Music
The musician Jeremy Parsons has his own entirely separate website.
Favourite Music
- My music albums as a Table, or text.
I was burgled so for the insurers, and the incompetent Macclesfield police, I needed to make a list of all the music that I used to own. The policeman said he felt sorry for the burglar stealing such untrendy music! The lists are updated very occasionally.
- Regina Spektor - brilliant, warm songs and unique character
- Sarah Harmer - Best acoustic session that I heard in Boston.
- Fiona Apple - Great singer, unknown on British radio
- Liz Phair - raw production, nasty lyrics, original
- Heather Nova - Great dreamy songs, studio perfect live
- Kate Rusby- A real character live, and an entrancing folk voice
- Bjork- Original and creative to a fault
- Robert Palmer- Classic British with stolen Jamaican rhythm
- Talk Talk- As good as British pop gets with perfect percussion
- Patty Griffin- Passionate white female acoustic songs
- Portishead- Uniquely wonderful
Digital Music Technology
Digital music can be confusing because there are two parts: firstly, there are containers for sound and video and, secondly, there are a range of codecs (enCODers and DECoders) that compress and uncompress the media within the containers.
Quicktime, AVI and MPEG are common proprietary containers, and you will see files with extensions like .qt, .mov, .avi and .mp3, .mpeg or .mpg.
There seems to be a huge number of codecs in use already and they are being invented all the time so it can be very difficult to know whether any online music or video will be immediately playable on your computer, phone, or PDA.
The name of the file, or the format of the container doesn't tell you how the music or video is encoded inside !
- Xiph.org - Produce an open multimedia container format called ogg.
- MPEG Audio Layer 3 (MP3) - The most common codec for audio.
- Ogg Vorbis - Open Source audio encoding, can sound better than MP3
- Theora is an open video codec being developed by the Xiph.org
- Dirac is an open video codec being developed by the BBC
- BladeEnc and Lame are MP3 encoders. However, I have fallen out of love with MP3 after I tried using my HiFi to listen to British DAB radio (MP2) and my own MP3 files and found it to be somewhere between unpleasant and painful.
The encoding seems to mess up the stereo soundstage at any bit rate and that hurts my ears except on headphones.
- My favourite music format now is flac which sounds blissful after an hour of MP3s.