Oops. I really meant Apollo 11 delivered…

But it’s not July 20 anymore, so about Fedora 11:

• Overall, no big problems
• Fedora Project slipped their final release schedule a couple of weeks, so I didn’t get started trying Fedora 11 until mid-June.
• VMware Server 1.0.x still doesn’t work with the 2.6.29 kernel(s) in Fedora 11. It appears that a one line kernel change is needed (assuming VMware doesn’t fix directly). However, I’ve never built a linux kernel before, and my first attempts have failed.
• The nastiest surprise, for me, was confusion about BIND. I’m used to Fedora putting BIND in a chroot’d jail. Fedora 11 seems to eschew actually doing this, but provides the /var/named/chroot directory hierarchy as if the jail still exists. I don’t find anything in the release notes about any of the BIND changes, and the additional DNSSEC  support in BIND 9.6 threw me off temporatily, since I don’t know much about DNSSEC. It took me a couple of hours to sort everything out, and my current solution is a bit clumsy, but seems to work.

There are other awkward aspects, such as the need for a /boot ext3 partition when trying to use ext4 for the rest of the filesystems, but these are adequately documented in the release notes, so not big problems for me.

I put Fedora 11 on my primary mail/web/DNS server yesterday, and all seems OK so far. (This post is stored on that server.) But the machine that depends on VMware Server is still running Fedora 10.

Yesterday I mixed the audio, used it in place of the camera’s audio track, and broke it up into segments for YouTube: Charlie Abbitt – Live at The Wellington May 22, 2008.

I’d hardly touched Cubase LE since August, and didn’t really remember much of what I had learned back then. What I did remember was sending analog output from the iO|14 to the audio input of another computer for mixdown. Though that memory was correct, that was not the best approach.

Fortuanately, I have been using Audacity frequently for simpler recording and sound processing. I routinely export processed audio from Audacity without involving a second system. My main learning yesterday was that Cubase does have export facilities (D’oh!), whch are quite usable and useful, such that a separate computer for mixdown was unnecessary (and potentially would have compromised audio quality).

Before the realization that a second computer was wrong headed, I thought about using the recently acquired iMac G4 pedestal. I thought I spied an analog input on the back next to the (“headphone”) analog output, but I was wrong — that connector is an Apple proprietary “Apple speaker minijack  for connection to Apple Pro Speakers”. OS X System Profiler and System Preferences tell me the only built-in audio input is the mic. Determining that was not easy, with only minimal info readily available from both apple.com & Google, but one of my Mac expert friends confirmed my determination. Even he had to stare at the back of one of his pedestals to be sure.

To try to end this rambling, but finish the story, this morning I wondered more about the 1/8″ combined analog/digital audio jacks on more recent Macs. The iO|14 has S/PDIF coaxial RCA digital input/output. The Mac jacks are S/PDIF optical, but not the typical TOSLINK, since those are different size/shape from the ubiquitous 1/8″ analog jacks. I finally found the explanation that the Mac jacks are “mini-TOSLINK”, that optical adapters are inexpensive, and that bi-directional coaxial/optical converters are not expensive. 

As a harmonica player myself, perhaps I pay special attention to great harp work, but not enough attention to Charlie McCoy. When I first became conscious of Charlie McCoy, when I bought Highway 61 Revisited and heard his guitar part on on Desolation Row, I probably still didn’t know of his harmonica prowess. And I probably didn’t know it was him playing the harmonica riff on Obviously Five Believers in 1966, though I played that album over and over that summer. I missed out on McCoy’s Nashville break on Orbison’s Candy Man in 1961. But when Dylan recovered from his motorcycle accident and released John Wesley Harding, I noticed the bass playing, all by Charlie McCoy. And the next year (1968) it was hard not to notice McCoy’s harp on Jerry Lee Lewis’ What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me). But I didn’t notice it was McCoy playing. The list of credits at http://www.charliemccoy.com/albumcredits.html doesn’t seem complete, but it is voluminous.

The other day I was trying to remember where (which recording) Johnny Cash chanted “I don’t care if I do die do die do die…”. With help from Google, my mistaken memories were corrected to the right answer, Cash’s recording of Orange Blossom Special, with, who else, Charlie McCoy playing more notes than seems possible on a diatonic harp. There’s a YouTube version of McCoy showing even more tricks, with maybe Johnny Gimble on fiddle, but I prefer the McCoy (Cash) studio version of the song.

Anyway, today I’ve listened to all of the above, plus more than a few other McCoy tracks, notably Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home, which seems like time well spent.

P.S. Of course, the title of this post refers to the song by Sonny Boy Williamson II and another harp influence, Tony Glover.

P.P.S. Imagine the Desolation Row session. Or all of the John Wesley Harding sessions. There’s Dylan playing harp with hardly anyone else there but McCoy. There are those (not me!) that dis Dylan’s harmonica playing. Images of those sessions suggest Dylan must not lack for confidence in his own playing.

P.P.P.S. I think I understand what McCoy is doing on Orange Blossom Special, mostly playing an F harp, switching to B♭ to get an octave lower F chord and the B♭ chord. Understanding what he’s doing and playing like that are a little different though…

Then I started seeing comments on Wired’s article about Doug Morris, chair and CEO of Universal Music Group, particularly where he’s quoted: “There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist.” Given all of the technical wizardry of musicians, audio engineers and producers, that disclaimer is hard to accept. For example, I’ve thought of Peter Gabriel as a technologist ever since being dazzled by a concert at the old Austin Coliseum in 1982.

But what is more striking in the article and commentary is the lack of homage to MP3.com. The Wikipedia summary of MP3.com history seems approximately correct. (In searching though http://web.archive.org for charts with Kay Buena’s songs, I discovered archives of MP3.com a little older than Wikipedia’s report of a 1998 founding date.)

Michael Robertson‘s MP3.com (not the c|net one) started to make us aware of “MP3″. But more than that, My.MP3.com seemed a plausible way for the music industry to monetize MP3s almost eight years ago. What would be the fortunes of that industry if significant MP3 sales had started in the year 2000?

Universal Music Group prevailed in stopping Robertson. U.M.G. had another chance to leverage the MP3.com concepts and technology when Vivendi Universal acquired MP3.com but then Vivendi sold the domain to c|net in November 2003 and abandoned the rest.

There were other eulogies four years ago. This week I still wonder what could have been.

P.S. Billboard.biz considers the Wired article a “hatchet job” but goes on “Morris and the other labels need to stop living in the past as well. They need to quit their bellyaching about how digital piracy decimated the business and start communicating the steps they’re making for the future.”

I’ve heard of other attempts since then, but it looks like the first successful realization is available from Gibson. Mechanically, it “sounds” much like what Jerry had in mind in 1969.

Update 2007/11/26: c|net has photos, says there was another realization in 1998, says “The Robot Guitar”, a Gibson Les Paul with self-tuning isn’t really available until December 7. Article at http://www.news.com/Photos-When-tech-tunes-your-guitar/2300-1040_3-6218819.html.

That’s saying a lot, considering the many times I’ve traveled to see Buddy Guy since a Chicago trip as a teenager, and considering all of the other great guitarists I’ve seen live (B.B. King, Hendrix, Clapton, Magic Sam, Montoya, …) or even had the privilege to play with (Jimmie Vaughan, Denny Freeman, Billy Gibbons).

I’ve sat at Led’s feet and also watched from afar in large concerts. His stints with the Shoe Band and Garrison Keillor’s comments leave favorable comparison with Chet Atkins. I suspect Led has difficulty suppressing a penchant for rock n’ roll, even (California) surf music. I’ve heard him play in pretty much any style but blues. So the words from Steve Goodman nag me:

My baby came to me this morning.
She said, “I’m kind of confused”.
She said “If me and B.B. King were both drowning,
    which one would you choose?”

I said “Whoa, baby”, I said “Whoa, baby”,
I said “Whoa, baby”,
“Babe I Ain’t Heard You Play No Blues“

Update January 24, 2008: ~Hippie Guy says “Ledward is probably the world’s best guitarist and one of the best slack key ‘ukulele players.” He also embeds a nice YouTube of Led at the 2003 ‘ukulele fest.

Update January 27, 2008: There’s an interesting discussion along these lines at http://www.taropatch.net/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6313.

MIDI became ensconced in Windows at least by 3.1, so unlikely to disappear. (Though even today Microsoft does seem to try to leave behind standards it once championed, e.g., seemingly trying to leave H.323, H.324 and T.120 conferencing standards out of Vista.)

Zenph Studios and partners such as Yamaha are working with what they call High Resolution MIDI. The concept is well described by “high resolution” — conventional MIDI with finer granularity, but otherwise, not the “something different” I had assumed.

What Zenph does with their software seems like science fiction: analyzing great piano recordings, converting them to high-resolution MIDI, feeding the data stream to a suitable piano and creating “re-performances” without the sonic limitations of the original recordings but with the artistic feel of the original.

A Pragmatic Project: Live In Concert descibes Zenph’s appealing software development approach.

Zenph (and, to a lesser but still notable extent, Cubase) are inspiring but also humbling. On the other hand, other software for compression and pitch-correction, though technically impressive, is not “The Future of Music” that I want to think about.

When pro-sumer 4-tracks became available in the early 70s, I wanted a TEAC 3340s, but even stretching my funds, only got a Dokorder instead. Bouncing tracks with that and a 2-track was a big improvement, e.g., for the Sandscript recording.

In principle, professional 4-tracks were good enough. I remember a Ringo Starr interview with Dave Herman, describing the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions as “four to four to four, very clean”. But by the time I bought a used 3340s, the Dokorder was worn out, and neither one would have made it in the door at Abbey Road. (Professional 4-tracks wouldn’t use 1/4″ tape.)

After recording technology became a much smaller part of my life, I splurged on a Fostex A-8, which crammed 8 tracks onto 1/4″ tape, vs. 1″ tape on professional machines. And then splurged on an Alesis XT-20. Finally, I had professional quality recording capability, but the first XT-20 died after a week’s use. The warranty replacement XT-20 sat mostly unused for years, until Caroline and I tried to use it last March. The XT-20 seemed to be failing, so the time had come to abandon tape.

Would USB or Firewire interfaces and software mixers really work? I had more optimism about the software than the performance adequacy of the hardware. How many channels of high quality audio can be reliably captured with current processors? After pricing various options, the Alesis iO|26 seemed the most promising, but also seemingly out of stock at all of the likely sources. The iO|14 (four analog microphone inputs instead of eight) seemed inexpensive enough (currently $260 after discounts and rebates) to be worth gambling on for a 30 day trial purchase.

Supposedly the iO|14 and iO|26 will work with a 2.0GHz Pentium 4, but I doubt that. The iO|14 recordings I tried to make with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 had unacceptable glitching, even at low sample rates. However, the iO|14 seems to work great with my Latitude D510 notebook with a 1.73GHz Pentium M, using 24-bit samples at 96KHz.

So now I can fit enough professional quality multi-track recording equipment into a suitcase: the D510, the iO|14, portable speakers, microphones, cables, headphones and small mike stands all went with us Thursday to Dallas to record Caroline’s father’s regular performance at his retirement home. The ease of capturing the live tracks confirmed my satisfaction with the iO|14.

Yesterday, I mixed the four live tracks down to stereo. I barely scratched the surface of Steinberg Cubase LE, but Cubase far surpasses the combined capabilities of the analog gear that used to be beyond my reach and now gathers dust on my shelves. Finally, multi-tracking beyond my ambitions.

The resulting audio is on the clips at Charlie Abbitt – Live at The Wellington .