Alex Due

I’ve made all my Creative Commons licensed songs available as FLAC files because I believe that lossless audio is the future and we should start using it as soon as possible. The files are provided through my profile on SoundCloud. Links to the FLAC file of each song are also available on the downloads page.

If you’re not the audiophile kind of guy this might bore for you. Nevertheless, it’s worth thinking about it.

FLAC stands for “Free Lossless Audio Codec” and that’s what it is. It’s a compressed audio format that can be decompressed to the original audio without loosing any bit of quality. Audio formats like MP3 and AAC (M4A) on the other hand do lossy compression. Even if you might think that they sound very good, they don’t sound as good as a CD does. FLAC however sounds exactly like a CD.

The downside is that FLAC files are larger. Lossy compressed audio files are relatively small. Depending on their compression they have 1–2,5 MB per second (128–320 kbit/s). FLAC on the other hand has 4–8 MB per second. That means that it takes 2–3 times as much space as MP3 files. However, they have exactly the same quality as uncompressed WAV files and these have enormous 10 MB per second.

FLAC compresses your audio without any loss of quality. That makes it so cool. Sadly many mobile audio players don’t support FLAC yet. But your computer most likely does.

You should keep in mind that once you use lossy compression and don’t keep the original, the original quality will be gone forever. You’ll always be stuck with the lossy sound. Indeed you could convert MP3 to FLAC. But that would be like scaling a 5 megapixel picture to 10 megapixel. It won’t gain any quality. So you might want to think about starting to use lossless compression today or in the near future. The good thing is that once you use lossless compression you can convert it to any other lossless format without loosing quality, be it Apple Lossless, Real Audio Lossless, or Windows Media Audio Lossless.

And let’s be honest. Current digital audio players have 16 to 64 GB of memory. And they grow continuously. Today’s average hard drive has a size of 1500 GB. That’s 178 days of lossless audio. Who the hell should listen to over 4000 CDs? Your audio player will have the same capacity in about 10 years and probably 300 GB in five years. By then you won’t care about the size. But you won’t get back what you already lost.

Another free track is available from German Electro duo Moonbootica.

For those of you who like free music. It’s already several months ago that Fonzerelli released a free track. I like it very much. Fonzerelli is one of my favourite House producers. And I admit, you have to register for his mailing list. But you can unregister afterwards. The track is worth it!

We are! At least that’s what a Swedish company is saying. WeSC—short for “WeAretheSuperlativeConspiracy”—is a clothing brand mainly focussing on skateboarding style. The company was founded about ten years ago.

Last autumn after some sightseeing in Stockholm I accidentally ran into their home shop in some side street. I didn’t know anything about WeSC, but the shop looked like fashion and I was looking for some clothes. I was instantly thrilled to see about thirty headphones in many different colours hanging on an iron rod. They were obviously designed to go with the shirts and sweaters on the table below and I couldn’t get around taking the picture you can see above.

Since then I’ve seen many people on the streets of Sweden wearing WeSC headphone. I think they are looking very good as a fashion accessory. As I can tell from my own experience Swedes (and probably also Norwegians) are pioneers in terms of fashion. They wear one or two years in advance what will then become trend in Europe and other countries. Certainly I don’t like everything of these new trends and I hope that some won’t spread. But I definitely like the phones. Over the last six months I’ve been watching out for people wearing WeSC phones in Germany. I’ve seen about half a dozen in Munich and Berlin, but apart from that there’s not much. I’m curious how long it will take until we see them all over the place.

My Koss PORTAPRO—which I love and wear with pride—are broken at the moment. There’s a loose contact somewhere inside the plug. Fortunately Koss offers a limited lifetime warranty on them, so I sent them in for repair. Hope they will be fixed soon. Anyway, I started thinking about buying new headphones which I could wear outdoors. Sometimes I don’t like ear canal phones even though some sound quite good. I usually use them for listening to news podcasts when I’m on my way. But having 5 cm wide speakers on your ears gives you a way better experience when listening to music.

This week I went to the only shop in my city which sells WeSC phones. I wanted to know how good they sound. The salesclerk was nice and it was no problem testing them. Currently there are basically five models:

• Alp Horn (DJ, 100–120 €)
• Bag Pipe (DJ, 130–150 €)
• Bongo (premium, 60–80 €)
• Maraca (retro style, 80–100 €)
• Oboe (street, 40–60 €)

I started with the Bongo because two of those have a really fancy colour pattern. Bass and mids seemed quite good. But the highs were quieter than the rest which led to a lack of clarity. Maybe most people who aren’t into music so much won’t be bothered by this. But I’m more the audiophile kind of guy and I won’t be happy with a sound like that. Therefore I didn’t even test the cheaper Oboe.

In contrast the Maraca sounded very good and I was on the verge of buying one, because I really like the retro style shape it has. But sadly the Maraca doesn’t have a beautiful colour pattern like some Bongo have. Maracas are at most simply two coloured.

A mentionable feature of the Maraca is the unexpectedly low weight. They are pretty comfortable to wear. One thing which also caught my eye was the short cable. It is only 50 cm long. There’s an extension included which gives you another metre. But the reason this made me uneasy was that I once had ear canal phones with extension. That was annoying when carrying my MP3 player in the trouser pocket. I had to use the extension for that and plug and socket were so heavy that the cable was constantly pulling on my ear. However, this is no problem with the WeSC phones.

Finally I brought myself to order the Maraca Dark Shadow today. For me it’s the colour that fits best with the retro style of the phones. Other colours are white, black, red, and turquoise. The black one would be my second choice because it seems ageless. Third would be the stylish white one. But turquoise and red aren’t my favourite colours.

Let’s see how long it takes my new phones to reach me.

The German Musikpiraten e. V. (music pirates registered association) started the Free! Music! Contest 2010. The aim is to promote artists who publish their music under Creative Commons licences. One song per artist can be registered until the end of July. Participants can choose to upload additional stems of their songs which may be used by other participants in the remix-phase ending August 22nd.

Patron of the contest is the author Cory Doctorow who published several bestseller books under Creative Commons licences.

The result of the contest will be a sampler which will be available on CD and as free download. A concert is scheduled for October 2nd at Wiesbaden Kreativfabrik including performances of selected participants and an exclusive—yet so far unnamed—headliner.

Guess I’ll have to decide which track to submit …

In search of Creative Commons music on the internet I came across rec72 which is a netlabel focusing on electronic music and visuals to be spread on the internet and being downloadable for free.

One of the many artists who has published music on rec72 is Zoe.LeelA. Her album “Queendom Come” is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works license and can be downloaded as a ZIP file from rec72.net. The album includes

• six tracks (MP3, 320 kbit/s),
• cover images (JPEG/PDF, 300 DPI),
• press infos (PDF, biography and infos),
• and four press photos (JPEG).

Download: Zoe.LeelA – Queendom Come

My favourite track of the album is “Destroy She Says” to which you can listen to here:

[audio:https://rec72.net/media/releases/zoeleela/audio/05_Zoe.LeelA_-_Destroy_She_Says_-_Queendom_Come.mp3|titles=Destroy She Says|artists=Zoe.LeelA]

Links

• ZIP file “Zoe.LeelA – Queendom Come” on rec72.net
• album website on rec72.net
• Zoe.LeelA website
• Zoe.LeelA on Twitter
• Zoe.LeelA videos on Vimeo
• Zoe.LeelA on MySpace

Die Industrial Rock Gruppe um Trent Reznor Nine Inch Nails hat am 5. Mai 2008 ein neues Album vorgestellt: The Slip.

Das besondere an diesem Album ist, dass es kostenlos heruntergeladen und weitergegeben werden kann. Möglich macht dies die Lizenzierung unter einer Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. Read the rest of this entry »

Ich habe wieder viel angefangen und wenig vollendet. Seit September 2007 arbeite ich am neuen Projekt BTBM, dessen Musikstil ich als elektronische-aggressiv bezeichnen würde. Muss auch mal sein 😉 Was wieder einmal fehlt sind Text und Gesang.

Nachdem ich mir endlich ein ordentliches Kondensatormikrofon zugelegt habe, von dessen Qualität ich begeistert bin, stände dem Gesang nichts mehr viel im Weg. Ich habe in letzter Zeit im Internet ein wenig nach Sänger(inne)n Ausschau gehalten. Dafür hatte ich mich bei einem recht neuen Phänomen des Web 2.0 Trend angemeldet: Music Nation Germany. Read the rest of this entry »