Aigarius Blog (Posts about music)

Croud clapping

Aigars Mahinovs — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:06:44 GMT

If you want to get a 'croud clap' effect then you not only need to multilpy a clap, but also make a Gaussian distribution of timing and loudness variation. The tighter the distribution, the more 'organised' will the clapping be. With a very wide deviations you will get a natural white noise clapping.

Censorship is unacceptable

Aigars Mahinovs — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:12:26 GMT

UK ISPs erect "Great Firewall of Britain" to censor Wikipedia

I used to use Eclipse in UK and recommended it to others, but they are now involved in this censorship scandal. Unacceptable.

iPhone review from a free software guy

Aigars Mahinovs — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:12:30 GMT

I got an iPhone on the very first day it was available officially in my country. I have used it every day since then and am now ready to decide how good it really is. Summary: it is a great piece of technology and the only tradeback is the locked down platform. I have abandoned my Palm and am not looking back.

Hardware: the hardware is just perfect. 4 buttons (Home, Power, Volume Up and Down) and 1 switch (Mute) are all very clear, easy to find and press and frankly are enough. The touchscreen is reasonably fast and very precise nicely corrected by software that guides your presses toward UI points of interest if such are within your finger. The casing is absolutely solid - there is no gaps, no wobble, nothing. All glossy surfaces attract fingerprints, but a couple passes with a microfiber cloth (included) clean it up easily. The loudspeaker is phenomenal - all sound comes from a single small hole, but it can easily fill a small room with music. Call sound quality is impeccable. You can plug in any headphones, but if you use the included headphones you get a microphone with a button that can pickup and hand up calls, start/pause music and skip to the next track. I also love that the only charger included is a very small power brick that provides a power-only USB port and a USB charging cable. That is a good way to reduce number of power bricks for gadgets. The iPhone 3G (that is what I have) also has a GPS build-in, but let us be clear - it is not good enough to replace a car GPS, the iPhone GPS is slow (takes several seconds to refresh the location and tens of seconds to find it first time) and the precision is measured in meters or even tens of meters. The WiFi is very good at getting a connection and doing it very fast. Oh and there is an acceptable camera.

Out of the box software: the software included surely is better than on any other phone I have seen (including Palm). The UI widgets are nicely written specially for a touchscreen interface - the best example is having click wheels instead of drop down menus. It is much easier mentally to flick a wheel up or down then to click on a list, click to scroll the list and then click to select an entry. And the click wheel makes it much easier to correct off-by-one errors. Switches that look like regular physical switches instead of checkboxes is another very useful UI concept. I think a lot of this can be reused on the desktop as well.

iTunes: and here comes the bad spot, the lock-in part. To get anywhere with the iPhone you need to associate it with an installation of iTunes. It fails to work in Wine or even in a virtual machine - apparently there are some errors related to avahi or something. Unfortunately, this means that you need wither Windows or MacOS to do nything with your iPhone. iTunes is the only way to backup, restore and upgrade your iPhone, it is the only way to get contacts and music on the iPhone (there is an iTunes Store app in the newest version that allows purchasing music over the air). Even after doing a jailbreak (see further) it is currently not possible to add music to the iPhone from any third party applications, because the iTunes database has a hashed checksum that the build-in iPhone music player (and iTunes) check before doing anything. If the checksum is wrong the only thing you can do is a full restore of the phone from backup. Crypto geeks - please help decrypt that hash, so that we can sync iPhones to amaroK. The iTunes itself is a bit weird - to get music onto the phone you need to create a playlist and then you can sync that playlist over. One of the playlist options is a smart playlist with a random feature and a limit on number of matches. That is the way to get random music from your collection onto the phone. I do dislike the fact that iTunes syncs all the contacts from Google to the phone and not only contacts for a certain group or only those that have a phone number, for example. Search and favorites do help here.

Third party software (iTunes Store): it is very easy to install new software on the phone over the WiFi and there is plenty to choose from. You do need a Mac to develop this software which restricts the developer base a bit. The main bases that I needed (or did not know I needed) are covered: Last.fm player, TwitterFon, LockBox password storage, Stanza ebook reader, Shazam music identificator, Wordpress client, BigOven cookbook and lots of fun games. Have not used any paid-for apps due to the fact that iTunes store is not available in Latvia and the official documentation recommends registering with a fake address in UK or US. :) Most of the software is rather stable and useful, but there is also a lot of fluff. User reviews and ratings help a lot, can we have those for Debian packages?

Jailbreak and third party software (Cydia): thanks to some anonymous hackers, we have the ability to break the software jail on the iPhone and install software that Apple did not approve. The process is made very simple, but again it does require you to boot into Windows or MacOS X. The main thing the jailbreak process does is install an installer on the phone. Currently the best one is Cydia which is built on top of ... apt-get and dpkg! After that is done, you can install a terminal, a ssh server and BossPrefs advanced preferences. There are also other interesting programs there - a different dock, file manager, caching youtube player, quake, themed app launcher with categories and startup page (winterboard). Theoretically the ssh server allows you to manage your music over WiFi from any platform, but unfortunately until the iTuned database hash algorithm is decoded, we can only copy music from the phone to the PC and not back. It is possible to copy files over using ssh and then play them using third-party players, but those players are very crude and featureless.

To summarize: an iPhone is a great phone and a decent application platform. To make using an iPhone with Linux easier we need to make iTunes run in Wine (and allow it to see the iPhone) and reverse engineer the iTunes database hashing algorithm so that we can get music on our phones with Linux tools. I also wish there was a way to develop iPhone apps in Linux, but that really is reaching for the stars.

Better now!

Aigars Mahinovs — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:08:32 GMT

As soon as my laptop came back from repairs, I started to feel better - being back with 1920x1200 resolution is great! NVidia is much more stable than ATi and Intel wireless is just great!

And then last weekend I was in Berlin for the FFII board meeting and used the opportunity to see the city with my girlfriend. I must say that there is a lot of interesting things to see in Berlin.The things I would recommend everyone are: go to the Zoo (5-7 hours of superb fun), then take bus 100 to Alexander Platz (driving by all the main landmarks), go up on the TV tower, then come down and sometime late in the night go to 'Weekend' dance club.

The Zoo is fantastic - most of the time there are no walls between you and the animals, only deep pits. Most animals can be seen both in their outdoor spaces and in their indoor places. The park is a bit maze like, but the best thing is that you can just keep on walking and you will always have something interesting to look at. Wherever there is a underwater bit, there is a glass plate that allows you to look underwater. It looks almost like huge TV sets. When a family of hippos swims by a long wall of glass, the effect fantastic. And so is the whole zoo.

Going to the 'Weekend' club was another interesting experience. We found out of the club from Wikitravel and went there around 22:30. The place was barely warming up. We easily found the big office building with red "SHARP" ad on top just off the Alexander Platz, but it was fully dark and quiet with no signs about the club, so we looked for people. At one of the entrances there were a couple people with a table that took 5€ from us and waved us inside to the elevators. When elevators came, they had two guys inside that did not ask us anything, but just shot us up to the 15th floor, we followed the small stream of people and came to a wooden roof-top terrace with lots of place to sit, to chat, to drink and a very long bar with lots of staff ready to make us a drink. And there was music - great quality soft disco music that was quiet enough so that people could relax and talk freely. You could see the street below, but not a sound from this roof-top chill-out reached the street level - that is one great way to make a club. We also checked out the small dance room on the 15th floor, but did not stay around for long enough to see the main area on the 12th floor. Again, the sound system was perfect - they were rolling dance music on vinyl and I could really hear the difference in the depth of sound and appreciate how the female DJ mixed the tracks seamlessly. We were a bit surprised by the number of gay people in the club, both male and female. It is very rare to see that in Latvia because of the still prevalent prejudice, unfortunately.

We also went to a great place serving South African food and we ate some ostrich and gnu meat which was cooked flawlessly. It was a place of a slightly higher level than we normally eat, but it was totally worth it.

Vanessa Mae in Riga

Aigars Mahinovs — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:12:19 GMT

On Monday I was at a Vanessa Mae concert in arena "Riga" in Riga, Latvia.

The concert was almost an hour late due to flight delay. It would have been fine if the organisers would let us into the hall or at least informed the several thousand people about the delay and its reason and not just have us stand in the rather restricted lounge. around half an hour after the planned start time, we were let to our seats and some ten minutes later an announcement was broadcasted explaining the reason for the delay.

Vanessa came out with her own band and a local Latvian string orchestra. I wonder if she played with local orchestras in other locations as well. The orchestra preformed perfectly as far as I could tell, which is not much because they were mixed way down and were barely audible most of the time.

I am a big fan of Vanessa Mae - I like classical music, I love her interpretation of that music and I appreciate how she made classical music more acceptable for a modern teen to like. That said, the concert was a mix of joy and disappointment for me.

The joy came from hearing the music that I know and like and seeing how it is played in real life. It was a great joy and most of the time I was bobbing in my chair as a very happy boy.

However, there were moments when I cringed and unfortunately there was more than a handful of those during the two hour concert. The problems could be put into three categories:

1. Vanessa missing a note or even a handful of them badly. I will be an optimist and blame that on the tuning - just the day before she was playing in Seatle in 80% humidity and then came to Riga and 20% humidity. She had to retune her wooden violin after each song because of that. She apologised for that mid-show.

2. Spotlight and camera missing the action. At times Vanessa steps back and one of her band members goes on a solo, but most of the time the person controlling the spotlight and the person controlling the camera were not 'in' the action and just stayed on Vanessa. The worst cases were when a couple seconds into the solo the camera would start to pan over to the band member playing the solo part, spend a couple more seconds framing and focusing and then after another second the spotlight did the same and by that time the solo part was over. Two cameras and two spotlight should be used for such cases with people controlling them having a clear idea of what happens next. One camera should always be on a wider angle shot and one for closeups, so that when a switch is coming, you could switch to wide angle a couple of seconds before the switch, give the closeup camera time to change target, re-frame and re-focus and then switch to it. And for the spotlights, one would always track the main person and the other seeking out the next person of interest.

3. Mixing problems. Vanessa was always way too loud and drowned out the other instruments even when that was not desirable. Background orchestra was too low. In general the mixing was very pop-ish - no dynamic range. The worst cases of this were Bolero and Storm. Storm is my favourite melody and I especially love the slow and quiet beginning of the song, but that was skipped entirely in the concert cutting straight to the loud part. Some other songs were also brutalised that way.

I know that true artists generate most of their income through concerts and for that reason I recommend every Vannessa Mae fan to buy the tickets to her concerts, but if you are an audiophile .. don't go there - stay at home with you trustworthy stereo system and FLAC recording of great sound. The concert is there to support the artist and for the atmosphere not for the best sound, unfortunately.

I'm blue!

Aigars Mahinovs — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:11:11 GMT

In the last day of Lastguru's visit, I convinced him to go to The Blue Man group performance in the New London Theatre. The performance was just great - a combination of rhythmic music, dramatic light and a hilarious comedy show. Just wonderful!
There was a lot of classic Blue Man moments - weird looks, colour-splashing drums, rock concert movements, textual and emotional sketches with the audience and the great "You Are LATE!" intermission. It really was 100 minutes of pure fun.
And best of all, on the exit I was given a special ticket with which I can get back in again for free if I bring a friend - yay!

Pandora music stream

Aigars Mahinovs — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:03:56 GMT

I just discovered Pandora. It is a online flash streaming music player that plays the music that you like much like last.fm radio, just simpler and with instant feedback. You simply go to the site and tell them what artist or track do you like and the music starts playing in a Flash applet. Then similar music starts playing and you can say whether you like this particular song or not. There are even keyboard shortcuts, so it is enough to focus the windows with the player and press "+" if you like the song or "-" if you don't and it immediately adjusts its playlist to your input. Those kinds of services could replace downloading of music via BitTorrent for most of "background noise" kind of use.

Update: now that's one screwy service. After you listen to a bunch of songs, the player stops and requires you to register. It gets even better - the registration is US only. Just great! Well - back to last.fm radio to me.

Update2: Oh, ok - you can easily register with zipcode of 00000 and no paying for the service is required. And I also have heard some hreat music there, like the Bohemian Rhapsody that fills my earphones now.

5nizza & Cosmos

Aigars Mahinovs — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 21:04:00 GMT

My Azureus just gave me something else to blog about: two wonderful new musical groups that I started to like recently - 5nizza and Cosmos.
Cosmos is a latvian project - five guys singing good old songs without music creating the melody by intermixing their voices. Imagine five beautiful voices singing together everyone of them having a different rythm and pitch, but all combining together perfectly.
5nizza is a similar russian project, but there are only two people in the group and they do use music for the backing. 5nizza also writes all of their songs which is a nessesity as both singers sing almost at the same time, one frequently continues a word that the other one has begun. The text is also nicely composed to have multiple meanings depending on where you divide the words or phrases. An example of such style you could see in a Ramshtein song - "Du hast mich (You hate me) .... Du hast mich gefragt (You asked me)"

Note to self: I really hate German spelling :P

Start with a killer

Aigars Mahinovs — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 20:04:00 GMT

To start the blog not with an obligatory 'Let's start this' post, but with something worth reading, I want to present the mighty nildience (null audience) the best Linux audio playing app: Amarok.

Collection of your music based on the top directory - i.e. you just say 'my music is in /home/aigarius/mp3' and it rebrowses that dir each time it starts to find new music.
Automatic rating based on play/skip ratio - just listen to what you like and skip songs you don't like and soon Amarok will be able to tell the difference.
Get lyrics in 1 or 2 clicks - I love this feature.
Control the player regardless of your current app - shortcuts with 'Windows' key work everywhere.
Very nice playlist management within your music collection.
Least played songs - either to try something long forgotten or to free your hard drive.

These are the features I like the best about Amarok. Please comment on what you like to find in your audio player.