OT: Me In a Music Video (get a good laugh!)

[Greg Guarino]

I don't think I've ever lost money as a musician. Never made a great deal either, but always got paid.

[Steve Turner]

It's possible that I've made enough money over the years playing gigs to actually PAY for my drum set, but I doubt it. It's *always* been a casual pastime for me and I've never tried to pursue it as a career. The band I'm playing for now has been together since 2003 and we only play out about once a month, and though we do like a good paying gig we never get particularly concerned about it. We all have day jobs. :-)

[Greg Guarino]

I'm in an odd in-between area. I've been in bands more or less continuously since my teens; everyone involved always had other jobs. I can remember flirting with the idea of becoming a professional musician, but flirtation (mild flirtation at that) was as far as it went.

On the other hand I figure I've done upwards of 2000 gigs in my long and undistinguished demi-career, at least three quarters of which came along when I was well past the recommended Rock 'n' Roll freshness date. ;)

[Bill]

On 11/15/2011 7:23 PM, Bill wrote: On guitar, I took the time to learn to play a few things well.

I thought of a more interesting story. Not too many years ago I was playing guitar, near a parking lot, outside my apartment a woman stopped to tell me her apartment number and that her husband went to work at 6:00. I guess she wanted a private concert and might have even paid me, but I explained briefly that I didn't do that. Morality aside, it seemed like a good way to get killed. So I passed up that chance at a paying gig.

Bill

[Casper]

I've done some minor repair work but no building or rebuilding. I've toyed with the idea, especially since I've thought about trying the bass guitar. Guess I'll have to poke around the local flea market.

Most of mine are in a giant metal rack I picked up a few years ago. Run-over is in milk crates, waiting to be cataloged. I use a program to try and avoid re-buying the same CD, which has happened.

I'm already in the process of doing that and glad of it. Much easier to listen to all around the house. Protects the CD too, from being handled too much. I already decided this year is the last year I'm going to "increase" my library. Going forward I'm going to limit myself to one hard drive and anything new going in requires something going out. With over 2k in albums, there are too many I don't listen too, at least often enough.

;) `Casper

[-MIKE-]

Honestly, I just picked one and went with it. It's funny both ways... "you've probably lost less money as a musician than a woodworker."

Funny, though.... the way Steve talks about it is why we all got into it. "It's so fun, I should do this for a living." Once you are trying to do it for a living, it get stressful, fast, and sometimes you think, "Wait, why am I doing this, again?" :-)

[Bill]

It has occurred to me that CDs might be somewhat "obsolete" in less than

10 years. Personally, I very infrequently go back to a CD once I've ripped it to my computer, and suspect that most of the publishers would prefer to just sell a file for the same money. I was searching for an artifact at the local Goodwill a few days ago and noticed several display cases for CDs. I'm not sure I wouldn't mind reclaiming the space that my CDs are "wasting" either. Might as well store them in the attic or something...

Bill

[krw]

I'm not about to pay more for "bits" than the CD, or the same, for that matter. I can always go back to the CD. I'm not stuck with the DRM crap, either.

[DGDevin]

This instrument was covered with stickers from bands I'd never heard of, one of the strap buttons had been ripped out, the pickup was adjusted into some weird shape and it was filthy. But I figured for a hundreds bucks it was a reasonable bet, it's tough to kill a Fender. I ended up putting in a new wiring harness, new pickup, new pots and jack and so on in addition to scraping off the stickers and general grunge. I also did my own setup and to my surprise it came out just fine. So all told I have about two hundred bucks into the instrument, new retail price a little under six hundred, and it was educational as well.

I've had the same problem, either that I don't know whether I have the old version or the expanded edition with bonus tracks. I use CD database software called Audiolist Plus on my Palm Pilot, that's stopped me buying duplicates.

I can't bring myself to get rid of albums except a few that I just couldn't see myself listening to ever again. Once we put everything on hard drives, drive space is so cheap (despite the recent jump caused by the flooding in Thailand) that capacity isn't an issue. However, as you say, there is the issue of keeping music that you never listen to.... A friend of mine uses a slick system from a company called Sonos. He has speakers in every room, and a remote control that looks like an iPod, he can call up whatever music he wants from a music server and listen to it in whatever room he happens to be in. I can see going with something like that, the old ritual of loading shiny discs into a player is going away sooner or later.

[Just Wondering]

That's not much of a limit. You can pick up a 2 terabyte drive for under $120.00.

one drive will easily hold 400,000 songs. If you listened an hour a day every day, it would take you over 50 years to hear each song just one time.

[-MIKE-]

>> That one drive will easily hold 400,000 songs. If you listened an hour a

How many if you store the wav/aiff files? That's why I like CD's... I call them uncompressed backups. I still have yet to buy a song from iTunes, because they are too stinking compressed.

When I put songs on my computer or mp3 players, I don't compress them anywhere near what they do on iTunes. Most mp3's are compressed from a

45mb file down to 3-6mb. My mp3's are generally up around 11-15mb.

[Just Wondering]

>>>>>>> That one drive will easily hold 400,000 songs. If you listened an hour a

My numbers were based on an average 5MB file size. It's a rare person who can truly discern a material difference between a 12MB mp3 and the same one compressed to 5MB. Nevertheless, if your mp3s average 12MB, you'd still get nearly 170,000 of them on a single 2TB drive.

If that's not enough, you can get a 3TB drive for around $170. That will let you store 250,000 12MB mp3 files, or 200 thousand 15MB files, all on a single drive. That's still enough to listen to about 20 songs a day, every day for 25 years without ever repeating a single song. If you listened to each one once, and had say 5 thousand favorites that you'd listen to at least once or twice a year, as a practical matter you'd die of old age before you got bored with your music library.

[Doug Winterburn]

>>>>>>>>>>>

>>>

As well, get one of these NAS boxes for not more than a C note and set it up for RAID-1 with two drives so if a drive crashes, no loss.

I have a Cisco/Linksys media/NAS box with two mirrored 2TB drives. The whole mess was around $300.

[-MIKE-]

I beg to differ. Not trying to argue...... I'm sure the average listener isn't going notice a 5mb mp3 just from casually listening, like me. But if you were to play 10 seconds from each for comparison, I bet 4 of 5 would hear the difference.

My listening experience is certainly far from average. I make part of my living by having to learn songs and figure out the drummer's part. It's frustrating to get but bunch of 3.5mb songs because the high end is always the first and most compressed part. Sometimes I can't tell if the drummer was playing his hi-hats, ride cymbal, or crash cymbal.

I was honestly asking. Once it gets above megabytes, my brain cramps up. :-) What I would do with a 2TB drive is back up my CD's as disc images or at least copy the songs over as aif/wav's in their entity. If iTunes offered the full song file as a download, I might do it. It certainly wouldn't take all that long on broadband. I've gotten plenty of audio files like that for session work.

[DGDevin]

2TB internals were under eighty bucks just weeks ago until the flooding in Thailand put a halt to a big chunk of the world's hard drive manufacturing--that price has about doubled. Happily I picked up a couple of 2TB drives just before the price spiked. I've learned the hard way that multiple backups are not an option.

[DGDevin]

I don't mind relatively compressed MP3s for listening in the car or in the garage, hi-fi isn't necessary there what with road noise and power tools and so on. On the home stereo is another matter, I even have a decent speaker setup on my computer since I probably listen to more music there than anywhere else. If I was going to put all my music on hard drives as a replacement for CDs I'd insist on a lossless format even though that would require more drives to hold everything (and I'd want a couple of backups if I was getting rid of the CDs).

[Robatoy]

This is a worthwhile read:

[-MIKE-]

rendition. Hearing no difference is perfection, and I got that at 128kbs variable bit rate."

He's either is out of his mind or like many former audio professionals, has lost his high end hearing.

[Swingman]

I disagree ... and totally agree with the following quote:

"Beware that many of the defects many people blame on data compression are in the CDs they bought in the first place. "

Open up a modern CD, with content mixed for radio, which is the usual mix format compression, and look at the overall waveform ... most often it will resemble a 2 x 4. (Try a Ricky Martin CD if you want to see what overuse of compression really looks like ... and sounds like as a result ... IOW, more cowbell, please!) :)

I'm indeed a "former audio professional who has lost his high end hearing" (the very reason I quit selling my services as an audio engineer about ten years ago), but with the Nyquist filter required in a

44.1hz sampling rate for CD digital recording, the Nyquist maximum frequency is 22050 Hz (with basically no power at frequencies above that).

This is unarguably far less than what you will hear on an analog recording, that may have third harmomic content well above 50Kz ...whether you can hear it or not, that content that is above your ability to hear will still "color" the sound of that which you can hear.

IOW, it ain't there on the 44.1 Khz CD ... and anything else is imagination. :)

That said the physiology of human hearing is an amazing thing. As indicated above, a trained ear will actually add in the missing frequencies that his ear can't actually hear due to a recognition of third order harmonics which color the sound; and, conversely, the absence of same in a CD recording, will also be very apparent to that trained ear ... which is the main reason why some of these older than Methuselah audio engineers, like Bruce Swedien, can work well past their hearing prime, and what any hearing tests performed on them would indicate.

[-MIKE-]

I will take a step back on my statement. Most songs are now mastered 3 times. Once for CD, once for radio and again for mp3s. The mp3's that are mastered by the producers are pretty exceptional. I can still hear a difference with the 128 mp3's. The 320 ones are pretty darn close.

Most of what I'm getting from artists for learning their set lists, are done by them or their management on their own laptop iTunes at a horrible rate, like 128. And they all sound terrible.

Karl, you're right about the "brick wall" compression. Sounds awful.