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Re: dissing, no, *issing

Subject: Re: dissing, no, *issing
From: Marty Michener <>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 05:57:54 -0400
At 10:40 PM 9/17/02 -0700, you wrote:
>KACastelein and DJLauten wrote (in part):
>
> >if you are going to process those MD
> >recordings to make music, be aware that you might find things get pretty
> >ugly pretty fast.
>
>Please give an example of how this might be demonstrated.
>
>-Dan Dugan

I also am still looking for the ugly.  The three people with the best
"ears" for music that I have met in my life, all raved about the cleanness=

of the sound of the two CD's of Pirates of Penzance I recorded last fall
with HHb, the two ME-67's and edited thousands of manual compressions and
level normalizing on CoolEdit. These people each get paid triple what I
have ever made, for their ears, (opera, ear interval training, vocal
instructing, etc.).  I cannot find better music expertise.

Let's get to the feared heart of it all: If you have a compression method
that is supposed to work by rendering what is most audible fairly, and by
deleting what is in the background, to save space.  Then the BIGGEST danger=

to nature recording is, for example, that ATRAC will "think" the airplane
(loud) is what is necessary, while the tweet of the bird (soft) is NOT.

So, the first thing I did with my HHb PortaDisc was to take many, many such=

recordings, and use CoolEdit to filter them, using frequency bands and
other artful filters to remove the airplanes, etc. to continue with my very=

overly simple analogy.  I also made dozens of filters named for what they
remove, e.g. "DE-BLUEJAY" filters, and "DE-TITMOUSE" filters to remove the=

LOUD and near stuff, leaving what?

That is the question, leaving what, nicht wahr?

In the case of the most feared "ugly", listening to LNS if you will,
leaving a distorted nothing.  Well, folks, you can listen to several
hundred species of distorted nothings on my new EnjoyBirds CD.  My summary:=

reports of the ATRAC death of background sounds have been greatly exaggerat=
ed.

The reason this keeps coming up on this group is simple: LNS has, by dint
of all the huge library of sounds we have donated to them, rather than from=

any scientific particular capability or talent, far more influence on
newbies than they should have. Also, whereas advice from, say, Walt Knapp
is free, THEY charge for it.   So we get dozens of complaints the "we
haven't heard what LNS says about MD's yet?"  Frustrating and endless.

If we continually defend it, it is because LNS continues to put us
off.  They stop? We stop.

cheers,

Marty Michener
MIST Software Associates
PO Box 269, Hollis, NH 03049


coming soon : EnjoyBirds - software that migrates with you.




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