black holes

After the tributes to Deep Sea Creatures and Beards, the latest themed compilation to emerge from the watmm-ekt forums is Futonic's IDM Tribute to Black Holes:


Black Holes by Various Artists

Ten tracks on a free download from Futonic Records, featuring Alban Arthuan, Dead Eros, Tenfingers, Chris Moss Acid, Cubus, Asymmetrical Head, Choleric Productions, Lucid Rhythms, AD and Beneboi.

Its a great compilation, ranging from bleepy electronica, through layered guitar soundscapes and acid workouts to dubby space funk.

My submission didn't get picked for the compilation, but I'm still pretty happy with it. Here it is:

magnetospheric eternally collapsing object   3:13



download mp3   6054 kB

The existence of black holes in our universe is taken for granted these days, but it turns out that they might not actually exist after all - some boffins looked at the equations again and came to the conclusion that the trapped radiation pressure of the collapsing object would prevent it from forming a singularity. Instead the Magnetospheric Eternally Collapsing Object slowly, asymptotically collapses towards the black hole state, but never reaches it because it burns all its matter in the process. Also, it seems that viewed externally, such objects would appear to burn and collapse forever, because of spacetime shenanigans or something.

So this track tries to conjure up a huge, bright, fiery, spinning, eternally collapsing ball of supercompressed matter, pleasantly set against a surrounding starscape.

symbiosis sound environments vol 1

Net Labels are cool, but its still hard to beat a good old fashioned CD. One of my friends has recently put out a joint CD release with a couple of other musicians, so here's a plug for it:

Symbiosis Sound Environments Vol 1

Tracklisting:

01 - The New World - Dr Z
02 - Prosumer - Mulefa
03 - Zamami - Somacoma
04 - Entropy - A Million Little Lies
05 - Hug Your Joy - Somacoma (bonus track)

The Dr Z track is worth the price alone - its an impeccably-produced chilled out rhodes and flute workout over a backing of smooth bass and dreamy delay synths. The Mulefa and Somacoma tracks are old-school analog-based electronica, and the track by A Million Little Lies is a multi-layered downbeat affair with wailing guitars drifting past in the background.

You can hear samples over at the myspace page. There is a 12 inch available from ifmusic and the CD (with cool artwork on 100% recycled packaging) can be found in independent music stores in London and probably other places too. Also, MP3 downloads are available from TuneTribe.

losing it with replay gain

I had a baffling few hours the other day, when an mp3 version of one of my tracks turned out to be quieter than I had thought it was. I ran the original WAV through a maximizer to add on a few db, then converted to mp3 again, tagged it, and it still sounded too quiet ...

Eventually I realised it was nothing to do with the source WAV, and that Replay Gain was the culprit. Replay Gain is an admirable attempt to tackle the problem of the different perceived loudness in mp3s from different sources. It is basically an algorithm to estimate the perceived loudness of a track, and then store an offset against a reference level in the track meta-data. Its a big improvement on the awful peak normalisation that some mp3 players were attempting a few years ago, but its still not perfect.

The problem I had was that I was using MediaMonkey to sort out my mp3 tags and add album art. However, unbeknownst to me, MediaMonkey was calculating the Replay Gain of my tracks and writing it to the meta-data each time I edited the tags. Then when I played them back using Foobar2000, suddenly almost 10db was being taken off because Foobar was reading the Replay Gain tags.

When you make your own music, you go to considerable trouble to master the tracks to get the perceived loudness to the level that you want. You dont really want some little algorithm suddenly sneaking in and resetting the levels. Admittedly, Replay Gain only adds meta-data and doesn't actually touch the music, but when its all done without your consent and then your mp3 player honours the Replay Gain tags without you realising, its equivalent to someone sneaking into your studio and messing around with the master volume knob while you're looking the other way.

Perhaps I was particularly unlucky in this case because my noisy track was getting given a Replay Gain of -9.5 db, a massive difference.

MediaMonkey is a pretty useful tool, even in its Free version, but I couldn't find any options in it to turn off the Replay Gain interference. Basically, any mp3 tag editing resulted in Replay Gain being slapped on the track.

Luckily, Foobar2000 came to the rescue. When you right-click on a track in Foobar, there is a Replay Gain option in the menu. This gives you further options to display, edit or remove the Replay Gain settings.

Using this I was able to clean out the unwanted Replay Gain meta-data that had sneaked in. I also experimented with setting the Replay Gain to 0.0 or -0.l db to see if that stopped MediaMonkey from interfering, but it didn't. However I cleared or set the Replay Gain, MediaMonkey would re-set it to its own calculated value on every tag edit.