Hilarious. Also true.

Craigslist is a marvelous institution. There are editions for some 500 different cities, but you can still consider yourself lucky if you live near one. Among (lots of) other things, Craigslist has ads for temporary or permanent film/tv jobs. Some of those listings have more to do with a newbie director’s fantasies than anything real - no budget, no plans, no technique - but you learn to ignore them.

QuickTime Quickies

I’m a soundie. So I frequently have to send music samples, progressive mixes, and other pieces of track to directors or clients for approval. Since I’m also a lazy soundie, I’ve discovered a couple of ways to speed up the process… and save my clients a lot of download time.

This is the fourth article in my series on audio data compression, and it’s the least technical. It’s actually just a couple of tips. The key is Apple’s QuickTime Pro, a $30 addition to their free QuickTime software for Mac or Windows. Among other things, it lets you have multiple audio and video streams as separate elements in the same file.

Vacuum Packed

My last two blog tutorials discussed neural masking, and how an mp3 or AAC can be good enough for broadcast or film sound when you do it right. (If you followed the link to my website, you even got proof.) But sometimes, even AAC’s tiny losses can be too much: you might be sending elements that will be processed or compressed more, or be saving an archive. While most non-audio files can be successfully squeezed with Winzip or Stuffit, those processes behave strangely with audio.

Living with (Data) Loss

If you do audio for the Web, broadcast, or movie theaters, sooner or later you’ll have to deal with some form of lossy data compression. But you don’t have to buy into the mp3 myths and hype. If you understand how those algorithms actually work - how they decide what data to lose - your tracks can sound a lot better.

Hearing What’s Not There

Ever wonder how magicians make a large object disappear, or a woman’s dress instantly change color?  According to a study in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, cognitive scientists have been wondering as well. The scholarly, footnoted article explains magic tricks in terms of the visual and neurological quirks they rely on. It credits The Amazing Randi, The Great Tomsoni, and Teller (of “Penn and…”) as co-authors. It’s visually oriented - as is a lot of magic - but abracadabra: Here on the audio side, we’ve been benefitting from that kind of research for years. You can benefit, too.

Deep Throat, Cetacean

Ask and you shall receive. A few weeks ago, I posted a blog entry about some fascinating research on how hormonal changes can affect the attractiveness of a woman’s voice. In the entry, I wondered if there was an equivalent phenomenon for male voices.

Page 1 of 1 pages