Friday, August 29, 2008

Hilarious. Also true.

How to interpret ‘crew wanted’ ads

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.

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Monday, August 25, 2008

QuickTime Quickies

A couple of non-intuitive hacks for QuickTime audio

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.

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Post Production • (1) Comments • Most recent comments by: pccaudioprof, • Permalink

Friday, August 22, 2008

Free Book

I seem to be a premium…

I just learned that BeachTek is giving away copies of my recent Producing Great Sound for Film and Video (3rd Edition, Focal Press, March 2008), if you buy any of their products from their online store.

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Vacuum Packed

Compress audio files without losing quality? You can, if you measure them the right way.

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.

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Post Production • (2) Comments • Most recent comments by: Jay Rose, Travis, • Permalink

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Living with (Data) Loss

mp3 and its cousins are a fact of life… here’s how to get the most out of them

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.

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Thursday, August 14, 2008

Hearing What’s Not There

Sometimes, making data disappear can be acceptable

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.

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Friday, August 01, 2008

Deep Throat, Cetacean

What whales consider sexy… and what’s really going on in the audio band.

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.

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Monday, July 28, 2008

Sour Notes

The music revolution will not be televised.

A friend pointed me to an article in the New York Times, about new software that claims to change the pitch of just one string in a guitar chord. This isn’t a trivial task, since plucked strings don’t have just one frequency. There are harmonics extending up the band, mixing with harmonics of other notes. Anything that wants to adjust a single string has to sort them all out, first. 

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