Recording Perfection...

I did a presentation at work today. It was intended to give people a look at the second release of a product that I've invested the last couple years into bringing to fruition, MITS Report.

About 50 or so people attended the presentation (which was hosted over the internet) and it was recorded for posterity. Unfortunately, the recording had a few problems and didn't end up coming out as cleanly as we would have liked.

I'm now faced with the same dilemma that faces many artists. How much polish is enough polish to release the recording? Since we're no longer stuck in "live" mode (the presentation is technically over), how scripted should it be? Should we do multiple takes and edit together the best snippets?

I can almost guarantee that the recorded version will not have the energy of the live version, but at the same time, it will be "better"... or perhaps more "polished".

Is polished better? We certainly experience a lot of polish in our lives... on TV, on the Radio, at Church, on the Internet. How much polish is too much polish. Isn't there something appealing about the ephemeralness and rawness of a live performance?

On thursday night I will be performing as part of Lacey Brown's band at the High Dive in Fremont. There will certainly be mistakes, and there will likely be some awkward pauses as the guitar player retunes... but that makes part of the experience doesn't it?

iTunes Plus

I've been purchasing music from iTunes plus for the last few weeks. The first couple of days had some hiccups as Apple struggled to keep up with the demand, but now things are working pretty smoothly, and I'm pretty happy. I've bought more music in the past 3 weeks than I have in the past 3 months.

I don't mind using iTunes to buy music, as I don't much care about the associated album art. It's nice to flip through, and then it gets filed away in some box somewhere, only to be retrieved when I decide to rerip the album at a higher bitrate.

Speaking of bitrates, 256kbps AAC definitely sounds better than 128kbps. I was djing a party and was asked to play a few songs I did not posses. There was an internet connection so I loaded up iTunes and purchased them... in the old-skool format. To me the older tracks sound "flat" and boring compared to their high-bit-rate cousins. Could be the particular tracks, and I haven't done any proper A/B comparisons, but I think it sounds better, and that's good enough for me.

definition of a niche

Something that seems like an awful idea to most people, and an awesome idea to a few people.

MySpace- finally rewarding its users

I have an inkling.

Now that myspace is actually getting its act together as far as user-interface goes, I have a feeling that people will be spending a lot less time on it. I say this simply because it will now take one step rather than 15 (or whatever) to delete comments, approve/deny/send messages, look through people's pictures, etc. That and I haven't had any kind of spam to delete or report for like 4 days and it's been glorious.

Since they made these adjustments, I've already won back hours. I know it sounds pathetic, but I have seriously spent way less time on myspace this last week or so.

What am I going to do with all my extra time now??

:D

It makes me happy.


I can't wait to see how much time we'll all save when they finally fix their search process. (Making it possible to search for a specific friend from among your friends, rather than having to search the whole FRAKKING SYSTEM. Gahhh that grinds my gears.) I hope they fix that someday.

- Gwen

and might I just add...

technology has been more frustrating than helpful to me over the last 3 weeks or so. On top of everything Gary has posted about recently, here's what has decided to declare war against me:

- Our DVR, of course. Constantly non-responsive to the remote control, continues fast-forwarding long after you've hit play, etc.
- I struggled with getting Finale 7 installed on my computer. Mostly because I am slow at that stuff, but it was still an annoyingly complicated process that called for 2 calls to customer service.
- We had to reinstall OS X on my mac. FOR WHATEVER REASON! It just wouldn't reboot one day.
- After that reinstallation, ProTools would no longer open. Had to reinstall that. It took about 6 tries, but I finally got it on there again.
- Every time I try to open Firefox, my computer isn't connecting to the internet right away. It's only a little hold-up, but it's still ANNOYING.
- And now for no apparent reason at all, Firefox just decided to hang my computer altogether. I went to restart, and it allllmost got all booted up. But not quite. So I had to restart it again.

And to top it all off, I'm just tired of typing to communicate and am letting emails pile up without replying. It's daunting.

- Gwen

boxing hand wraps

I finally found a good illustrative guide to wrapping your hands for boxing. I can start hitting my bag again without as much worry about damaging my hands.

http://www.ringside.com/WrapYourHands.aspx

xbox issues

XBox360 just hung while pausing an HD movie that I downloaded. Earlier today the HD version of the Matrix wouldn't play the first couple times I tired.

Why does technology always have to fail?