cygweb

Ars Technica's RSS feed now includes per-item ads; and they're quite redundant. I'm unsubscribing.

My favorite drummer ever (and a heck of a writer to boot) has a new website.

Cyg's Bunters are doing well in both of their leagues. They're currently in fourth place in the competetive 12-team Brutal Deluxe Baseball League; three teams, including the Bunters, are within 4.5 games of the lead. They're currently leading Pixel's All Pro League of 8 teams. Both leagues are head-to-head, but Pixel's league has 25 point categories and the BDBL has 10.

I had high draft order in each league and secured A-Rod in both. Many of my other picks (I didn't rank, just left Yahoo's autoranked list as the default) seem good as well. I don't follow baseball a whole lot, but participating in these leagues, particularly with no hockey on, is making me pay a little more attention. Melissa even asked me why I kept switching over to the ESPN HD game last night (Mets vs. Nationals) during commercials on ABC. "To watch the game!" I said. ;)

I made my first gutsy (?) managerial move this week in the BDBL. About halfway through the week, I'd reached the minimum "innings pitched" requirement and the opposing team had a lot of injured pitchers. My corps had amassed a relatively low ERA (2.83) and WHIP (1.40), so I benched all my pitchers Wednesday through Sunday. It worked out well enough, as I went 3-2 in the pitching categories and 4-0-1 in the slugging ones. I figured leaving my pitchers in might give me higher W's and strikeouts, but I decided to take a chance and bench them.

Otherwise, I've just been watching the trends and trying to put the best players on the diamond at a partcular time. Baseball certainly has plenty of stats to keep up with; it's a great fantasy sport. I even like checking it out in person every once in a while.

I've just upgraded ICYG's Oddcast instance to v.3.0.7 (thanks, Oddsock!) and reinstated Captain Footure's Continuator plugin, version 0.2.4. Things are going good so far. I can deal with no crossfades, but the stream sounds more "pro" with them. Here's hoping everything stays stable!

UPS tracking tells me that my copy of the Deadwing Special Edition is here in Harrisburg after its long jaunt from California. Perhaps I'll receive it tomorrow? A day earlier than UPS said? More like a week late.

Yes, I'm up early today - probably a result of being up at 4:30 yesterday morning to get out at the crack of dawn for Manolas to participate in the Spring Crafts Festival in downtown Lebanon. The weather cooperated nicely, and it made getting over there and setting up relatively easy. Besides several new items Melissa's made since our last show, I just got a sign made for the tent this last week. I'll Flickr photos of this stuff later today. We ended up doing much better than we expected to do saleswise. In tallying things up yesterday Melissa said we topped our previous best, which ironically was Bridge Bust 2004. Yesterday's show was well-attended, but certainly not as large as the Bridge Bust. There was also the flea-market element present, but with the pleasant live music and decent food I liked the Lebanon show better. I think Lebanon hasn't seen the last of the elephant. ;)

There are some technical things I wanted to blog about getting the sign I mention printed at Kinko's. They had warned in their signs catalog that for cut vinyl, they required encapsulated PostScript, or any Illustrator- or Freehand-compatible vector format file. I thought this would be an issue, since we lay all of Manolas' graphic art out in MS Publisher 2003 (don't yell at me, MS gave me a copy!) and it doesn't natively support export to other vector-based formats. I can export to many other raster formats, but they were useless for this job. However, Kinko's had a "print to PDF" option on their workstation that had Publisher installed. This turned out to be the bridge we needed to make my sign design turn into reality. It actually turned out pretty cool for what it is, and was certainly used by the passers-by yesterday. It also helped to make our display one of the nicer ones, based on some of the comments we received. For future work like this, my dad recommended that I install a PS-printer here at home and then use it to "print to file" to convert our Publisher work to PS. We'll see.

Mom and Dad are visiting this weekend, and Dad and I are going to take a bike ride in a little later. Looks like we shouldn't get rained on. So I'll be offline until tonight!

Every once in a while, I check my status on FreeiPods.com to see if I've been lucky enough to get the five completed referrals necessary to win a free iPod. Recently I just gained my fourth one. One more to go!

If you are interested in trying to earn a free iPod, please use my link to get to the site. Thanks.

Nerd alert!

After popping the DVD-V disc of Deadwing SE into my computer, I noticed that the DTS 5.1 version of the album played back more quietly than the PCM stereo version. I had already noticed that the CD version of the album was mastered with some pretty aggressive limiting, although unlike some other CDs, I don't notice any distortion or crackling as a result, just a lack of headroom. To me, this translates into how much the music is allowed to breathe. But to be honest, the quieter passages of the album are given a decent amount of headroom in the stereo mix.

So, like any other audio nerd, I wanted to see if I could rip the DTS track, mix it down to stereo, and apply just enough tweaking to get a version of the album on CD that had more dynamic range than the official stereo mix.

I'd never even considered listening to DTS audio outside of DVD playback, but I knew that DVD Decrypter supported raw stream ripping. I used it to rip the full DTS streams off the DVD-V disc as .dts files, which Foobar 2000 can play with the foo_dts plugin. Since I didn't have any experience mixing down 5.1 to stereo, I found two other FB2K plugins that did: ATSurround and Channel Mixer. I ended up using Channel Mixer to do the mixdown since it supported a "stereoimage width" parameter and level controls for center, rear, and subwoofer mixdown. I used the 1.25 setting on the stereoimage width, 0.9 for center and rear mixdown, and 1.0 for subwoofer mixdown. I also applied a little low-end EQ (-5dB@55Hz, -2dB@77Hz, -1dB@110Hz) to tame the bass. Playing back the DTS with these settings produced a stereo mix that sounded pretty decent and peaked at about -4.5dB. I took that into Sound Forge and used the Wave Hammer plugin to limit at 6dB and maximize. This trimmed the peaks while still leaving plenty of headroom.

Waveforms of the initial crash of the title track of Porcupine Tree's "Deadwing". From top to bottom: my rejiggered DTS downmix, the official stereo mix from CD, and the official stereo mix from the LPCM track of the DVD-A (which is 48kHz, 24-bit, but has similar amplitude).

Example:
Deadwing "Official Mix" (23 sec) OGG (463k) MP3 (562k)
Deadwing "Alex's DTS Downmix" (23 sec) OGG (477k) MP3 (526k)

Listening to my downmixed version compared to the official stereo mix, the difference in volume is quite apparent. Also, I can hear phase problems with the drums in certain areas, and, of course, the panning of many of the musical elements is different. The dynamic range of my version is greater, but because of the discrepancies I can't say I prefer it to the official stereo mix. I'd like an official stereo mix that had more headroom, but I guess that war has already been lost. Louder is better, right?

Manolas Handmade Soaps can now be found at the Cumberland Coffee & Tea Company in Lebanon, PA. Thanks to Myra for wanting to carry our products; we met her at last weekend's craft show.

Lame. Depressing. If I didn't like Jonathan Frakes and the Enterprise cast so much I probably would have turned it off.

[Light spoiler warning.]

You know the reason the finale had to end with "final" things (NX-01 getting mothballed after 10 years, Trip and T'Pol just being friends, a major character dying, etc.), right? So that any hope for reunion movie(s) are killed. I really don't think the series had to end this way.

However, the 8PM episode, "Terra Prime", was pretty darn good. The final scene with Trip and T'Pol was great. (Conner Trinnear, I will miss Trip.)

For some reason, I keep on waking up at 4-4:30am and can't get back to sleep. Yesterday, I did manage to sleep in, but on Friday I was up early as well.

Received some more biking-related stuff in the last few days: a new royal blue jersey from Performance, which fits slightly more snugly than the Canyon that my parents gave me. Also received an Ascend cyclo-computer, so I can see how slow I'm going and how few miles I've racked up. ;) I got a helmet-attachable rear-view mirror; should be interesting. And from Camp-Mor I got a rain cape my dad recommended and a headband-mounted LED lamp for the camptime navigation and reading during Bike Virginia 2005.

It's been over 5 years since I've camped, so that'll be another benefit of taking the tour. My dad's loaning me his old tent, although I'm quite impressed with his new one, a snug Coleman 2-person (but not my sized a person) tent with a dual-arch design. Pretty cool. If I was planning to camp more as an individual I might invest in a tent, but as it is we are going to have to break out the old 8x8 dome tent that Melissa has and see if she, Ryan, and I can fit in it comfortably. At some point I think we're going to meet my parents halfway and camp in Maryland's Cunningham Falls State Park.

The threat of rain looms today, so I'll probably be doing some stationary cycling and attaching the aforementioned cyclo-computer to my bike. I'm also starting to compile a few Hi-MDs with the music I'm going to want to listen to on the tour. I'll probably keep a disc free to make some recordings.

Also trying to clean up the mounds of data I seem to pile up (TV show AVIs, redundant instances of digitized music, downloaded software). Burning to DVD-Rs is nice, but I'm certainly starting to rack up quite a few of them. I need to get more organized.

Finally picked up a new/old game on Friday: Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic. Kinda seems like Diablo meets Star Wars, in a good way. It got a lot of "game of the year" honors in 2003, so I'm thinking it should be fun. BTW, it's just slightly depressing that a 2-year-old game's hardware detection utility thinks my main video card (an Nvidia GeForce2 Ti) is passable but not at its recommended level (a GeForce4). At some point I'll be upgrading the video card and my main monitor, but probably not until the monitor dies. Gotta milk this hardware for all it's worth.

I'm happy to welcome Ross to the ICYG music club. Sharing a fresh set of tunes with us, he challenged my scripts with iTunes-encoded AAC files, which I hadn't taken the opportunity to play with previously. It turns out that while FB2K handles them fine, mmpython doesn't parse their metadata. My playlist picker requires mmpython-provided metadata from all eligible songfiles, so this produced quite a gap.

In researching this, I've found that it appears that Apple hasn't formally specified their metadata implementation. Since I couldn't find any Python code to read the metadata, I took advantage of the fact that FB2K could add new tags to the AACs, as well as transfer all the tags over to transcoded Ogg Vorbis files created via its diskwriter. The resulting Oggs are well-behaved and we can now check out Ross's stuff.

Slightly related topic: Amazon's increased their thumbnail image size to 75x75 pixels for the CDs they carry.

Passed to me by Scott.

Total Volume Of Music On My Computer...
My main personal archive of music is 39GB, and submitted ICYG music currently totals 11GB.

The Last CD I Bought Was...
For myself, Porcupine Tree's Deadwing, but the last CD I actually bought was a gift for my wife: Rob Thomas' Something To Be.

Song Playing Right Now...
Robert Plant, "Dark Moon", Fate Of Nations

Five Songs I Listen To A Lot, or Mean A Lot To Me...

• Rush, "The Analog Kid", Signals
• Dream Theater, "Voices", Awake
• King's X, "Everywhere I Go", Faith Hope Love
• Our Lady Peace, "Are You Sad?", Spiritual Machines
• Yes, "Run Through The Light", Drama

Five People To Whom I Am Passing the Baton...

• Brian
• Don
• Mike
• Phil
• Ross

A venerated sage with vast power and knowledge, you gently guide forces around you while serving as a champion of the light.

Judge me by my size, do you? And well you should not - for my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life greets it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us, and binds us. Luminescent beings are we, not this crude matter! You must feel the Force around you, everywhere.

Appropriate, given the release of Revenge Of The Sith today.

Aside from the traffic in and out of the city, our trip to Philly to see Porcupine Tree went pretty smoothly. Mark, Scott, and I made it over to the band's pre-show meet & greet at AKA Music at about 3:15pm. I had previously read of just Steven Wilson and John Wesley participating in these, so I was surprised when we found that the whole band was there. Cool!

I was a little awestruck; I'm not used to meeting popular musicians I like face-to-face. Questions I had prepared in my head the day before, such as "Steven, why was Deadwing mastered so loud?", "Colin, why don't you play on all the tracks?", and "Gavin, did you come up with the odd time signatures in 'The Start Of Something Beautiful', or did Steven?" yielded to confessions like "I met you at the Blackfield show back in March, and I'm looking forward to my first PT show", "I'm an amateur bass player and my favorite line of yours is 'Slave Called Shiver'", and "I really enjoy your drumming". Ugh. ;) I knew that Wes knew Don, but I'd never met him in person. I dropped Don's name and was pleasantly surprised to hear that he wanted to meet up with him to say "Hi" after the show. Don and Lois had car problems and we late getting into the city, but I assured Wes I'd pass the message along. All the guys were really easy to talk to; very patient gentlemen. They all signed my Deadwing SE CD. Mark and Scott rightly agreed with me when I said "now I'm a PT fanboy" after we left the store. They thought I spent a little too much time at the table. ;)

The walk between the Troc and AKA along Arch Street treated us to several landmarks, like the Betsy Ross house, Ben Franklin's burial plot, and the US Mint. I posted some of those pictures on Flickr. We went over to the Independence Brew Pub, which was recommended by the people on the Dark Matter mailing list, for beers and eats. Don and Lois met up with us there a little later so we made introductions and exchanged pleasantries for a while.

Did I mention we were there for a show? As we stood in line, the Troc personnel told us cameras weren't allowed in, so Don and I had to go stow ours. Once we got in, I checked out the merch stand. I had hoped the XM2, Up The Downstair reissue, and new Wes CDs would be for sale, but none of them were available yet. I picked up the PT and Wes sampler CDs and a window sticker (now gracing my back window after some creative cutting). Hopefully I can find a US source for those CDs; ordering them from the UK will probably introduce a bit of expense! The opening act, Tunnels, was interesting, but the jazz-fusion trio was unique enough that it was hard to get into the majority of their set. They also had a number of audible dropouts that distracted from the music. Entertaining, but we were there to see the Tree. Apparently the Troc had an 11PM curfew. The other listed opening act, Marrow, did not take the stage. PT was on at about 9:20.

The sound was great and I didn't need the earplugs I had brought. The band immediately started rocking with "Deadwing" and I was hooked. A few technical things I noticed:

• "Lazarus" featured neat vocal harmonizers on Steven and Wes's singing in the chorus.
• Colin Edwin played a fretted bass (I believe it was a G&L) the entire night, which surprised me because as far as I knew, he was a fretless guy all the way. Also, he played with a pick and not fingerstyle. I think he played fingerstyle on the fretless.
• Some of the computer-generated/controlled video backdrops were excellently synched with the music. It made me wonder if they were triggered by the band, and if they dynamically responded to triggers during playback. The video show itself was excellent.
• Wes's solo in "She's Moved On" kicked ass. ;)

Don and I had fun singing along with the band, even filling in some of the parts missing that are on the recordings. My favorite DW song, "The Start Of Something Beautiful", was played, as well as some of my other favorites, like "Even Less" and "Trains". All the Deadwing material had excellent treatment compared to the CD and was very fun to watch and listen to. Steven was the most animated, playing with a lot of flair. Everyone played great and my first PT show was a real treat.

The show ended a little after 11 and we were summarily kicked out of the venue. We waited around for about 30 minutes and then Wes came out to the tour bus. He and Don conversed a bit and he signed our tickets. A number of Wes fans were there, and he took his time with each of them gracefully. He seems like a really cool dude.

After quickly hitting a nearby Wawa, we said our goodbyes and hit the road. After I got on the PA Turnpike (I drove) it was kind of tough to stay focused at that hour, but we made it back in one piece at about 2:30AM. Thanks for Mark and Scott for accompanying me on our first PT "voyage"; it was a blast! And thanks to Don for getting me into PT and Wes!

Update: Scott, Don, and Lois blogged about the show as well.

Update (5/24): On second thought, I think Colin was playing a Graphite Pearl Stingray.

Even before I've delved too far into my new PHP/MySQL book I've got ideas as to how I want to architect the next version of ICYG. I'll leave the Python song-picking scripts intact for the time being, and will work on creating a database backend that's populated with info from songs as they're played. That backend will first be used to power a new PHP version of the ICYG website, hosted (along with the database) on this web host. It'll be nice to get the website off my home server, even though the stream will have to continue to be generated there.

The other advantage of moving to a DB-based system will be the ability to add interactive features to the station. The first would be what I've always wanted - some sort of voting system for club members that would give each track weight. Many systems call that "karma"; I think I'd call it "mojo". ;) I also want to implement a buzz-bin type feature, probably based on the newness of the song (taking into account both when it was uploaded and its date tag).

Ross's upload of iTunes AAC files made me realize one of the reasons I've used Vorbis for so long is that it's got decent quality, a completely open format, and enough application support for me to be able to extensively use it for ICYG and computer-based listening. I notice its super gapless support everytime I listen to an MP3 encoding of an album with seamless track changes. ;) I don't see much of a point in natively supporting codecs/containers other than MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC. They cover the bases -- lossy vs. lossless, varying hardware support, excellent software support -- well enough. Transcoding stuff into Vorbis or MP3 to take advantage of ICYG's tag-parsing features shouldn't be a big deal, right?

Something I'll do in the short term is add support for CD Universe links that's similar to my support for Amazon links. I've used them occasionally, but my interest is peaked since I just signed up as an affiliate. CDU seems to have better availability on more obscure titles.

I'm not ready to re-add support for member-created shows yet, but one thing I'll probably do is schedule "member spotlight" hours where an hour or two is drawn from a single member's submissions. Don, Scott, Brian, Ross, and I all have enough uploaded to support this.

Lost's two-hour finale last night was good, but Alias's had a great ending.

Forgot to mention that we watched the finale of The Contender and enjoyed that as well. Who needs American Idol?

OK, I'm listening to the first track of the new DT album and I'm already digging "The Root Of All Evil"'s references to "This Dying Soul" from the previous album. I think they have another winner here.