you know, we engineers spend ridiculous amounts of money on preamps, compressors, eq, etc., yet when all is said and done, the end result is compressed into some horrible sounding mp3 file and listened to on a pair of crappy earbuds. my friend chad and i have discussed this quite a bit. we even started functional equivalent recordings so that we would have a place to not only release our music in the form we want it to be heard in, but also to express that we want higher fidelity in the recordings released by all artists, which we don’t find to be particularly ground-breaking and wonder why this isn’t the norm already.

i was reading the new tapeop magazine a few days ago and loved the interview with t-bone burnett. apparently a team of engineers and himself have been working on a new release format called XO∆E (CODE). they say

creates high-definition audio files that are virtually indistinguishable from the original master tapes. The resonance, warmth and presence that has been realized with CODE is unprecedented in the digital era.

i can’t seem to find any other information about the format as he also stated in the tapeop interview that there would be a higher quality downloadable format as well. either way, i think this is a great idea, yet i will withhold judgement of the format until i hear it. the new john mellencamp, cougar, the coug, mellencoug, whatever you want to call him has been released in this format, so i guess i won’t be hearing it for at least a little while.

also, i recently came across bandcamp. it’s a great place for artists to upload their albums and have them transcoded to lots of different formats. they also make them available to buy either by a price you as the artist set or by letting the fan set their own price. oh, it also sounds great! give it try and see what you think.

i ran across this (BOJAM) on one of my RSS feeds today. they say:

Bojam is an online music collaboration service connecting musicians to mix, record, and collaborate to produce original or popular music.

Bojam does so with music, open-sourcing all aspects of the music creation process, including a wiki-style platform for adding song info, lyrics, and instrument tabs.

i like the idea of this, but i’m not sure that it will attract the right crowd. i sure hope it does, though. i really want to see the wiki part of the site and the ability to auction off services, which they say the whole app is based around. i don’t really care about the whole mixer/editor thing. let’s hope that a nice community of musicians show up.

Bands in Town is something i came across today and it seems pretty cool. it shows a tag cloud of artists that are playing in a specified area and the dates when they play. it will even let you take a listen to the band via a streaming player.

last.fm users can log in using their username/pass and it will filter to bands that it thinks you’ll like. you can also filter based on location and distance from that location.

pretty cool.

We’ll miss you, Terri Cat.