I first got the idea for this benchmark when I stumbled upon a native 64-bit FLAC executable for Windows. Curious, I did a quick and dirty test against the canonical build for Windows and found that while encoding times were similar, decoding times were considerably faster.

To figure out why this is so (the 64-bitness or something else), I quickly pulled some some additional compiles and benchmarked them against a few different samples.

I have three different samples I used, ripped in WAV format as single files:

• Lateralus, by Tool
• Californication, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Bruckner’s 9th Symphony, by Giulini/Vienna Philharmonic, 1989

I’ve included a table for each sample, split into encode/decode times and compilation.

The builds I included were:

• The canonical build from the official FLAC website
• MSVC8 (Microsoft) compile from RareWares
• ICL 9.1 (Intel) compile from RareWares
• 64-bit compile (MSVC?) from HardwareHacks 2000

My test system is a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, with 4GB of RAM, running Windows Vista x64 SP1, with all available patches. The timer used was by Igor Pavlov (the developer of 7-zip). Reported times are global (as opposed to kernel, user, or process times).

It turns out that the x64′s advantage when it comes to decoding isn’t due to its 64-bitness, but probably because it includes some extra optimizations (SSE?) that are inherent ot a 64-bit compilation.

The clear winner in both encoding and decoding is the ICL9.1 compile (I wonder if a 10.1 compile would be even better); at least, it is so on my machine. The x64 compile was sometimes better, sometimes worse than the canonical compile. Clearly, there’s an early benefit from some optimization (probably SSE routines), along with a small margin of benefit from using Intel’s superior compiler. 64-bitness is beneficial for FLAC processes only insofar as it necessarily encompasses these routines as part of its instruction set.

If you’re looking to use a particular build of FLAC, I suggest you mosey on over to RareWares and john33′s ICL build: the resulting files are a few KB larger, but the processes itself is noticeably faster.

It’s been close to two years since I wrote GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a visual and textual comparison of some the best available audio players for the GNOME desktop.

As is usually the case in the world of free software, a lot has happened since then (and yet, in a strange way, things have stayed exactly the same). I decided to revisit some of those players and see how they’ve progressed. Some of them listed last time haven’t seen any appreciable development, and have been left off.

I realize that I am totally ignoring the daemon-based players (read: Music Player Daemon, XMMS2); this is by design, since those players open up a whole new can of worms. Suffice it to say that if you’ve decided on and XMMS2 or MPD-based player and successfully configured it, you probably don’t need any advice on choosing software.

The following programs will be covered in this review (development versions):

• BMPx (0.40.14)
• Rhythmbox (0.11.6)
• Exaile (2.99.1-svn)
• Banshee (1.4.1)
• Quod Libet (2.0)
• Decibel (1.00)
• Songbird (1.0)
• Listen (0.6~svn1044)

All of the testing was done on a fresh install (and update) of Ubuntu 8.10 in VirtualBox, using a small representative sample of my music collection (some modern, some classical, in Vorbis, MP3, and FLAC).

Another frontend, cdrtfe (cdrtools frontend), was a freeware project that fairly recently opened its source, and I’ve been using it ever since. It hasn’t got the best interface in the world, but it’s one of the most powerful little programs I’ve seen in a long time.

Please note that the version of cdrtfe that I use is 1.3pre1 which is not the stable 1.2x series. Any bugs which I describe should not be ascribed to the stable series, but considered bugs in development until proved otherwise.

Interface

I’m going to get my criticisms with this program out of the way, because they’re mostly superficial. One gripe that I have with cdrtfe is that the options are not organized well. As you can see in the screenshots, there is a button marked “settings” in the right pane which controls options for the entire program: you wouldn’t assume that based on the button’s placement right below the physical device options. In the “middle” pane of sorts, there’s another button marked “Options” which controls project-type-specific options—except when there are other buttons for other options like the disc filesystem…. which is, admittedly, a lot of options and probably deserves its own area. But you may have also noticed the grey or block text to the right of those buttons, which are clickable/toggleable. These are also options, and they are all also available by clicking on the “Options” button, which has both them and other options. Do you see what I mean about an inconsistent user interface?

Believe me, I love having all these options available to me. I hate programs which abstract options so much that the full potential is lost (GNOME, for instance). But I also like sane options layouts (VLC is another example of a bad options design). With a bit of cleanup work, this problem could vanish.

I would also like to see the GUI updated to take advantage of other features that Windows offers. You might have noticed that, except for the top menu bar, none of the internal fonts of cdrtfe take advantage of ClearType (font smoothing), which makes the program look dated and unattractive. I see this every so often, especially with install wizards, and it still rather galls me: ClearType’s been around for 6 years now, and there’s really no excuse not to have your GUI look like it belongs in this century.

Those of you who have used BurnAtOnce will appreciate the spartan output view for cdrtfe: there are no fancy progress bars or animated widgets here: the bottom pane of the program outputs text data about the current operation, and that’s it. For me, that’s just fine: I personally don’t think that widgets are necessary for a good burning program.

Projects

cdrtfe is organized by function with tabs. Unlike programs like InfraRecorder, which have a more or less singular look and one toggles between functions (e.g. audio disc, data disc, &tc.) with a menu click, cdrtfe likes to clearly separate each mode into its own area. For people who never use anything except the Audio Disc and Data Disc functions, this may seem a little much, but rest assured that you never have to click on tabs you don’t need.

Data

The data disc view is fairly self-explanatory: there is a tree view in the left pane, a file view in the middle pane, and device options in the right pane. There’s an option to tweak the filesystem, which you will likely only have to do if (a) you’re a power-user and have specific needs or (b)> you have deeply-nested directories in your project and need an ISO-4 filesystem.

As you can see, cdrtfe also includes a verification option, which has grown to be a must for me: until I switched to Taiyo Yuden optical media, I sometimes had issues with bad burns, and with the verification switch, I would at least know about it.

Audio

The audio disc function is one area where cdrtfe has surpassed Infra Recorder by leaps and bounds. As you may have noticed in the corresponding screenshot, I have three different types of encoded files in my project, namely MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC. cdrtfe comes with support for all three right out of the box. It doesn’t rely on written plugins like Infra Recorder, but instead comes bundled with codecs (easily swapped with the latest versions, if you like) which handle the files prior to burning.

The playlist interface is another area where cdrtfe has surpassed Infra Recorder, because as of version 0.42.1, Infra Recorder didn’t have support for playlist reordering: when I tried to drag items in the list to a different position, the program would exit silently. cdrtfe has no such problems.

As a warning: I’ve experienced—only once—an event where cdrtfe would error out when trying to decode some mp3s for burning. My guess is that this has to do with the madplay decoder and not the program, but it might still be something that you run into every now and then. I was able to decode the files manually using foobar2000 (one could theoretically use just about anything) and then they burned just fine.

XCD

I don’t have much to say about this function, since I never use it. It’s likely that you never have, either. Ostensibly, it’s a way to squeeze more space out of a regular CD-R by remove a data correction layer. See the Doom9 thread for more details.

CD/DVD-RW tools

This item should be fairly self-explanatory, though I admit I haven’t had to use rewritable discs in quite some time: optical media has become so cheap that I don’t mind making a few coasters. But that’s beyond the point: cdrtfe fully supports erasing rewritable media in both modes: Table of Contents only, and complete (similar to a “quick” or “full” format for hard drives).

CD Info

The underlying libraries of cdrtfe can also give detailed information about both your optical drive and your disk. You can opt to view any of these on the “CD Info” tab, which can be useful when trying to figure out if a disk is a dud or not.

DAE

DAE stands for “digital audio extraction” and it’s a fancy way of saying “CD Ripper.” This is the only part of the program which didn’t work for me, as I was treated to an application error and couldn’t proceed. Hopefully, it will be fixed in later versions, although I must admit that I would likely never use it anyway, as better tools exist for such like (e.g. EAC).

CD Image

Another very useful feature, the CD Image tab gives users the ability to either make ISO images from physical CDs or DVDs, as well as burning both ISO and bin/cue images. If you work with a lot of esoteric file formats (Nero’s NRG, Alcohol’s MDS/MDF, &tc.), then this isn’t for you. But if, like me, the majority of formats you burn are ISO, this is a perfect solution.

(Super) VideoCD

cdrtfe has the ability to burn three different formats of VideoCD (like DVDs, but with regular 700MB CDs): v1.0, v1.2, and SVCD, which requires a differently-encoded MPEG2 file and is of a higher resolution. In all honesty, the age of this format has passed, and it was always much more popular in Asia than it was in the states, but it’s nice, anyway, that the option still exists. Most likely, you’ll be wanting the next option.

Video DVD

This is just what it sounds like: cdrtfe can burn a standards-compliant video DVD when given the right source. It won’t do any sort of encoding for you: you’ll need a special DVD authoring program to create a correctly-formated TS_VIDEO (for instance) directory.

Other thoughts

Like a lot of hobby projects, cdrtfe has its problems and its quirks: likewise, it’s hardly the sort of hand-holding program that will wipe your nose for you while it converts, edits, and burns the entire contents of your hard drive for you. It wasn’t made for that purpose: in grand Unix tradition, it’s a tool which does one thing: it burns stuff to optical media. The fact that it has a few extra features (even if they don’t all work) is just a little bonus.

Take a look at the screenshots: if you like what you see, then cdrtfe might be just the thing for you. If it’s too ugly, there’s always Infra Recorder. If that’s still too difficult for you, well, you can always drop a hundred dollars for crap.

The state of Win32 burning programs

The proprietary choices for optical disc burning on Windows are pretty obvious: at the fore, there’s Roxio’s offering, EZ Media Creator, and Nero’s offering, Nero Burning Rom. Having used Roxio’s v5 program long, long ago with my Hewlett-Packard 4x external CDRW drive, and having used Nero’s Burning Rom during the entirety of its v6 lifecycle (when it was one of the best offerings on the market), I’ve been disappointed to see most of these offerings turn into bloated creatures, invasive and slow.

Perhaps you want built-in picture managers, movie players, reencoders, editors, and every bang and whistle you can think of. If that’s your bag, baby, you’re more than welcome to shell out $80+ for a copy

My time on Linux, however, has engendered me to the rock-solid (if historically murky in license) cdrtools, especially since the wonderful k3b is essentially a cdrtools frontend.

Historically, frontends for Windows have been touch & go. Burnatonce, a freeware closed-source frontend, which two years ago was a great little minimalist project, has stagnated, as the developer has no clear roadmap for development or time to create one.

The functional but less-glamorous cdrtfe is another good solution, although my experiences with it have been limited.

Enter Infra Recorder

A relative newcomer on the scene, Infra Recorder is an open source program by Christian Kindahl, the author of TugZip. Infra Recorder is similar in functionality to other frontends, but it also sports a really slick interface that makes use of the Tango icon set.

Infra Recorder can do the following:

• Create data CDs
• Create audio CDs
• Create mixed mode CDs
• Create data DVDs (dual layer, too)
• Create Video DVDs
• Dump CD to image
• Write any project to a disc image (.iso)
• Burn a disc image to a physical disc

I have yet to produce any coasters, although it may be also that my media is very good .

With regard to supported formats, we reach a somewhat tricky subject. Infra Recorder’s support for audio formats when burning is plugin-based. The default installation comes with support for WAV files, Ogg Vorbis, and WMA. MP3 support is available, using LAME code, but you have to download it separately because of legal troubles. This is unfortunate, but it’s not a particularly difficult process: you merely download the Zip file and extract irLame.irc into the Codec directory of your Infra Recorder installation.

Technically speaking, any format could be supported as long as it uses Infra Recorder’s plugin schema. I talked with Christian, who said that he wants to support FLAC by default in future versions. I would like to see community involvement in terms of extra installable codecs, but so far Infra Recorder seems to be laboring in obscurity, and unfortunately it changes enough with every release that the codecs need to be updated every time, as well. Once the project stabilizes, and gains some recognition, I think (hope) that user contributions will start coming in.

As you can see from the screenshots, Infra Recorder’s graphical metaphor is nothing groundbreaking: it sticks to the sort of interface used by most of its predecessors. Which is not to say that it’s bad, certainly: it sports a clean, uncluttered look, it has a great icon set (I would prefer to see the size of the toolbar be adjustable, though), and it allows for very handy integration into the Windows shell. The configuration options, while limited, currently allow for tweaking of FIFO buffer size, as well as an activation of file association and an Explorer extension.

Another feature, which I don’t generally take advantage of, is Infra Express, a small window which allows for the simple selection of a project template. All this really does is then launch Infra Recorder proper, and not a scaled-down filepicker dialogue, as is the case with Nero Express.

As an added bonus for those of you running 64-bit versions of Windows, Infra Recorder comes in a 64-bit version, as well (as of v0.42)

Infra Recorder is, I think, the best (certainly the most attractive) cdrtools frontend under active development. If you don’t specifically need some feature of a bloated, expensive proprietary suite, I see no reason why you shouldn’t download this right now.

1. Sondre Lerche • Things You Call Fate
2. Six Organs of Admittance • This Hand
3. Tristania • Lethean River
4. Sparta • Without a Word
5. Do Make Say Think • Le’espalace
6. Stars of the Lid • Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage
7. Änglagård • Ifran Klarhet Till Klarhet
8. Leaves • Should Have Seen it All
9. Don Caballero • Palm Trees in the Fecking Bahamas
10. Katatonia • Journey Through Pressure

Funny semi-related story: My junior year of high school, I played “Lethean River” for my cringing English class (which was nothing compared to playing Opeth’s “April Ethereal” for my sophomore English class). Mark, if you happen to be reading this: I believe you tried at the time to convince me that Eddie Vedder also growled, and I am still miffed that we never continued that debate the following Monday.

Streams of argentine across eyelids are drawn:

• The Smedley Log (“Back 2 Good” is a really great song, perhaps my favorite from the album, but it always makes me kind of sad for some reason)
• Winter Spring Summer (Equally baffled by some of the entries on this list)
• Freakapotimus (Remember with a mix of fondness and horror the days when I listened to Korn)
• Faux Real, Tho (Seeing “Did I Step On Your Trumpet” performed live was interesting, to say the least)
• The Sam and Beckyboo Show (Reminds me of Bleu’s “Searching for the Satellites”)

The benchmark’s ostensible purpose, at least at first, was to compare four mainstream codecs—FLAC, Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, and OptimFROG—and see how their current stable versions stacked up with the version in development. I ended up throwing in a few others—TTA, LA, and Shorten—for comparative purposes. This test looked at Encoding Time and Compression Ratio; decoding speed was not tested.

If you don’t want to look at the raw data, I’ll save you the trouble of even clicking past the fold.

FLAC

FLAC has languished at v1.1.2 since February of 2005. It has the uncomfortable position of having reached an stable position in the world of lossless codecs, even garnering some hardware support. As a result, it can’t make any sweeping changes without breaking compatibility or hurting its (excellent) decoding speed.

The result is that there have been some definite improvements in compression, though nothing that will blow anyone away. There appears to be an album-wide net loss of between 0.5 and 1.5%, enough to shave another few megabytes from the total size. The default compression (-5) for 1.1.3b2 now compresses better than the maximum practical compression (-8) of 1.1.2. Of course, part of 1.1.3′s appeal is other features, like album art embedding, but that’s beyond the scope of my test.

WavPack

WavPack has been around for a long time (it supposedly inspired Matt Ashland, the creator of Monkey’s Audio, to work on his own), but for some reason has always been underappreciated in the world of lossless compressors. I suppose that’s because it manages to fall somewhere in the middle of Monkey’s Audio and FLAC, not offering compression ratios as low as the former or decode speeds as high as the latter. Still, I was impressed that WavPack not only encoded faster than FLAC, but it got a better compression ratio, too—and it’s decoding speed is also very excellent.

WavPack has two settings: default and -h, or high. It also has a -x[1-6] switch that can possibly shave off a fraction of the size at the expense of a really long encode time. The tendency of 4.4a3 under the default setting was to take a few seconds longer to encode with the benefit of between 0.1% and 1.5% improvement in the compression. For the high setting, however, the encoding time was a few seconds quicker, but the ratio was always worse.

Monkeys Audio (APE)

Monkey’s Audio has a storied history, part of which has to do with its laughable “open source” license, spurned by every Linux distribution I’ve ever seen. APE offers better compression than FLAC without drastically increased encoding times, but it’s particularly CPU-intensive for decoding, making it impractical for handhelds or DAPs.

The change from 3.99 to 4.01b2 has been entirely in the GUI frontend. The encoding times weren’t different enough to be significant, and the sizes were exactly the same. My understanding, though, is that it’s been optimized for dual-core processors, so if you’ve got one, you’ll see a significantly faster encode time.

OptimFROG

OptimFROG is the only truly closed-source encoder in the primary four. It offers the best compression of them as well, but also long encode times and piss-poor playback speeds. It hasn’t gained very much traction except as a curiosity: its closed source nature prevents its use in Linux distros, and its intense resource usage means it will likely never be supported in hardware.

The changes in OptimFROG between 4.520b1 (stable) and 4.600ex (testing) aren’t in the default encoding options. The —highnew mode (the —bestnew mode took 100 minutes for the first album, so I very quickly decided to try the one below it), which increased encoding time for modest compression gains under 0.5%.

Others

TrueAudio is another open-source format that’s languished in obscurity. It’s resolutely middle-of-the-road, offering decent compression and a fast speed. Unfortunately, that means it also gets shown up by the Best in Class codecs.

Shorten was the very first of the serious lossless encoders, first showing up in 1993. It hasn’t gone anywhere in years, and even the organization most attached it to (the live music trading site, ETree, long ago replaced it with FLAC. It offers super-fast decoding speed, but the very worst compression.

LA is another closed-source encoder with very slow encoding times (not quite as bad as OptimFROG) that repeatedly trounces every other codec available in terms of compression ratio. However, its high resource usage and closed nature make it impractical for just about everything but a curio. It also hasn’t seen any development in some time now.

To see the complete table, look below the fold.

See this table in a more attractive PDF format

Tests performed by Ben Gunnink on November 14-17

The Rising Action

I spent the past weekend in Macomb, Illinois, a little bucolic ‘burb in the middle of a vast stretch of corn and grass. In any other circumstance, this sleepy little town of about 20’000 people would be entirely unexceptional—it is quintessentially Midwestern, by which I mean that it is quintessentially dull. Officially founded in 1830, it didn’t gain its famous feature—Western Illinois University—until 1899. It enjoyed a brief relationship with the St. Louis Rams, who used WIU’s athletic facilities for summer training from 1996-2004.

I made the 3-hour drive west to see my girlfriend, Allison, who began her undergraduate studies there this fall, as you may recall if you read this rag regularly. We’d planned it for close to a month—I knew that visiting was a categorical imperative for me, but it was just difficult enough to remain an occasional thing. Sadly, no surprise visits or unexpected trips.

I arrived on Friday afternoon. The trip was long and lonely, the sky overcast but the air humid enough to require me to keep my air conditioning on. At 80mph, opening the windows is a practical impossibility. My back and ass hurt from sitting for so long, my bladder was slightly distended from the large coffee and the bottle of water that I imbibed along the way, but by the time I was navigating Macomb, I no longer really cared. In part, this was because I was busy navigating (I missed my turn anyway and had to circle around to a secondary parking option), but it was also because I was so excited about finally seeing my girlfriend—I had not seen her, after all, since Labor Day weekend, admittedly not an eternity, but close enough when one is madly in love. After navigating across a street and between some buildings, I saw her just as she exited her orchestra rehearsal, and my heart leaped as she came skipping toward me. Neither pictures nor memory do her justice—I was thrilled. My journey was over.

Once we got back to her dormitory, I had to meet all of her friends. Allison makes a lot of friends, and being on an all-girl floor (more on that later) means that she’s surrounded constantly by mostly friendly girls of similar age. I’ve seen this before—when Allison was in colorguard, for instance, or the dance team—and it always ends in bubbly friendship. Sure enough, Allison had a whole cadre of extroverts, with whom we ate dinner in the cafeteria. Nice, certainly, but a bit overwhelming to a quiet, understated, and severely car-lagged person such as myself. I immediately set out to memorizing all their names (most of which seemed to begin with a |k| sound), with some success. It being Friday, most of them were going out drinking.

WIU and Drinking

Drinking is big at Western. Really big. Naturally, there are well-known party schools that probably eclipse it, but I personally have never experienced an on-campus culture as heavily predicated upon alcohol as I did during my 2.5 days in Macomb. Western is home to 28 sororities and fraternities. I am unaware how intrinsic the Greek system is to the drinking culture on campus, but I can say that the most drinking we saw was on Adams St., home to a number of frat houses, overflowing with herds of beer-gulping partygoers.

My immediate theory is that Macomb offers little other recreation besides intoxication. The location is remote from any urban center (the nearest shopping mall is ≈30 miles away), and while Western it has the standard college amenities, the usual sort of commercialization that follows the college demographic—coffee houses, hookah bars, bookstores, specialty restaurants—just isn’t there. Macomb is lucky to have a Wal-Mart and some fast-food franchises. So, despite the Macomb police’s harsh stance on underage drinking, it’s stubbornly prevalent, to the degree that you are statistically likely to be doing only one of two things on a weekend night: sitting in your dorm room, or drinking somewhere. According to a 2000 College Alcohol Study by the Harvard School of Public Health entitled “Binge Drinking On America’s College Campuses,” Greek system membership and collegiate athletics participation are the two important correlating factors for the likelihood of binge drinking, but anecdotally I can assure you that it’s by no means limited to these criteria alone.

Saturday morning, Allison and I attended a charity softball tournament, sponsored by her sorority, which was held for charity. It began at 10 a.m., which struck me as odd, since I figured most of the participants would be miserably hung over at that point. And to no great surprise, I heard a number of the female spectators mumble things like “I drank so much last night,” and the otherwise-fit male participants stumbling and groaning like overtaxed fat men, bemoaning their sorry state. True to form, however, one winning team, when faced with three empty hours until their next match, began to loudly suggest they all head to a local bar for some celebratory beers.

Accommodations

Allison and I didn’t tarry too long at the event—we were tired from staying up late the night before, as Allison wanted to finish the last few episodes of the second season of Grey’s Anatomy before we watched the inaugural episode of season 3 that I had brought with me on my pen drive. Also, were hungry, having basically missed breakfast. Our first night of sleep was a little turbulent, too: Allison lofts her bed, which is a twin-sized unit, and this leaves maybe two vertical feet from mattress to ceiling. So there we were, having both squeezed into that little cave of a space, and we fell asleep almost immediately, only to wake up from the incredible heat that I had managed to generate underneath the covers. Also, the bed had a bit of a droop in the middle, and so we both rolled toward each other, fighting for space. I know, I know—how romantic. By Sunday night, though, we had managed to find our groove, sleeping more comfortably and more soundly in each other’s embrace.

I’ve never lived in a dorm before—the closest I’ve come was bunking in a dorm at Case Western for three days (see blogged bits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), or maybe staying at a hotel. Allison’s dorm is an X when viewed aerially, and each L (half of the X) on each level is reserved for a specific sex. Each half of a floor is isolated from the other—for a male to go from his side of Floor 10 to the other, for instance, he has to travel down to the first or second floor, walk around, and take a different set of elevators up to the female side of Floor 10, and he must be accompanied by a female from that point on. As a male guest residing in a female area, I had to be accompanied by Allison for every trip to the bathroom (I wash my hands just often enough to be irritating), and when I showered, she stood guard to make sure that no other girls came in looking to bathe—I was, after all, about an entire head taller than the shower stall (the showerhead rose to a point level with my chest). Had someone been starkers in a neighboring stall, I couldn’t have seen her goods without a purposeful effort on my part (which I am smart enough not to do), but it still would have been a bad scene. None of the girls seemed to particularly care about a guy on their floor, which made things considerably easier.

I lived mostly out of a suitcase, a selection of clothes that were mostly too warm, as I underestimated the warmth of the weekend (rain was forecast—we received almost none). I am a creature of habit and familiarity, so living in a foreign environment, with travel-sized and microwaveable versions of my stuff and my diet, respectively, was unsettling. Or at least it would be—in Ohio, I was uncomfortable for much of the time, bunking with coworkers—but being with Allison was comforting. I didn’t feel out of place or at odds with my environment: to the contrary, I felt more comfortable with Allison than ever before.

Saturday: He drinks a whisky drink, he drinks a vodka drink, he drinks a lager drink, he drinks a cider drink

Saturday afternoon, after returning from the charity event, Allison and I availed ourselves of the local Pizza Hut, and absolutely smashed a large pepperoni pizza and order of breadsticks. Maybe I was just hungry, but we both agreed that it was especially satisfying at that point. After we had digested, we went out to the library, which is one of WIU’s points of pride. It’s a massive structure (six stories and 200’000ft²), a mixture of a college library and a botanical gardens, overflowing with decorative plant life and topped by a triangular glass ceiling. It was deathly quiet that afternoon, and we hiked up to the top floor, found two chairs, and read, but the early rising and the smothering silence eventually got to us. I found my eyes crossing in fatigue as I tried to read. Eventually, we gave up and headed back to the dorm for a nap. By this point, the rest of Allison’s floor (with some notable, sober exceptions) was just beginning to stir, nursing headaches. It was still quiet enough for a nap, and we woke sometime shortly after five, somewhat refreshed but groggy all over again.

The major event of the night was a fall concert held by the various musical groups of WIU’s Fine Arts program, namely the Chorus, the Jazz Band, the Orchestra, and the Wind Ensemble, the latter two of which Allison is principal bassoonist. After getting ready, Allison, myself, and two of Allison’s friends piled into her car and headed out in a bit of a hurry. In the end, I had to drive Allison’s car a block or so to a parking lot while she rushed to get her instrument and high-tail it to the performance hall.

The concert, while nice, was nothing to gush about. That is to say, each ensemble performed a short, illustrative set that introduced itself without really showing off what each was capable of (it is early in the semester, after all). The orchestra played the final movement of Dvorák’s 9^th Symphony, which was excellent, and the highlight of the wind ensemble’s performance was Frank Ticheli’s Blue Shades, a jazz/swing-inspired piece that featured an outlandish clarinet solo, which was performed with such pizazz that the male clarinetist was treated to a feminine chorus of cheers as he stood up after the conclusion of the piece. Allison had a few short exposed parts (she has more solos in the full Dvorák symphony, which they will naturally be playing next weekend when I am not there), and needless to say she was wonderful, as she always is.

The post-concert festivities, unrelated to the Fine Arts program, was a Fall Party for Allison’s sorority. Allison was invited, but not even sure how to get to the venue until perhaps 10:30pm, when she was finally able to get ahold of someone who knew. The “venue” was really just the backyard of a farmhouse in rural Macomb, and by the time we got there, it had been a “wet” event for a couple of hours, which is to say that everyone was drinking by that point. You might think that a couple of hours isn’t even long enough for a proper drunk, but even before 11, some of the same people who were hung over like death at the charity event that morning were already so stupendously inebriated that they were having trouble standing. Some seemed to be taking it more easy with the drinking. One very nice girl who came up to talk to Allison and I admitted immediately that she was basically shitfaced, but managed to talk to us for a good ten or fifteen minutes, coherently, about the sorority and about her career plans. My FLAC hoodie sparked a discussion about computer science majors and the Java programming language. So, I can at least say that this group, while very drunk, was at least comprised of friendly drunks, who were also prescient enough to sleep on-site, in tents set up for that very purpose.

Unimpressed with the choice of recreational activity (e.g. drinking, and then peeing on the corn), Allison and I left after a short stay there and headed back to the dorm, where we cuddled, finished watching Laws of Attraction, and went to bed around 1:30pm, aware that we had the luxury of sleeping in the next morning.

Falling Action

Sunday doesn’t lend itself well to narrative. Allison and I arose at about 11am, cleaned up around the dorm, and hung out until 4pm, when she had to go practice for a talent show that her sorority is participating in. I sat on the sidelines and read my book, sometimes smirking at the hangover-related groans being offered up by the participating fraternity members. I never cease to be amazed that the behavior of the previous evening fails to change, regardless of the events of the subsequent day. It’s a pervasive and pernicious sort of culture.

After the practice, Allison and I stopped at K-Mart for some supplies, got dinner at a Wendy’s, and ate quickly before she needed to leave for her sorority’s new member ceremony (an actual ceremony, though, and not a hazing). I stayed at the dorm, confined to the room, and read my book, snacking all the while. I spent most of the time wrapped up in the enormous blanket that Allison had made me (I’d offer pictures if my camera wasn’t shit), and she finally got back around nine, along with most of the girls who had left for the weekend.

We did some laundry, and I painted her nails while she studied for a test. Neither of us really wanted to go to bed, since the morning would be a harbinger of my inevitable departure. I had decided to stay the extra night, rather than leave Sunday afternoon, in order to squeeze all of the time possible out of my visit, but it still didn’t seem like enough time. I didn’t want to leave; Allison didn’t want me to either, but come Monday morning, I needed to leave by 8:30 in order to make it to my afternoon classes. Tears were shed—Allison and I felt extremely close to each other this weekend, and leaving felt like losing her to college all over again. The ride home was smooth and uneventful, but I was in a dour mood, eschewing music for the first 40 or so miles, unable to get into it.

In a little over a month, she and I will celebrate four years together. It continues to amaze me how she and I seem to be a living breathing thing capable of autonomous growth. It never feels to me as though we weaken, despite any fights or ruts, and my love for her is continuously renewed by some means or other. I had a great weekend with Allison. I love her, with all my heart.

Here’s a basic overview of the problem. Opponents of DRM say:

1. There should be a stipulation allowing “users to remove from their computers certain DRM software that causes security and privacy harm”
2. Exemptions to bad DRM would mean that labels would be under presssure to come up with good DRM
3. Or, as worded by the CCIA and Open Source and Industry Association: add an exemption for DRM schemes that “employ access control measures which threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives.”

Then Big Media (BSA, RIAA, MPAA, &tc.) says:

1. There wouldn’t be any incentive to create better DRM it “would be fundamentally undermined if copyright owners [...] were left in such serious doubt about which measures were or were not subject to circumvention under the exemption.
2. [T]he boundaries of the proposed exemption would turn on whether access controls “threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives”

Now, I agree with Big Media insofar as the proposed exemptions are rather broadly defined, and you know that Big Media hates broad language unless it works to their benefit. However, when we’re talking about what defines a situation where DRM “threaten[s] critical infrastructure and potentially endanger[s] lives,” something tells me that we’re not talking about Joe Sixpack illegally obtaining the latest Korn album. That Big Media would quibble over such things is truly pathetic.

I’m surprised that they’re even pushing DRM so hard at all. Anyone who knows anything about technology has been saying for years that it’s a waste of time. It ruins your portable music player’s battery life, it can harm your computer, it doesn’t accurate reflect the usage pattern of most consumers, it’s not broadly compatible, and it hasn’t seemed to make a dent in the RIAA/MPAA’s bogeyman of INTERNET PIRACY!

Here’s the thing: if my options are to pay $X to download a 128kbps AAC, MP3, or WMA file with copy protection that I can’t use indefinitely or play everywhere, or to “illegally” download a release group’s rip at 192kbps/VBR or find a lossless FLAC version somewhere, then my choice is obvious. I hate to break it to big media, but as much as they’d like to be the ultimate arbiters of price, technology, and taste, it’s really market forces. I’m part of that market, I cast my vote, and my vote is a big hearty “Fuck you” to the RIAA, the MPAA, software patent holders, and anybody else who thinks they deserve money for controlling information instead of providing services.

There should be no reason whatsoever that patent-free formats (OGG, FLAC, APE, MPC) shouldn’t be supported by every audio program and digital audio player in existence. The code is freely available: the only excuse for companies who continue to churn out hardware players that only support MP3 and WMA is sheer laziness. We know that it’s possible. Even vendors who like to tout themselves as friendly to FOSS continue to enforce a narrow spectrum of patented codecs (MP3 and WMA or AAC) and vendor lock-in. From now on, consumers must press for the adoption of patent-free codecs for their own music libraries, and in terms of vendor support.

2. Digital Restrictions Management

DRM is a fundamental blow to users’ freedom of information. DRM is only supported by proprietary audio codecs whose performance and quality is severely lacking, and only understood by restrictive software like Windows Media Player and iTunes. It hinders the fair use of legally purchased music and does nothing to hinder the spread of pirated material, all of which is available in formats with freely available encoders (FLAC, LAME, &c.). It does this by only allowing a song to be transfered a certain number of times before expiring, meaning that despite legally purchasing the song from whatever source, the consumer does not own the music, but is rather only renting it; all this for a song in a poor format, a fraction of its former self. From now on, consumers must let vendors know that DRM is an abridgement of their rights as consumers and an insult to free ownership.

3. Bitrates

Vendors tout the size of their Digital Audio Players’ hard drives (which might otherwise be incomprehensible to computer-illiterate customers) in terms of the number of songs that can be crammed onto it. In order to maximize the appeal, marketing departments usually use the lowest possible encoding quality in order to use bigger numbers. The Creative Zen description states “20 GB storage lets you bring up to 10,000 WMA songs (64 kbps) or 5000 MP3 songs (128 kbps) everywhere you go.” It is in affront to audiophiles everywhere to suggest that one should encode anything at 128kbps; such a thing may have been acceptable in the days of Napster, but is certainly not now. MP3 files do not reach transparency until at least 192kbps. It is a mockery of even greater proportions to suggest that any piece of music should ever be subject to an encoding at 64kbps (in WMA, even!).

It is time that consumers start demanding a more realistic approach to these marketing campaigns; they need better education on the relative qualities of various formats at differing levels of compression. What’s more, disk-based storage has reached an extent at which we should be clamoring for better (if less efficient) methods of compression, such as the aforementioned lossless codecs. From now on, consumers must pressure manufacturers to use realistic figures when describing capacities.

4. Bono

Bono must stop making commercials for the iPod and just focus wearing sunglasses at diplomatic functions. In fact, he should probably stop making albums as well; he seems to be better as an activist than a musician.

5. Radio

Consumers need to abandon the radio as a means of entertainment. It’s become a cesspool of nothing but Top 40 tripe and the vapid banter of legally retarded show hosts. What’s more, its quality is completely miserable, and it’s subject to the iron fist of the FCC. Either listen to CDs or MP3 players in your car/home, or use satellite radio as a censor-free and higher-quality alternative. The idea of listening to six minutes of commercials in order to hear the same Gwen Stefani song they played an hour ago strikes any sensible audiophile as absurd. Take control of what you listen you.

6. Mastering

As stated before, the tendency to create extremely loud songs suited to radio airplay is a death knell for music quality. To all producers and sound engineers, this is a call to start mixing audio in such a way that preserves dynamics and makes the experience of listening to said music more enjoyable. Not only does hot music just sound bad, but it makes the job of compressing and manipulating that music even harder. Stop it! Just stop it! Ross Robinson, I’m talking to you!

7. Consumers

Of course, none of this would be a problem if you music fans and consumers weren’t such braindead twits about it all. You have the right to inform yourselves of the dangers of DRM, the strengths and weaknesses of different compression formats, and the evil that is hot mastering. You have the right to pester hardware vendors about support for patent-free codecs and the right to purchase from those companies that do implement them; you have the right to see through marketing bullshit about fitting 10’000 songs on a single player. You have the right to not give a damn about Apple’s glossy-but-inferior products or the white earbuds that will get you mugged. You have the right to use better programs than Windows Media Player, the right to encode your entire collection in FLAC, the right to transfer a song that you own to as many devices as you damn well please.

You have the right not to be a lazy as and accept whatever is fed to you. And you have the right to enjoy your music in all its unadultered glory.

One of the major problems that have cropped up in many of the pop music releases in the past 5 to 6 years is level control. I have painfully listened to my step kids CDs and heard the shrilling sounds they conveyed. I wasn’t surprised when I hooked up the CD player’s analog outputs to my oscilloscope and observed levels so high that they were clipping on a consistent basis. One normally thinks of clipping as a power amplifier problem, yet clipping in the digital domain can be just as bad.

I bring this up, because lately I’ve been experimenting with the FLAC audio compression format. It’s touted as having an average compression ratio of 0.5-0.55 (original size * 0.5[5] = new size). When I was converting a CD of Rachmaninov piano concertos, I got between 0.38 and 0.47. Obviously, those are extremely good compression ratios for a lossless encoder. In fact, they are such that I’ve considered buying some extra storage space and having my entire music collection be FLAC. Except I can’t. Because most of my collection is modern, and probably hot as hell. I tried encoding my Boy Hits Car album in FLAC, and got average ratios of 0.75 (that’s bad: only a quarter of the file size was shaved off). At 400 modern CDs, that’s almost 300GB right there, not counting anything else I download.

And yet, when I encoded King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King, I was getting the promised levels of between 0.5 and 0.6. Why? Because that album was recorded and mastered well, just like most recordings of classical music. With the proper levels, FLAC is able to achieve good compression rates. Another album that is supposed to be excellent in regards to this is Tool’s Lateralus according to Wes Lindstrom. In an effort to test my hypothesis about FLAC, I decided to do a rough comparison of rates for a robust classical album (Solti/CSO play Mahler’s 8^th Symphony), a relatively tame classical album (Ashkenazy’s performance of some Rachmaninov preludes), Tool’s Lateralus, Opeth’s Blackwater Park, RHCP’s Californication, Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, Änglagård’s Epilog, and Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick. I will average the ratios for all tracks and present the findings, seeing if the compression matched what I thought it would be based on my preconceptions of the mastering. For instance, I expect both classical albums to be excellent, as well the Jethro Tull and to a lesser extent the Änglagård. Opeth will fall in the middle, and Oasis/RHCP will be horrible. All compression is done using FLAC 1.1.2a -8 -V.

As you can see from the results, most of my hypothesis was confirmed. Classical music, even boisterous Mahler, compresses extremely well, while modern music does not. Depending on the type of music, a similar approach may or may not be taken in terms of mastering and levels. The Änglagård album, recorded in the the style of 60s prog bands, saw compression rates similar to those touted by FLAC’s coders. Californication, mentioned specifically by Wes Lindstrom for being extremely hot, sees levels at about 0.75. That was 1999: today, most rock/pop albums are that hot. Lindstrom also specifically mentioned Tool’s Lateralus as being well-mastered, and we can see that the main tracks tend to fall in the low 0.6s: not exactly the best I’ve ever seen, but excellent for an album with as many furious moments as it has. Even Mahler’s 8th hit similar numbers at one point.

I’m no expert on the acoustic model, but it doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to figure out that the music industry’s tendency to create extremely loud/hot albums (think of these in terms of the acoustic model) is not only damaging to the quality of the music, but it also defies our ability to compress it efficaciously. When you consider that pop bands essentially record for the radio, it’s really no surprise that most people can’t appreciate the difference between a well-mastered and a poorly-mastered album. It’s also no wonder that people don’t seem to mind listening to mp3s with such low bitrates: these songs were recorded for a lackluster medium, and one lackluster medium is as good as another. Hot mastering steals away dynamic contrast and quality sound. Take heed, producers: give us back our music!