to get a new computer, and maybe you will find out how much better your stuff will sound... I'm hoping to have the money this fall to get a new motherboard with a fast CPU, and hope to have the money to put in a lot of RAM. But I have no intention of commiting to GPO output of my files (even if I decide to buy Finale 2006) because I still want to produce General MIDI compatible MIDI files that I can put on my website. Perhaps I will experiment with what I can do with HP and GPO after the fact (for one, I have dozens of files already created for GM playback), but I don't think I'm interested in investing the amount of time it will take to get too much out of GPO playabck. But to come back to the start of the discussion. I agree that your soundcard may sound better than some soft synths. I have got a 5000$ midi keyboard (workstation), and it certainly sounds better than any soundcard synths I know of. But I think, for an impression of your score, a finale playback (your listeners can always downlad Finale notepad for free) or a simple midifile (they can sound ok if well programmed) will do the job. On a modern computer the difference in sound will be about a hundred times less than the difference in file size. For broadband users this shouldn't matter. As I already said, I'm providing the MP3s for the people who don't have MIDI playback that's as good as even my non-state-of-the-art soundcard playback. OK. One advantage of the mp3s in comparison to midi files and finale files - your listeners will only be able to copy your music by ear, and not by loading it into a music software...;-) Well, I'm still providing both, because the dialup user isn't going to want to download the MP3s. And if you'd look at the web page, you'd also see that I'm providing graphics of the full scores (all on one line): http://dfenton.com/Midi/index.php?stem=Foerster10_1last=44current=2; mvt=1 I haven't yet incorporated the MP3s, as I haven't coded the page (I want the MP3 links to appear on the left only when there's an MP3 available, which means new PHP coding that I haven't gotten around to yet) and don't have the MP3 files created yet (it's a pretty time- consuming process, since capturing the synthesizer output is a real- time operation) and I just started in on this part of the project. I put the
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
David, Ok. I should not have said that, I should have added easily or something like that. By the way, I just had a look at your side and must say it's very interesting. And it's very nice you can see the graphics and download the midi. I got a roland sound canvas about twelve years ago. It was about 800, 900 $, I think. I have one at the school I work, too. Still works fine, and sounds better than any soundcard I know. For some years there have been software versions out (Edirol/Roland) that cost less than 100 $, I think, and the sounds are better (more RAM) than the hardware. I should give them a try (Roland, Yamaha). You can play your midi files through them, save wav files and convert them to mp3s, it's not very expensive, it even doesn't need a state of the art computer, but I think you might get better results than using the soundcard. You don't have to change your playback files. I use the Sound Canvas VST instrument if I really need a midi file as audio CD or MP3. It's absolutly GM/GS compatible. And I am sure there will be new versions out using more RAM, better sounds and more computer power OK, I'll leave it at that... Kurt At 20:56 27.09.2005, you wrote: But you said it couldn't be done until recently: but... until Finale 2006 you couldn't even set panorama to a sound. ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 27 Sep 2005 at 22:13, Kurt Gnos wrote: Ok. I should not have said that, I should have added easily or something like that. . . . Well, easily is in the eye of the beholder. To me, setting pan and so forth is simple in Finale, as it works just the same as any other expression. Given that I don't have any need to vary pan in the middle of a piece, the mixer doesn't really offer me anything I need - - I just set pan at the beginning of the piece and leave it (I can't conceive of a piece of classical music where I'd want to change pan during the music). Now, channel volume or expression is a different matter. A mixer that allows you to set changes in those controllers in real time would be a vast improvement over Finale's older MIDI controller editing, which just doesn't work very well (the flaw is actually that the visual UI has to be aligned with the note as spaced in the score, which means that the horizontal spacing does not represent the actual time proportions. Perhaps it would be better to use time signature spacing when editing controllers, but the UI is still flawed and I don't think that would completely fix its inadequacies). The fact that Finale doesn't have good continuous data editing is why I don't do much at all in terms of setting crescendos/diminuendos. That's one area where HP would greatly improve my MIDI files, and it's definitely something I'd write into my MIDI files with the Apply HP plugin. But, for now, I'm satisfied with the results, given the budgets I have have and the time I want to spend on it. . . . By the way, I just had a look at your side and must say it's very interesting. And it's very nice you can see the graphics and download the midi. I'm working on getting all the scores up there, but I have to rework all of them to bring them up to my current standards. The problem is that I began this project in 1991, with Finale 2.01, and my engraving standards have changed over time as I've learned more about Finale and gotten newer versions of Finale that make it much easier to get good engraved results. Also, I'm in the process of arranging a reading session with some professional string players (with me on piano), and I'm trying to get the scores that I intend to read through into shape for creating parts. This involves extensive editing to get my editorial emmendations into the score before I can create the parts. This is a lot of work, as you might well know, not least of which because I've got to decide what I'm going to add editorially, but also because I'm at cross purposes with myself, editing for a real performance (even if it's just a reading session), and editing for scholarly purposes. I haven't yet quite decided what I'm going to do. I'm keeping my editorial interventions clearly distinguishable from the source, but so far I'm not distinguishing things I want in performing parts but would not put in a scholarly edition (the last page of the Foerster is an example -- the senza ritard is a performance indication, and not part of the critical edition text. I want it in there for my reading session, but when I wrap this up for a performing edition, that will be made a non-printing expression. In other words, I've got a helluva lot of work before me, even just to prepare for the reading sessions this winter, let alone getting the web page completely done. And I've got nearly a dozen other pieces that aren't listed there or that I've not yet begun (or just barely begun) scoring up. It's all marvelous fun, but it is, nonetheless a helluva lot of work. In terms of the bigger picture, the quality of the MP3s is good enough for now. I got a roland sound canvas about twelve years ago. It was about 800, 900 $, I think. I have one at the school I work, too. Still works fine, and sounds better than any soundcard I know. For some years there have been software versions out (Edirol/Roland) that cost less than 100 $, I think, and the sounds are better (more RAM) than the hardware. I should give them a try (Roland, Yamaha). You can play your midi files through them, save wav files and convert them to mp3s, it's not very expensive, it even doesn't need a state of the art computer, but I think you might get better results than using the soundcard. You don't have to change your playback files. I use the Sound Canvas VST instrument if I really need a midi file as audio CD or MP3. It's absolutly GM/GS compatible. And I am sure there will be new versions out using more RAM, better sounds and more computer power That's an excellent suggestion. I'll have to look into it. Do you know where I might find something like that for purchase on the Web? And will it overburden a 500MHz P4 with 768MBs of RAM? How many GBs of disk space is needed to store the samples? As to which soft synths, I did experiment with the first free Yamaha soft synth nearly 10 years ago, in the hopes that it would be downloadable and
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
David W. Fenton / 2005/09/26 / 05:40 PM wrote: On 26 Sep 2005 at 14:29, Christopher Smith wrote: . . . All there would be left to do is to compare them with the original (presumably sixteen-bit digital.) I would suppose that the maximum of about 3 dB differences in the mid-range wouldn't be very audible. I have uploaded the source WAV here: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.zip OK, I redone the spectragraph. http://a-no-ne.com/temp/mp3Test.gif This time, I changed the scale so you can see the differences in high better. You might think 8k and above is not necessary to human ear, but this is where the time impulse lives to reproduce the depth of the image. -- - Hiro Hiroaki Honshuku, A-NO-NE Music, Boston, MA http://a-no-ne.com http://anonemusic.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
At 4:21 PM -0400 9/25/05, David W. Fenton wrote: Does anyone hear any significant differences between the two? I can convince myself that I do, but it seems only psychological. David -- I can hear a very minor difference, but shouldn't your reasoning include your target audience? That is, shouldn't you consider whether or not they are the sort of people who would be able to tell the difference, and whether they would care in the context of their reason for listening to the recordings? Personally I like 160 kbps for importing CDs for my MP3 use, and consider it a good trade-off. I have no idea how that setting would affect files from your sound card, compared to 128 and 192. At 5:04 PM -0400 9/25/05, David W. Fenton wrote: Of course, if I save the intermediate WAV file, I can generate MP3s of any quality at a later date, but I was hoping to skip that step so that I wouldn't have all those big WAV files littering my hard drive (which has a mere 2GBs of free space left). If it was me I'd litter a few CDs with the WAV files in case I needed them at a later date, save the midi files to a data CD in case I wanted to use them when synth technology had greatly improved, and erase it all from my hard drive. By the way: If audio quality is really important to the people who will be listening to these files, why not just send them audio CDs with WAVs/AIFFs on them? Best wishes, -=-Dennis . ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
When he's right, he's right. The only thing I would add is that iTunes (the Mac version, at least) includes Apple Lossless, a compression technology that allows full WAV/AIFF quality at half the size. If space is really at a premium, you could try that (provided it's included in iTunes for Windows). - Darcy - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY On 26 Sep 2005, at 5:09 AM, Dennis W. Manasco wrote: At 4:21 PM -0400 9/25/05, David W. Fenton wrote: Does anyone hear any significant differences between the two? I can convince myself that I do, but it seems only psychological. David -- I can hear a very minor difference, but shouldn't your reasoning include your target audience? That is, shouldn't you consider whether or not they are the sort of people who would be able to tell the difference, and whether they would care in the context of their reason for listening to the recordings? Personally I like 160 kbps for importing CDs for my MP3 use, and consider it a good trade-off. I have no idea how that setting would affect files from your sound card, compared to 128 and 192. At 5:04 PM -0400 9/25/05, David W. Fenton wrote: Of course, if I save the intermediate WAV file, I can generate MP3s of any quality at a later date, but I was hoping to skip that step so that I wouldn't have all those big WAV files littering my hard drive (which has a mere 2GBs of free space left). If it was me I'd litter a few CDs with the WAV files in case I needed them at a later date, save the midi files to a data CD in case I wanted to use them when synth technology had greatly improved, and erase it all from my hard drive. By the way: If audio quality is really important to the people who will be listening to these files, why not just send them audio CDs with WAVs/AIFFs on them? Best wishes, -=-Dennis . ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
David W. Fenton wrote: I'm about to start creating a bunch of MP3 files that are recorded from my sound card playing back MIDI files created from Finale files. It seems to me when comparing these two files: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.mp3 http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA1.mp3 there is no apparent difference in sound quality. The first is 192K and the second is 128K. The file size difference is significant enough that if the 128K files are good enough, I'll go with those. Does anyone here any significant differences between the two? I can convince myself that I do, but it seems only psychological. I definitely hear a different between 192 and 128 with live recordings, but my soundcard output seems to be sufficiently less complex waveforms that there's no difference to my ear. But it's incredibly difficult for me to test objectively, so I'd appreaciate anyone who cares to listen and let me know what they think. I find a noticeable difference in the upper partials, especially in the viola's sound. The 192 sounds a bit richer. In my own tests to determine best encoding rates, I have found such a tiny change between 192 and anything higher that I am very satisfied with 192 encoding, since most of the change in tone that I do notice makes no difference on the headphones or speakers I listen to the MP3 files through. But I notice a big change between 128 and 192, with a noticeable dropoff in upper partials which deadens the tone noticeably enough for me not to like it. -- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Chuck Israels wrote: David, Yes, I can hear a small difference. I know because I expected (before reading carefully) to hear the more compressed file first and noticed a slight veiling in the second sample. That said, I don't think it makes a whit of practical difference in demonstrating the arrangement to those who may eventually play it. I say, use smaller files in this instance. This from one who favors good sound (and the unfortunately large file sizes that go with that) for actual recordings. Hope this helps you. Chuck On the other hand, the difference between the files is 2MB. Which would be very significant were the 128 file something like 100KB and the 192 file 2,100KB. But with even the 128 file being too large to send as an e-mail attachment for many (most?) servers, the file size won't make that much difference, so I'd go with the larger one since it sounds better. I would hate to have a client think that if I were satisfied with a lesser-quality sound, would I also be satisfied with a lesser-quality engraving final product? For demo purposes to convince someone to buy the music I don't think it would really matter either way, nor as a practice recording to provide a guide for interpretation would it matter either way. But the file size even for the 128 file is already too large to be sent any way other than by uploading/downloading from a web-site, and if that were the case, broadband users would notice no difference and dial-up users would be just as stymied by a 5MB file as by a 7MB file. If it's to be posted on a web-site, possibly posting 2 files: the 192 file and one encoded at an even lower rate so that dial-up users could select which one they wanted to download. -- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 4:09, Dennis W. Manasco wrote: At 4:21 PM -0400 9/25/05, David W. Fenton wrote: Does anyone hear any significant differences between the two? I can convince myself that I do, but it seems only psychological. I can hear a very minor difference, but shouldn't your reasoning include your target audience? This is a good point, but I'm not certain who my target audience is! That is, shouldn't you consider whether or not they are the sort of people who would be able to tell the difference, and whether they would care in the context of their reason for listening to the recordings? Well, I'm doing this for my Piano Quartets Quintets web page, which I've recently completely revamped: http://dfenton.com/Midi/index.php (I'm still tweaking the layout there; the original version is still at http://dfenton.com/Midi/index.html) Personally I like 160 kbps for importing CDs for my MP3 use, and consider it a good trade-off. I have no idea how that setting would affect files from your sound card, compared to 128 and 192. Well, I don't do anything with commercial CDs -- I only make MP3s of the recordigs of the groups I perform in myself, and I've found that 192K is noticeably better than either 128K or 160K. I've also experimented with variable bit rate, but found that I had to set it so high to get the same quality that I ended up with a file that was about the same size as the 192K version, so I just don't muck with it any longer (and there are, of course, some older MP3 players that don't handle VBR files well). At 5:04 PM -0400 9/25/05, David W. Fenton wrote: Of course, if I save the intermediate WAV file, I can generate MP3s of any quality at a later date, but I was hoping to skip that step so that I wouldn't have all those big WAV files littering my hard drive (which has a mere 2GBs of free space left). If it was me I'd litter a few CDs with the WAV files in case I needed them at a later date, save the midi files to a data CD in case I wanted to use them when synth technology had greatly improved, and erase it all from my hard drive. Well, saving to CD is certainly an option, but I prefer to keep By the way: If audio quality is really important to the people who will be listening to these files, why not just send them audio CDs with WAVs/AIFFs on them? Well, if I were sending files, I'd just record CDs made from the original WAV files, and no MP3s would be involved at all (i.e., no reduction of quality from the original), but this is for a web page, so file size matters a lot. For me on 2Mbps broadband, the different between 5MBs and 8MBs is insignificant, but for anyone with under 1Mbps (I assume dialup users will ignore the MP3s) it could be a problem. I think I'm just going to go with the 192K files and be done with it. I definitely like listening to them better than the 128K files, even though I can't quite put my finger on why they sound better. And, of course, for some listeners the artificiality of the not-good synthesized strings is going to be more of a stumbling block at either compression factor than the difference between 192K and 128K (though most people don't find the piano the least bit objectionable, though there are plenty of better piano samples out there; I just wish this one had better in-tune unisons). -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 5:14, Darcy James Argue wrote: The only thing I would add is that iTunes (the Mac version, at least) includes Apple Lossless, a compression technology that allows full WAV/AIFF quality at half the size. If space is really at a premium, you could try that (provided it's included in iTunes for Windows). Well, that's worth looking at for storing the files on hard drive, but I'm probably going to make audio CDs from the WAV files and then delete them from the hard drive. The difficulty with using the Apple format is that none of my audio programs would probably be able to use it directly to write CDs or make MP3s (other than iTunes itself). I refuse to use iTunes to burn CDs because it insists on loading its own CD driver service, which I'm not interested in (and which could conflict with my existing writable CD support). I use iTunes as nothing but an audio player, an in that regard, it's superb -- MP3s always sound significantly better played from iTunes than from any other player I have. I wish I knew what iTunes was doing (beyond normalization, which I do on the WAV files before conversion to MP3, but on a whole work, rather than on individual movements) because I'd love to be able to save it into the MP3 files permanently (like saving HP data in Finale). I actually haven't tried creating an MP3 with iTunes itself to see if it made a better MP3 -- I should try it (though I'd miss batch conversion). As to the MIDI files, which Dennis suggested archiving and deleting, they are so tiny, there's no reason for me to delete them. All the MIDI files on my computer don't add up to one of the MP3 files, let alone one of the WAV files! And the MIDI files are 1/10 or less the size of the corresponding Finale files from which they were generated, so I'm definitely going to keep them around. There's also the possibility of my upgrading my system's hard drive storage from 60GBs to 100GBs (I happen to have two unused hard drives that I could swap for the existing hard drives), which would help a lot, but it's a lot of work to do that. I'm also considering buying a new motherboard for my system so that I can get a much faster computer. Right now I'm on a tight budget and an entirely new system is just not in the cards. But I'd huge projects like that always eat up more time than I think they will, so I'm wary of embarking on that journey if I can avoid it. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 6:09, dhbailey wrote: I find a noticeable difference in the upper partials, especially in the viola's sound. The 192 sounds a bit richer. I'll have to listen for that. In my own tests to determine best encoding rates, I have found such a tiny change between 192 and anything higher that I am very satisfied with 192 encoding, since most of the change in tone that I do notice makes no difference on the headphones or speakers I listen to the MP3 files through. But I notice a big change between 128 and 192, with a noticeable dropoff in upper partials which deadens the tone noticeably enough for me not to like it. I find that the difference between these two files is more in the ambience than it is in the actual instruments. To my ear, it's as though the 192 file was recorded in a slightly more live room, even though both files derive from the exact same source file. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 6:14, dhbailey wrote: If it's to be posted on a web-site, possibly posting 2 files: the 192 file and one encoded at an even lower rate so that dial-up users could select which one they wanted to download. As the MP3 file is only going to ever be used on the website (if I'm sending a CD, I'd record an audio CD from the source WAV files, or from CD made from the source WAV files), the website is the only consideration. I'm providing the MIDI file for those without the bandwidth to download the MP3s easily. I also have a limit to my storage space on my website. It's easy to upgrade, but I don't see any point in spending the time uploading the smaller files alongside the big ones just for the one or two people who'd care about the 2-3MB difference. I've basically decided, based on all the great feedback, to stick with the 192K MP3s. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On Sep 26, 2005, at 11:05 AM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: David W. Fenton / 2005/09/25 / 04:21 PM wrote: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.mp3 http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA1.mp3 I put them in a spectragraph, averaged between 230' and 330'. http://a-no-ne.com/temp/128vs192.gif I guess I had too much free time this morning :-) Got to work... Hey, thanks! I was very interested to see the difference, or rather, the lack of difference between the two encodings. Very surprising! A bit more mid-register goosing in the economical encoding, and a tad less high end at the very top (where I have all but ceased to hear anything in any case) but not too much difference! All there would be left to do is to compare them with the original (presumably sixteen-bit digital.) I would suppose that the maximum of about 3 dB differences in the mid-range wouldn't be very audible. And despite David F.'s apparent lack of interest in the point that Kurt made, I would be most interested to see how the spectrographs compared when the source material was live instruments from a high-quality recording. I suspect that the difference between the two encoding systems would be more pronounced in that case, but I would be ecstatic to be proved wrong! ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 11:05, A-NO-NE Music wrote: David W. Fenton / 2005/09/25 / 04:21 PM wrote: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.mp3 http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA1.mp3 I put them in a spectragraph, averaged between 230' and 330'. http://a-no-ne.com/temp/128vs192.gif I guess I had too much free time this morning :-) Got to work... I really appreciate that -- it tells me a lot, at least, if I'm interpreting it right. It shows that the better ambience that I'm hearing in the 192 file is due to smoother handling of the frequencies from 8K to 16K, and of incorporation of more of the data above 16K. Are there any freeware spectral analysis programs out there that I could use to generate these myself with, for instance, live recordings? It's helpful to be able to see what my ears are hearing. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On Sep 26, 2005, at 2:22 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: I actually haven't tried creating an MP3 with iTunes itself to see if it made a better MP3 -- I should try it (though I'd miss batch conversion). iTunes for Windows doesn't have batch conversion? Are you sure, as it is a basic part of the UI in the Mac version? Christopher ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
David W. Fenton / 2005/09/26 / 02:22 PM wrote: an in that regard, it's superb -- MP3s always sound significantly better played from iTunes than from any other player I have. I wish I knew what iTunes was doing It's all depends on decoder. For example, iPod had never been able to playback MP3 as good as AAC until the 4th gen, ClickWheel. I had two of the 1st gen, and am using 3rd gen right now. MP3 is a full of artifacts which can not be heard if played directly from iTunes. By the way, any of the compressed file format such as MP3, you will hear artifacts at the end of the reverberation. -- - Hiro Hiroaki Honshuku, A-NO-NE Music, Boston, MA http://a-no-ne.com http://anonemusic.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005, at 2:22 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: The difficulty with using the Apple format is that none of my audio programs would probably be able to use it directly to write CDs or make MP3s (other than iTunes itself). Sure, but if you need to burn to CD, you can use iTunes to convert the Apple Lossless files back to WAV as needed. I wish I knew what iTunes was doing (beyond normalization, which I do on the WAV files before conversion to MP3, but on a whole work, rather than on individual movements) because I'd love to be able to save it into the MP3 files permanently (like saving HP data in Finale). Is it possibly the settings in iTunes' mixer? I don't think there's any way of writing that into the audio file. I actually haven't tried creating an MP3 with iTunes itself to see if it made a better MP3 -- I should try it (though I'd miss batch conversion). You can load and convert an entire folder at once in iTunes. - Darcy - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 14:34, Christopher Smith wrote: On Sep 26, 2005, at 2:22 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: I actually haven't tried creating an MP3 with iTunes itself to see if it made a better MP3 -- I should try it (though I'd miss batch conversion). iTunes for Windows doesn't have batch conversion? Are you sure, as it is a basic part of the UI in the Mac version? You may be right. I'm expecting a standard batch conversion UI, whereas it seems that with iTunes, you add files to the library, and *then* you can convert them as a group. I'm not sure what happens with filenames and output locations, but I should definitely experiment with it to see what kind of results it gets, and if so, if its batch conversion is not going to annoy me. I'm annoyed enough at LAMEBatch for having inappropriate limits on the lengths of ID3 fields (and for other things), but it is fast and easy otherwise. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 15:40, Darcy James Argue wrote: On 26 Sep 2005, at 2:22 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: The difficulty with using the Apple format is that none of my audio programs would probably be able to use it directly to write CDs or make MP3s (other than iTunes itself). Sure, but if you need to burn to CD, you can use iTunes to convert the Apple Lossless files back to WAV as needed. Well, sure, but with my old slow PC, this is a lot of work. If I make an audio CD from the WAV files created from MIDI, then I can use that audio CD to create new WAV files or MP3s as needed, without needing to depend on Apple's file format at all. I wish I knew what iTunes was doing (beyond normalization, which I do on the WAV files before conversion to MP3, but on a whole work, rather than on individual movements) because I'd love to be able to save it into the MP3 files permanently (like saving HP data in Finale). Is it possibly the settings in iTunes' mixer? I don't think there's any way of writing that into the audio file. There's a mixer in iTunes? The version I have is 4, and I'm not about to upgrade to 5, given that I am running Win2K (and iTunes 5 is known to completely trash Win2K systems when installed). I actually haven't tried creating an MP3 with iTunes itself to see if it made a better MP3 -- I should try it (though I'd miss batch conversion). You can load and convert an entire folder at once in iTunes. I'll have to experiment with how this works, as it's not obvious to me from the UI. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Hi David, If you have Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized checked in your iTunes preferences, iTunes audio files are stored in: iTunes Music/ Artist Name/Album Name By default, converted files will have the same album name and artist name as the source files, so they will be stored in the source folder, which may not be what you want. However, it's easy to select all the converted files and assign them a new album name after the fact, which will cause them to be moved to a folder with that album name. I'm not sure what happens if you leave this item unchecked -- I believe in that case, iTunes simply saves the converted files to the same directory as the originals, and you would have to move them by hand. - Darcy - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY On 26 Sep 2005, at 3:59 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: On 26 Sep 2005 at 14:34, Christopher Smith wrote: On Sep 26, 2005, at 2:22 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: I actually haven't tried creating an MP3 with iTunes itself to see if it made a better MP3 -- I should try it (though I'd miss batch conversion). iTunes for Windows doesn't have batch conversion? Are you sure, as it is a basic part of the UI in the Mac version? You may be right. I'm expecting a standard batch conversion UI, whereas it seems that with iTunes, you add files to the library, and *then* you can convert them as a group. I'm not sure what happens with filenames and output locations, but I should definitely experiment with it to see what kind of results it gets, and if so, if its batch conversion is not going to annoy me. I'm annoyed enough at LAMEBatch for having inappropriate limits on the lengths of ID3 fields (and for other things), but it is fast and easy otherwise. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Lee, made me laugh, your post;-) ... at first, that is. But after I'd gone through the rest of the post, I'm asking myself... First, I just wanted to be helpful. While the difference between 128 and 192 mbs certainly doesn't matter with those crap sounds, anyone calling himself (or herself) a musician should hear the difference using real music. And as for CD and SACD - if you cannot hear it, get a decent sound system or clean your ears. But what I really cannot understand - I use Finale a lot for scoring and arranging - I would feel ashamed to burn the finale playback of a sound card to a CD... Even MP3s - and give them to other people. We are talking about music, right? Music? I sometimes do some practice playbacks for my choir. What I can play on real instruments, I do. What I cannot, I do using VST instruments etc., and while not really real, it is about 32mb MP3 to SACD compared to those soundcard sounds... You won't hear that much of a difference between Steinbergs The Grand (2) and a grand piano. And it's played musically, as well... I really like Finale's playback to proof read, and it's certainly become better in version 2004 - 2006 (even if the NI sounds cannot be recorded the easy way), but I certainly wouldn't like to rehearsal to a Finale playback, and feel quite ashamed to publish a work of mine using one... It's ok for fellow finale users who know about the difference... But for real people? ...and real music? And, David, I must confirm Lee, you don't have much of a whim of knowledge considering manners and modern sound technology and certainly don't know what you don't know Kurt At 00:47 26.09.2005, you wrote: On 25 Sep 2005 at 23:54, Kurt Gnos wrote: I use finale as a notation program, not for real music. .. . Well, good for you! . . . If I was you, . . . And you're clearly not. [remaining know-it-all remarks snipped] Kurt, if you haven't yet figured it out, it is a complete waste of time answering any of David Fenton's remarks, even when you're trying to be helpful, since he considers everyone except himself to be an idiot. Save your breath and ignore his arrogant and obnoxious posts. Lee Actor Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic http://www.leeactor.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
At 04:14 PM 09/26/2005, David W. Fenton wrote: There's a mixer in iTunes? The version I have is 4, I had 4.9 until recently. In the lower right corner of the main iTunes window is an icon that looks like an equalizer. It opens the equalizer. g and I'm not about to upgrade to 5, given that I am running Win2K (and iTunes 5 is known to completely trash Win2K systems when installed). Really? Do you have a URL to cite? I'm running Win2K SP4 and I've had iTunes 5 installed since it came out, with no visible problems. Thanks, Aaron. ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 16:15, Darcy James Argue wrote: If you have Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized checked in your iTunes preferences, iTunes audio files are stored in: iTunes Music/ Artist Name/Album Name Ah. I'd *never* do it that way -- subfolders like that just don't have anything to do with the way I would ever choose to organize my music. By default, converted files will have the same album name and artist name as the source files, so they will be stored in the source folder, which may not be what you want. However, it's easy to select all the converted files and assign them a new album name after the fact, which will cause them to be moved to a folder with that album name. Well, the problem here is that for iTunes to work, I'm stuck with their straitjacket approach to storing the source files. Of course, with all the batch converters I have, I can have only one destination at a time, so I have to move files, anyway. I'm not sure what happens if you leave this item unchecked -- I believe in that case, iTunes simply saves the converted files to the same directory as the originals, and you would have to move them by hand. Well, if that's what it did it would be exactly what I wanted 9 times out of 10! I have never quite understood why that shouldn't be the default for any batch converter, but obviously, I'm in the minority on this -- I don't use these programs for anything like the same purpose as the vast majority of people. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 22:29, Kurt Gnos wrote: And, David, I must confirm Lee, you don't have much of a whim of knowledge considering manners and modern sound technology and certainly don't know what you don't know You have completely missed the point. You are more interested in telling me how poor my $150 soundcard is in comparison to modern samples, but I've listened to demos of the modern stuff and for the price and the performance costs, the emperor has no clothes -- when the move was made away from dedicated DSPs for sound towards soft synths and processing by the PC's CPU, a lot was lost, and the reason for it was simply because PC makers were too damned cheap to spend the money on $25 chips. The results leave me underwhelmed in terms of sound quality. And from where I sit, the whole industry made a huge wrong turn sometime around 2000 or so. I don't by any stretch of the imagination consider my soundcard's sounds to be musically satisfactory -- they are obviously not -- but if I compare its solo strings to the basic sound of a lot of the soft synth solo strings available in the sample sets, I don't think it comes out too poorly. And it does not require a multi-GHz CPU and gigabytes of RAM. Indeed, it worked just fine in my P120 with 128MBs of RAM until a few years ago. I was even able to record to WAV files on that machine. None of the modern sound solutions have anything like that kind of efficiency. Yes, the soundfont approach can give you much more flexibility of different samples for different musical purposes, but at the cost of making your MIDI files 100% tied to that sound sample. If you're producing only WAV-based output, that's not really an issue, but I still believe in distributing a general MIDI file. Given that no synthesized sound is ever going to be as good as real musicians, I'm unsure that the time it takes to get the better results with the more advanced soundfonts is worth the time and effort. I'm producing the MIDI files and the MP3s not as any kind of substitute for actual performances, but as a way to get some kind of idea of what the music might sound like. There's a lot that can be learned from listening to those files that can't easily be learned by studying a score. There's also a lot that I learn in producing the MIDI performances, however rudimentary they may be musically speaking (and however inferior they obviously are to performances by real musicians), that ends up informing the decisions I make in editing the music. Most of the sources I work from are problematic (or even defective) in one way or the other, having both errors or inconsistencies in the text, and those defects and inconsistencies need to be resolved in any edition that's going to be used successfully for a live performance. Figuring out how to get a rudimentary MIDI performance helps me figure out where I need to add editorial marks, like dynamics, articulations, bowings, etc., and it's the process of producing a MIDI performance that allows me to do that. You or someone else might spend a lot more time or use completely different tools than I do, and the results would be different. But, likewise, if you were performing it with live musicians, the results would also be different from a performance that I would be involved in. My MIDI files are like rough sight-reading sessions, whereas yours may be more like performances that result from hours of rehearsal. That's fine -- you have different aims. I'm just trying to get a whole lot of music into performable condition, and attempting along the way to add enough life to the MIDI output that you can get a bit of a clue about the musical content, at least enough to tell if the piece of music is interesting or not. From where I sit, all MIDI performances, no matter how elaborate your sound setup, are completely unacceptable as a replacement for even a half-assed live performance (Hi, Dennis!). There is so much that even amateur musicians do (consciously or not) that is almost impossible to get into a MIDI file generated from Finale (if you're inputting the MIDI directly into a sequencer, you can do things that output from Finale's notation cannot do as well), even using Human Playback (which I don't have, as I'm using Finale 2003). So, you're basically comparing one very imperfect facsimile of the music to another facsimile, made with less versatile tools. That's why in my original post I allowed that perhaps given that it was a rudimentary synthesized performance using not-very-realistic string sounds that the difference between 192K and 128K was not really relevant, as either was wholly inadequate compared to even poor quality live recordings. I don't know if we agree on that, because you seem to be arguing that my soundcard and my sequencing are both so awful in comparison to the results one can get from modern sound samples and sequencers that it doesn't make a difference, and
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 16:42, Aaron Sherber wrote: At 04:14 PM 09/26/2005, David W. Fenton wrote: There's a mixer in iTunes? The version I have is 4, I had 4.9 until recently. In the lower right corner of the main iTunes window is an icon that looks like an equalizer. It opens the equalizer. g Ah, yes! I'm stuck in a Microsoft world where it's a rule of UI design that you can never have UI components that are accesible only by a mouse- based path. So, I looked at the menus and saw nothing about an equalizer. Of course, the equalizer is set to FLAT, so it's obviously not doing a damned thing to the sound! and I'm not about to upgrade to 5, given that I am running Win2K (and iTunes 5 is known to completely trash Win2K systems when installed). Really? Do you have a URL to cite? I'm running Win2K SP4 and I've had iTunes 5 installed since it came out, with no visible problems. Oy, it was a couple of weeks ago when it came out that there was a storm of complaints in one of the lists I read, because people had downloaded and installed it and it rendered their systems unbootable. I can't find anything on Google that addresses it directly, but I know that I read a couple of articles about it in the few days after the upgrade was released a couple of weeks ago. It was causing disastrous results for some users. I only use it as an audio player, so I don't really need anything in the new version, thankfully. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 14:29, Christopher Smith wrote: On Sep 26, 2005, at 11:05 AM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: David W. Fenton / 2005/09/25 / 04:21 PM wrote: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.mp3 http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA1.mp3 I put them in a spectragraph, averaged between 230' and 330'. http://a-no-ne.com/temp/128vs192.gif I guess I had too much free time this morning :-) Got to work... Hey, thanks! I was very interested to see the difference, or rather, the lack of difference between the two encodings. Very surprising! A bit more mid-register goosing in the economical encoding, and a tad less high end at the very top (where I have all but ceased to hear anything in any case) but not too much difference! . . . Well, it seems to me that there are large differences from 8K up, and that's where a lot of what we hear is happening. No, many older listeners might not hear the differences above 16K, but the ones from 8K to 16K ought to still be pretty audible. The difference in sound is subtle in this case, because, I think, the source is digital, and thus, not as rich in original source spectrum as live performance. . . . All there would be left to do is to compare them with the original (presumably sixteen-bit digital.) I would suppose that the maximum of about 3 dB differences in the mid-range wouldn't be very audible. I have uploaded the source WAV here: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.zip (the zipping did actually save 4-5 MBs, believe it or not) And despite David F.'s apparent lack of interest in the point that Kurt made, . . . Well, perhaps I misinterpreted Kurt's point, which seemed to me to be a matter of going off on a tangent about MIDI editing and sample quality, but I fully agree with your point that the comparison with live performance would be interesting. . . . I would be most interested to see how the spectrographs compared when the source material was live instruments from a high-quality recording. I suspect that the difference between the two encoding systems would be more pronounced in that case, but I would be ecstatic to be proved wrong! I'm interested in this, as I am embarking on putting up a whole host of MP3s, and am really not sure what people expect. Here's two examples, one from a non-professional recording, and one from a commercial recording: 192 vs. 128: http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Tenebrae/01-Couperin-Magnificat.mp3 http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Tenebrae/Couperin-Magnificat128.mp3 On this pair, the 128K sounds more harsh, with the soprano sounding thinner and the viol more abrasive. Mozart Clarinet Quintet (Academy of Ancient Music) I edited the original performanace, which took both repeats (and had some very nice differences between the 1st and 2nd times through) to use the repeat of the exposition and the 1st time through the second half. 192 vs. 128 (all on one line, of course): http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/AAM-Mozart- ClarinetQuintet192.mp3 http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/AAM-Mozart- ClarinetQuintet128.mp3 The original source WAV file (all on one line): http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/AAM-Mozart- ClarinetQuintet.zip To me, there's an immediate obvious difference between the 192/128K versions, with the clarinet entrance being clearly much better sounding in the 192 version. The difference is here is much greater than in the soundcard output, which, I think, both you and I expected would be the case. Now I should try using iTunes to convert and seeing if *that* sounds different! -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
At 05:30 PM 09/26/2005, David W. Fenton wrote: Oy, it was a couple of weeks ago when it came out that there was a storm of complaints in one of the lists I read, because people had downloaded and installed it and it rendered their systems unbootable. I do see a couple of mentions on the Apple site, but nothing dire. the upgrade was released a couple of weeks ago. It was causing disastrous results for some users. I only use it as an audio player, so I don't really need anything in the new version, thankfully. There is now a 5.0.1 version which addresses some unspecified stability issues. But as you say, if you're just using it as a player, there's probably no reason for you to upgrade. Aaron. ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
David, ok., I appologize... I didn't understand you, as well...;-) and I appreciate the length of your answer - kind of being taken seriously... but... until Finale 2006 you couldn't even set panorama to a sound. And that's much in a midi file. I would recommend to export a midi file from Finale to, say, Cubase. Take piano sounds. Even edirol's (Roland's) super quartet has much better piano sounds than a sound card, and the grand is grand. Take strings... Halion strings is way better than anything you can get out of your old soundcard. Ok it costs somewhat. OK you have to tweak a bit. But other than hiring real players it will give you a much more satisfying experience. Using Midi Files. OK, you will get a certain impression of the music, but you are right, many soundcards will even do a worse job... Even if I must say Window's softsynth will do better than most soundcards... You can tweak midi files to sound ok. But you cannot do this in Finale. I even had a turtle beach soundcard about 10 years ago. Payed about a 1000 $, too. I dumped it since there were (never, not some years later) no drivers to get it to run up to the factory specifics, and without crashing...:-( But... On a halfway adequate computer, be it Apple or Windows, you WILL get much better sounds if you know how to do it... Even the 2006 Native Instruments sounds sound much better, and you can tweak panorama and reverb, but since there is no official way to save them as a wav or aiff or mp3... I think you mean well. I also think I was rude to say you were behind the time but - if you will have a decent mp3 playback there are things that matter a lot more than the difference between 128 kb and 192 kb Kurt At 23:24 26.09.2005, you wrote: On 26 Sep 2005 at 22:29, Kurt Gnos wrote: And, David, I must confirm Lee, you don't have much of a whim of knowledge considering manners and modern sound technology and certainly don't know what you don't know You have completely missed the point. You are more interested in telling me how poor my $150 soundcard is in comparison to modern samples, but I've listened to demos of the modern stuff and for the price and the performance costs, the emperor has no clothes -- when the move was made away from dedicated DSPs for sound towards soft synths and processing by the PC's CPU, a lot was lost, and the reason for it was simply because PC makers were too damned cheap to spend the money on $25 chips. The results leave me underwhelmed in terms of sound quality. And from where I sit, the whole industry made a huge wrong turn sometime around 2000 or so. I don't by any stretch of the imagination consider my soundcard's sounds to be musically satisfactory -- they are obviously not -- but if I compare its solo strings to the basic sound of a lot of the soft synth solo strings available in the sample sets, I don't think it comes out too poorly. And it does not require a multi-GHz CPU and gigabytes of RAM. Indeed, it worked just fine in my P120 with 128MBs of RAM until a few years ago. I was even able to record to WAV files on that machine. None of the modern sound solutions have anything like that kind of efficiency. Yes, the soundfont approach can give you much more flexibility of different samples for different musical purposes, but at the cost of making your MIDI files 100% tied to that sound sample. If you're producing only WAV-based output, that's not really an issue, but I still believe in distributing a general MIDI file. Given that no synthesized sound is ever going to be as good as real musicians, I'm unsure that the time it takes to get the better results with the more advanced soundfonts is worth the time and effort. I'm producing the MIDI files and the MP3s not as any kind of substitute for actual performances, but as a way to get some kind of idea of what the music might sound like. There's a lot that can be learned from listening to those files that can't easily be learned by studying a score. There's also a lot that I learn in producing the MIDI performances, however rudimentary they may be musically speaking (and however inferior they obviously are to performances by real musicians), that ends up informing the decisions I make in editing the music. Most of the sources I work from are problematic (or even defective) in one way or the other, having both errors or inconsistencies in the text, and those defects and inconsistencies need to be resolved in any edition that's going to be used successfully for a live performance. Figuring out how to get a rudimentary MIDI performance helps me figure out where I need to add editorial marks, like dynamics, articulations, bowings, etc., and it's the process of producing a MIDI performance that allows me to do that. You or someone else might spend a lot more time or use completely different tools than I do, and the results would be different. But, likewise, if you were performing it with live musicians, the
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 17:40, David W. Fenton wrote: Now I should try using iTunes to convert and seeing if *that* sounds different! OK, I've done that now. The file is (all on one line): http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/AAM-Mozart- ClarinetQuintet192iTunes.mp3 I *think* I hear a difference in iTunes' favor, but the files are nearly identical, except for the ID3 tags. That is, they are essentially the same number of bytes. A comparison of the spectra of the two files should prove interesting, to see if they are identical or not. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 26 Sep 2005 at 23:54, Kurt Gnos wrote: ok., I appologize... I didn't understand you, as well...;-) and I appreciate the length of your answer - kind of being taken seriously... but... until Finale 2006 you couldn't even set panorama to a sound. Panorama? Is that different from pan? I've been setting pan in Finale files for years. And that's much in a midi file. I would recommend to export a midi file from Finale to, say, Cubase. Take piano sounds. Even edirol's (Roland's) super quartet has much better piano sounds than a sound card, and the grand is grand. No, no, no. I'm not going to spend my money on these kinds of things for the kinds of sounds that are available within my budget. I could spend a lot of money on a piano sample that would then make the strings sound even more inadequate. And I think the GPO solo strings are really not very good at all, at least not nearly as good as the massed strings. So, I'd have to buy very expensive solo string samples, and now we're talking real money. And, oh, BTW, I'd need an entirely new PC. Take strings... Halion strings is way better than anything you can get out of your old soundcard. Ok it costs somewhat. OK you have to tweak a bit. But other than hiring real players it will give you a much more satisfying experience. But I'm not looking for a satifying experience, which I can only get with really good live musicians. I'm looking for something that's good enough for me to be able to get the job done in creating my editions and in demonstrating a bit of what the music sounds like. Using Midi Files. OK, you will get a certain impression of the music, but you are right, many soundcards will even do a worse job... Even if I must say Window's softsynth will do better than most soundcards... The Windows softsynth is pretty sucky, in my opinion, especially the solo strings. My soundcard's solo strings don't really sound anything like solo strings, but they are more musical than the whiny Windows softsynth solo strings. You can tweak midi files to sound ok. But you cannot do this in Finale. Well, as I said, I'm not interested in perfect MIDI performances. I'm only interested in the best that I can get out of Finale, because I'm not going to fork my MIDI file from my notation file because that vastly increases the amount of work involved in maintaining them. I even had a turtle beach soundcard about 10 years ago. Payed about a 1000 $, too. I dumped it since there were (never, not some years later) no drivers to get it to run up to the factory specifics, and without crashing...:-( Mine is flakey under Win2K and probably wouldn't run at all under WinXP. They never even provided NT drivers, though they did have an explanation of how to get it to work under NT. At one point, Midi2Wav couldn't hear it, but now it can hear it, but there is no way to set the output volume of the wavetable synthesizer for some reason. This happened after I downloaded and tested a bunch of MP3 converters. At least now with Midi2Wav I can just reduce the recording levels and get decent sound. But... On a halfway adequate computer, be it Apple or Windows, you WILL get much better sounds if you know how to do it... My computer is more than adequate for the tasks I use it for. Even the 2006 Native Instruments sounds sound much better, and you can tweak panorama and reverb, but since there is no official way to save them as a wav or aiff or mp3... I can set reverb in Finale, too. I think you mean well. I also think I was rude to say you were behind the time but - if you will have a decent mp3 playback there are things that matter a lot more than the difference between 128 kb and 192 kb Well, I disagree. You seem to think that you can get a decent MIDI performance without spending thousands of dollars and dozens of hours. I don't believe that. And even that result will not be enough better to justify the time and expense for the purposes that *I'm* creating these MIDI files. If you truly think that you can't set pan and reverb in Finale, then it suggests to me that your statements about Finale's inadequacy for tweaking a performance are not very credible, because you clearly don't know much at all about what Finale has been able to do for more than a decade. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
David, Yes, I can hear a small difference. I know because I expected (before reading carefully) to hear the more compressed file first and noticed a slight veiling in the second sample. That said, I don't think it makes a whit of practical difference in demonstrating the arrangement to those who may eventually play it. I say, use smaller files in this instance. This from one who favors good sound (and the unfortunately large file sizes that go with that) for actual recordings. Hope this helps you. Chuck On Sep 25, 2005, at 1:21 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: I'm about to start creating a bunch of MP3 files that are recorded from my sound card playing back MIDI files created from Finale files. It seems to me when comparing these two files: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.mp3 http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA1.mp3 there is no apparent difference in sound quality. The first is 192K and the second is 128K. The file size difference is significant enough that if the 128K files are good enough, I'll go with those. Does anyone here any significant differences between the two? I can convince myself that I do, but it seems only psychological. I definitely hear a different between 192 and 128 with live recordings, but my soundcard output seems to be sufficiently less complex waveforms that there's no difference to my ear. But it's incredibly difficult for me to test objectively, so I'd appreaciate anyone who cares to listen and let me know what they think. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale Chuck Israels 230 North Garden Terrace Bellingham, WA 98225-5836 phone (360) 671-3402 fax (360) 676-6055 www.chuckisraels.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 25 Sep 2005 at 13:34, Chuck Israels wrote: Yes, I can hear a small difference. I know because I expected (before reading carefully) to hear the more compressed file first and noticed a slight veiling in the second sample. Well, it seems to me that there's a slightly more realistic-sounding envelope to the highter-bitrate file, one that makes is sound slightly more like real instruments. But the difference is still so huge that I'm not sure it's worth the file size. That said, I don't think it makes a whit of practical difference in demonstrating the arrangement to those who may eventually play it. Just to clarify, this is not arranged by me. It's an arrangement that appeared in 1802, made by Gelinek. It's part of the repertory of pieces for my dissertation, from the very interesting subgroup of arrangements for piano quartet/quintet of works from other genres. It's a pretty good arrangement, too, I think. Also, there's some added ornamentation in the 2nd and 3rd movements that I believe tells us something about appropriate performance practice, or, at least, the ideas of Gelinek about it. The fact that the ornamentation is indicated (and only in the piano part) may also relate to the fact that there was a strong association of piano chamber music with amateur (and female) musicians. I say, use smaller files in this instance. This from one who favors good sound (and the unfortunately large file sizes that go with that) for actual recordings. The only reason I would go for good sound is that this may be as close to a performance as these pieces ever get (though I'm trying hard to get them performed), so in that case, I'm not sure I want to spend my time creating the lower-quality MP3s. Of course, if I save the intermediate WAV file, I can generate MP3s of any quality at a later date, but I was hoping to skip that step so that I wouldn't have all those big WAV files littering my hard drive (which has a mere 2GBs of free space left). -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On Sep 25, 2005, at 2:04 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: The only reason I would go for good sound is that this may be as close to a performance as these pieces ever get That's too bad. I think it's terrific that we have this method of hearing a sketch of music, and I'm all for that, but as a substitute for real players, it falls far short of a good experience. Of course, I realize this is not your choice. I have become involved with Gary Garritan (as you may have gleaned from previous posts), and I'm eagerly awaiting the set of jazz sounds. But as enthusiastic as I am to have access to this tool, I have no illusions about anything approximating people playing instruments, and I'm sad to think how often this may become a short cut substitute. This is not about your use of this. It's just another change in the world of music. Chuck (though I'm trying hard to get them performed), so in that case, I'm not sure I want to spend my time creating the lower-quality MP3s. Of course, if I save the intermediate WAV file, I can generate MP3s of any quality at a later date, but I was hoping to skip that step so that I wouldn't have all those big WAV files littering my hard drive (which has a mere 2GBs of free space left). -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale Chuck Israels 230 North Garden Terrace Bellingham, WA 98225-5836 phone (360) 671-3402 fax (360) 676-6055 www.chuckisraels.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
There is quite a difference between 128K and 192K. However, considering the hideuos soundcard synth sounds, you may easily neglect it. As you say, in natural sounds, it makes quite a difference, but for the cheap synth sounds it doesn't really matter. I use finale as a notation program, not for real music. If I was you, and I would want a decent playback of a Finale file, I would save it to midi, import it to Nuendo and use some sampler or sampling software. There are solutions out there, if they are programmed well, you almost cannot tell wether it's a synth or a real orchestra. (e. g. film scores.). And if it's real, you will hear the difference between mp3 (192) and CD (or SACD) anyway. Even Finale 2006 can sound a lot better...;-) Kurt At 22:21 25.09.2005, you wrote: I'm about to start creating a bunch of MP3 files that are recorded from my sound card playing back MIDI files created from Finale files. It seems to me when comparing these two files: http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA.mp3 http://www.dfenton.com/Midi/MozartK581Arr/MozartK581ArrA1.mp3 there is no apparent difference in sound quality. The first is 192K and the second is 128K. The file size difference is significant enough that if the 128K files are good enough, I'll go with those. Does anyone here any significant differences between the two? I can convince myself that I do, but it seems only psychological. I definitely hear a different between 192 and 128 with live recordings, but my soundcard output seems to be sufficiently less complex waveforms that there's no difference to my ear. But it's incredibly difficult for me to test objectively, so I'd appreaciate anyone who cares to listen and let me know what they think. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 25 Sep 2005 at 23:54, Kurt Gnos wrote: I use finale as a notation program, not for real music. .. . Well, good for you! . . . If I was you, . . . And you're clearly not. . . . and I would want a decent playback of a Finale file, I would save it to midi, import it to Nuendo and use some sampler or sampling software. . . . Well, that isn't going to happen. I'm perfectly happy with my Turtle Beach sound card for demo playback, and the only reason I'm making MP3s of the MIDI files is that I have discovered that hardly anyone has a soundcard or soft synth (except the pros) that sounds even half as good as my cheapo 7-year-old TB Montego II. I don't have the computing power to get into the latest sample sets with their poorly designed players (I simply cannot understand why GPO with the Kontact player should take so damned much RAM when my dedicated TB sound card had not even close to the same amount of memory in it as is easily available in any recent PC) that are so inefficient they won't run reasonably well on multi-gigahertz boxes with gigabytes of RAM. Color me completely unimpressed. If the sounds were so great, it might be worth it, but overall, I am not that impressed with any complete sound sets I've demo'd. Perhaps if you get into the realm of sample sets where you're paying thousands for a family of instruments and have dedicated equipment to process and render them for you it sounds pretty good, but I'm never going to be in that arena. That anyone could be satisfied with sounds as unsatisfactory as the Quicktime Musical Instruments or the Finale Soundfont boggles my mind. From my point of view, those kind of soft synths are an enormous step backwards from the cheap dedicated wavetable synthesizers I've been using on PCs for nearly 10 years now. And because it's not a dedicated DSP processing the sound, you also end up with contention for the computer's CPU which greatly degrades the quality that you can get while doing any multitasking at all. This is, I assume, why those soft synths have such incredibly poor samples, because anything better would be too taxing for standard CPUs. . . . There are solutions out there, if they are programmed well, you almost cannot tell wether it's a synth or a real orchestra. (e. g. film scores.). . . . Oh, puh-leaze. I can tell a synthesized film score a mile away, not matter how good their samples were. They tend to lard on a huge amount of reverb to try to hide the inadequacy of the basic sound as a substitute for real strings and other real instruments, but anyone who has every listened to live orchestras knows perfectly well that it doesn't sound like the real thing. . . . And if it's real, you will hear the difference between mp3 (192) and CD (or SACD) anyway. I don't hear the difference between CDs and SACD, for one. Actually, my 1985 Magnavox oversampling CD player sounds better than my 4-year- old Sony DVD player that plays SACD. From where I sit, on all of these subjects, the emporer has no clothes more often than not. -- David W. Fentonhttp://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associateshttp://www.bway.net/~dfassoc ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
RE: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
On 25 Sep 2005 at 23:54, Kurt Gnos wrote: I use finale as a notation program, not for real music. .. . Well, good for you! . . . If I was you, . . . And you're clearly not. [remaining know-it-all remarks snipped] Kurt, if you haven't yet figured it out, it is a complete waste of time answering any of David Fenton's remarks, even when you're trying to be helpful, since he considers everyone except himself to be an idiot. Save your breath and ignore his arrogant and obnoxious posts. Lee Actor Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic http://www.leeactor.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
No I won't shut up yet. Two more. JS On Sep 25, 2005, at 5:47 PM, Lee Actor wrote: On 25 Sep 2005 at 23:54, Kurt Gnos wrote: I use finale as a notation program, not for real music. .. . Well, good for you! . . . If I was you, . . . And you're clearly not. [remaining know-it-all remarks snipped] Kurt, if you haven't yet figured it out, it is a complete waste of time answering any of David Fenton's remarks, even when you're trying to be helpful, since he considers everyone except himself to be an idiot. Save your breath and ignore his arrogant and obnoxious posts. Lee Actor Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic http://www.leeactor.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
Re: [Finale] OT: MP3 Compression Comparison
Sorry, sent the last one the wrong direction. My apologies. JS On Sep 25, 2005, at 5:47 PM, Lee Actor wrote: On 25 Sep 2005 at 23:54, Kurt Gnos wrote: I use finale as a notation program, not for real music. .. . Well, good for you! . . . If I was you, . . . And you're clearly not. [remaining know-it-all remarks snipped] Kurt, if you haven't yet figured it out, it is a complete waste of time answering any of David Fenton's remarks, even when you're trying to be helpful, since he considers everyone except himself to be an idiot. Save your breath and ignore his arrogant and obnoxious posts. Lee Actor Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic http://www.leeactor.com ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale ___ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
