Re: iPod trouble - can anyone help?

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

We're running iTunes 6.0.2 on both Macs. Rebecca is currently sat with
her iPod plugged into her iBook and looking at the music library
residing on the 2G4 via iTunes[1].

Thing is, while that shared music plays perfectly well, there doesn't
seem to be a way of transferring music from the shared music library to
her iPod using the iBook.

Can anyone explain either how to do the transfer, or why we can't?

You can't. You can only copy music from the local machine. This is a
feature that obviously has something to do with protection of songs - I
don't see how it does but there you go.

Righto. Thanks. Although I suspect you can copy music from a remote
machine - but only if you get to it via file sharing, not iTunes music
sharing. I've not tried it yet, but I bet it'll do the deed if I point
the iBook iTunes at files kept on *that* particular disc. Can it tell
whether a mounted volume is local or remote?

Oh no, it doesn't care. If you have file access to the disk you can copy
it to your iPod, just not via music sharing.

Righto - ta. Good.

FWIW, both myself and Rebecca reckon that 320 kbit/s mp3s produced by
iTunes are too fuzzy to want to listen to. 320 kbit/s AAC, on the other
hand, is still inferior to the losslessly[3] encoded version but one has
to listen carefully side by side on decent gear to tell which is which.
It'll do for portable listening[3], I reckon. Either is certainly a lot
better than the `worn out vinyl copied onto cassette' of the Walkman
era.

I am fine with a lot lower rates than that. I guess I am used to worse
equipment (and listen to mostly guitar based music which obviously
doesn't have the quality for that anyway).

Umm. Electric guitar based music is exactly the sort of thing that'll
show up the differences very clearly.

Once it has been through cheap quality amps, had all the harmonics
stripped out, gone through loads of cheap effects, sent across the air
to a microphone?

Er? Right.

Okay.

The distortions generated by the particular amplifiers chosen (often
because they're a highly distorting design that produce a particular
sought after sound) and the distortions added by the rest of the output
chain are all an important part of the particular quality of the sound.
I recall hearing that a unique sound made by the Kinks was caused by
(Ray or his brother) cutting his guitar monitor speaker cone with a
knife. Overdriven amps are often used to get a particular sound by
adding artistically judged amounts of distortion (i.e., rock guitarist
says `twiddle knob, twiddle knob, kick box, dent speaker cabinet, pour
beer over sound engineer's head, yes I like that sound')

All these sound modifications add huge amounts of harmonics to the
signal - regardless of the `quality' of 'em in any engineering sense,
it's the artistic effect that the musician is interested in, he arranges
for it to be just so, and then you've got to record it. A decent mike
will record the signal well - they had that sorted in the 1950s (when
they put their mind to it).

No, the problem is that because of all the dirty tricks played on the
signal, you get all these complex harmonics and subharmonics and god
knows what else which is extra information that has to be recorded and
lossy compression schemes aren't so good at recording complex signals
well.

The more complex the music (in
the strict sense of mathemtical informational complexity), the worse
it'll compress.

Indeed.

And that's all there is to it.

Electric guitars tend to be played with lots of effects
- distortion, and all sorts. That adds to the complexity.

Not delay effects it doesn't - it reduces the complexity.

Bets? But even if that particular sort of effect reduces complexity,
fuzz boxes, wah-wah pedals, overdriven amps, cut speaker cones, and all
the other tricks that Hendrix, Page/Beck, and the like pioneered all
*do* add complexity. Maybe there are a few that reduce complexity -
well, most work the other way.

Delay bound
effects will reduce the harmonic content (as well as changing it).

Umm. Yes, but if you're using delay effects, you get notes overlapping
each other which - I wouldn't be surprised to find if I looked -
possibly ends up adding about as much complexity as the harmonic
reduction (is there such? I've not looked into it) takes out.

You've often
got someone playing silly buggers with an enormous percussion set too,
haven't you? This is why `Overkill'[1] by Motorhead compresses to 1141
kbit/s using the Apple Lossless Compressor (ALC) while the adagio
movement of Elgar's Symphony No.1 gets down to 438 kbit/s despite it
being played with a full orchestra.

Probably because it contains more noise.

Not at all noisy - there's probably more objectionable noise on the
Elgar, given that it's impossible to record an orchestra without such
while Motorhead is a small group recording in an (allegedly, anyway)
sound proofed studio. People would *say* Overkill's more noisy - but
that sound is the complex harmonics generated by the instruments, that
some people *hear* as noise, usually due to poor reproduction and/or
poor hearing. The difference in the sound of Motorhead on good
reproduction kit and poor is astonishing. I find Motorhead unbearable
on bad audio kit - it really does just dissolve into apparent noise.
The music is very complex and therefore hard to reproduce well.

Overkill's simply a more complex piece of music in an informational
sense. Overkill moves at warp speed with more or less constant manic
drumming including lots of snare drumming. Adagio means `slow moving' -
and Elgar didn't often hurry himself anyway.

Jean Michel Jarre: doesn't suffer from lossy compression anything like
as badly.

Harmonically there isn't much created by a synth.

It depends on what you're using it to do. Old fashioned synths, yes.
Moogs were just a bunch of oscillators mostly kicking out sine waves to
beign with, as I understand it - i.e., you start out without any
harmonics aside from the inevitable tiny distortion your electronics
can't help adding (and in the case of a Moog, you'd want the distortion
to be exactly what the original circuitry happend to kick out because
that's part of the artistic quality of the sound), and then mix things
up, chuck in filtering, and I don't know what else to create the sound
you want.

Modern synths? They can do anything - including sound like old
fashioned synths.

The point is, y'see, that the more bits you *need* to express the music,
the more you have to throw away to get down to the specified bitrate for
your lossy scheme. Properly speaking, compressing `The Farmer's
Servant' with mp3 at 320 kbit/s should produce no loss in quality at
all. I bet it does - but I've not tried. Compressing `Overkill' with
mp3 at 320 kbit/s does produce a very obvious loss in quality. ZZ Top's
Deguello does very nicely at 320 kbit/s AAC.

I will take your word for it. If I was young with perfect ears maybe it
would matter,

I'm very nearly 40 FWIW. My ears haven't been perfect for a long time -
the left one got damaged by the brass section when I was at school.
Used to play a flute, y'see.

but I cant tell the difference between deguello at 160kb
AAC and the full albumn. Either way both are better than when I had the
vinyl, and all of them are better into headphones than sending that
signal around a normal room.

You should try some decent speakers one day. Wait until I've got a pair
of these and *then* tell me that headphones are better:

<http://www.hornet.hr/Hornet.asp?sPage=Hedlund&sub=Pictures>

(why? <http://www.lowtherspeakers.com/tech.html>[1])

The problem with most speakers is that they have multiple drivers and
cross-over networks, which inevitably distort and blur the wavefront
they're trying to generate. If you've got speakers with two drivers per
cabinet, you've got a design that crosses over and buggers up the signal
really badly bang in the middle of the audio range where you need
maximum fidelity of reproduction, so of course they'll sound mushy and
crap.

There are two ways round this that I know of: electrostatic speakers and
rear loaded horns with single full range drivers. Both have trouble
with deep bass. You can get deep bass from a horn, but it has to be
huge, hence what you see in the above pictures.

I've currently got Lowther drivers in old Lowther Acousta 115 cabinets.
Quite good - bloody marvelous in the mid-range where most of the music
signal's kept, but being a 1960s commercial design (i.e., sane people
were meant to buy these), they're too small and so lacking deep bass and
the toppest of the top end. I say `too small', but most people comment
on how huge they are. But from the audio point of view, they need more
horn length.

Hendrix used Lowther speakers very similar to mine himself - except that
he kept blowing his up. 10W drivers, y'see. V. efficient in horn
cabinets, mind. V. v. v. v. efficient (electrostatics are notably
inefficient). Two 10W speakers is plenty enough to annoy hell out of
the neighbours. These days, they're still 10W rms but have better
overload handling.

Anyway, it's not so much the bouncing the signal around the room that's
the problem as transducing it through crappy speakers, and virtually all
speakers are crappy. It's easier to design and build high quality
headphones.

[1] Phil Taylor is completely mental on that track. Totally off his
bloody rocker. A human being simply cannot play drums at that speed for
that long with that consistency.

I can think of a few more consistant faster tracks,

With an unadulerated *human* (or at least humanoid) drummer? Play 'em
back to back with Overkill and tell me how the drumming rates compare.
I expect there are others of similar pace - but it's still alarming to
listen to and apparently impossible.

and mostly they
weren't that consistant.

Well, not without some chemical
assistance... Ever wondered why Lemmy wrote a song for Hawkwind called
`Motorhead' and named his band the same way after he'd been sacked by
the hippies[2]?

Technically dropped by the hippies as they could get in the states (or
was it canada) and he couldn't as he had a drugs offense, whereas
obviously the rest of hawkwind were completely drugs free!

<grin> He'd been daft enough to have been *caught*, was the problem.
btw, Lemmy once sacked a Motorhead guitarist (I forget which one -
Campbell, possibly) for abusing himself with drugs, which I thought was
a bit rich coming from Lemmy. Except, of course, that Lemmy does keep
his drug use well controlled. The proof? Look at the man: he's been
hitting the booze, speed, coke, and pretty much everything else quite
heavily since the 1970s and he's actually pretty well preserved. I'd
say that Lemmy looks to have more marbles now than he's ever done in the
past.

Rowland.

[1] This Web page makes the following claim:

`It is virtually impossible to make a recording which can accurately
capture a classical music performance in a large hall. This is
because--in a concert hall--you hear many different sources of
sound--the music coming directly from the orchestra--the reflections off
side walls, the ceiling, the back of the hall--resonances coming from
the floor under the orchestra and the hall itself. And stereo imaging is
not an important element in classical music..

I should note that Decca in the 1950s was of the opinion that they'd
worked out how to do just that very job - tricky, but they were clever
and figured it out. I've got some Decca orchestral recordings and I'd
not say that they were wrong.

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