Time Really Can Be On Your Side, After All

Have you mastered time?

When asked about his career ambitions in the movie Say Anything, the character Lloyd Dobler (played by Jon Cusack) famously said, "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed."

But you don't have that luxury. If you are ephemeralizing physical analog media to weightless digital form, by now you know there is always something to record, pre-process, process, post-process, export, convert, or catalog. And if you're working on deadline (say, doing a project for a friend or relative) it can feel like the tasks are coming faster than you can dispatch them. To contradict The Rolling Stones, time is not always on your side.

Or is it? There are four task groups in the audio processing pipeline (see below). Understanding what kind of time commitment each task group takes will help you regain control and master time.

Time Commitment Taxonomy of Audio Processing Tasks.

1. Background Tasks (Machine/Real-Time). Background tasks are the most efficient use of your time. Recording the source material cannot be accelerated (if there are 60 minutes of audio, it will take exactly 60 minutes to record it) but requires very little intervention (set-up and flipping sides).
2. Monitored Tasks (Machine/Accelerated). Monitored tasks take time proportional to the recording length but are anywhere from 2x to 15x accelerated. Less efficient than background tasks, although your active intervention is usually limited to set-up and pressing "go."
3. Automated Tasks (Human/Accelerated). Automated tasks are similar to monitored tasks, with the additional step of having to evaluate results, sometimes adjusting controls and repeating until desired results are achieved.
4. Manual Tasks (Human/Real-Time). Manual tasks are the least efficient use of your time. They are hands-on and can be frustratingly repetitive. But, in the end, the quality of the work you do here elevates a merely good result to studio-quality.

Assign background and moniored tasks to large blocks of time when you are at home but need to be doing other things. Take on automated and manual tasks when you are comfortable giving them the necessary attention. Time will take care of itself.

  

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #30           

Artist: Philip Glass
Title: Satyagraha
Genre: Opera
Year: 1980

Satyagraha, based on the life of Mahandas K. Gandhi, is a 3-LP set. Yet, I was able to completely process it in course-record time. How? Despite its running time of nearly 2 hours, there are only nine (9) scenes/tracks. This minimized the slowest manual task of isolating tracks for export. Very efficient.

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #31           

Artist: Chick Corea
Title: Children's Songs
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1983



In contrast, Chick Corea's Children's Songs allocates its seemingly short 45 minutes of running time to 20 individual tracks, only three of them longer than 2 minutes. This maximized the slowest manual task of isolating tracks for export. It took me longer to process this one disc than all of Satyagraha. Very inefficient.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

If You Don't Know Where You're Going, Any Road Will Get You There

Even if your metadata is not sufficiently rich to let you sort your music autobiographically, you can still have fun with it. Let's play a music association game.

[Image: Connect the Dots Music Festival, Beaumont TX]

WDET-FM in Detroit runs an annual event called Music Head. Starting with a song submitted from a listener, in-studio guests "connect the dots" among artists, titles, and musical collaborations to create playlists where each succeeding song is somehow connected to the previous song.

Unfortunately, the listening audience experience of Music Head is a lot of near-dead air as the hosts and studio guests hem and haw, battling the clock to navigate a journey that has no destination on a road that diverges in all directions at every decision point. How can you judge the value of any choice? If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

Then, on her Essential Music show the following day, host Ann Delisi delivers a version of Music Head with a specific goal. Starting with a song previously submitted by a listener, she charts a path along associated metadata to create a connected playlist as before; but at some point, she has to reverse course and return along a different metadata path to arrive back at the starting song, and to come full circle in about an hour of running time. There's a real challenge.

To celebrate that challenge, here is the first Surface to Air Music Head Full Circle list. All songs come from my dematerialized music library:

Full-size table here. Annotated table with all the associations here.

What do you think? I intend to publish Full Circle lists from time to time. Readers are encouraged to submit song sugesstions via the Comment Form or via email. Let's collaborate on a journey.

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #20            

Artist: Blondie

Title: Parallel Lines
Genre: Alternative
Year: 1978

More than five years before the Parents Music Resource Center (aka the "Washington Wives") advocated warning labels on physical music media for potentially objectionable content, the original LP release of Parallel Lines had the following label affixed to the shrink wrap: CONTAINS THE UNCUT, UNCENSORED VERSION OF 'HEART OF GLASS.' The line bleeped by radio station censors: "... it was a pain in the ass." Could anyone possibly be offended by it today?

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #21            

Artist: Philip Glass

Title: The Photographer
Genre: Contemporary
Year: 1983

January 27, 2012 was the 75th birthday of composer Philip Glass. Among the tributes and retrospectives, the radio program Fresh Air ran an previously-unbroadcast This American Life conversation between Philip Glass and his cousin, host Ira Glass. For me, the highlight of the exchange was this quote: "Style is specialized technique. You can't have style until you have mastered technique."

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

Modern Playback: Lossless Digital Audio Streaming through the Fog



[Edited 2019-Jan]

I am not so much interested in getting my albums back in the rotation as I am in getting rid of them, just like I got rid of my audio CDs.

OK, I didn't "get rid" of the CDs. I transferred their content to 16/44.1 lossless WAV files, then retired all those jewel boxes and cardboard sleeves to a closet with the rest of my no-longer-needed install discs. That reclaimed much-needed shelf space, simplified the main audio stack by eliminating the need for a CD player, and created a new world of playback options.

Playback from physical media by dedicated players is 20th century. The CD player is obsolete. When music is captured in bits and streamed digitally, virtually any electronic device can be a player to varying degrees. (I'm convinced digital video streaming will eventually obsolete the Blu-Ray player and TV DVR, too.)

Protocols like Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and AirPlay enable computers, network-aware audio components, and hand-held devices to organize dynamically as:

• Digital Music Servers (DMS)
• Digital Music Players (DMP)
• Digital Music Renderers (DMR)
• Digital Music Controllers (DMC)

A DMR is a limited type of DMP that cannot locate content on its own. It must be set up by a third party—the DMC.

Once devices have connected, digital audio can stream from DMS to DMP/DMR via standard network transport—if not through "the cloud," then certainly through "the fog" (the wireless cloud inside your house).

Any computer in my house can send music to any other computer. Computers can send music to the networked audio video receiver (AVR) in the den. My smartphone can play files stored on computer. Computers or the AVR can play files stored on phones.

My preferred playback configuration is a UPnP smartphone app acting as a DMC, directing the AVR as a DMR to play WAV files accessed through the computer in my office as a DMS. All wireless and controlled from wherever in the house my phone and I happen to be, a solution more elegant than any point-to-point wireless audio gizmo. (The AVR controls audio distribution to speaker sets in various locations. I most often listen to music in the kitchen/dining area during meal prep and enjoyment, or outside on the patio when it isn't Michigan winter.)

This is playback at its most flexible, most powerful and most convenient: over 1 TB of indexed uncompressed audio—my entire dematerialized library—literally in the palm of my hand. And there is no reason why music currently confined to LPs can't join the digital party in a way that preserves the unique sonic characteristics of vinyl.

Then the physical LPs can join their CD brethren in retirement.

               Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #3              

Title: Einstein on the Beach

Artist: Phlip Glass Ensemble
Genre: Opera
Year: 1978




A funny thing happens when you ephemeralize an LP from a physical object into streaming bits—the particulars of its pedigree become less important. The Fog doesn't care whether my Philip Glass bits originated with the cool indie Tomato Records box set or the mass market Sony Classics re-issue. (For the record, my bits came from the former but the album art above came from the latter.) So, with your digital transfer safely stored, you are free to find a collector willing to pay a premium for a late 70s cultural artifact.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.