Tom, that is HILARIOUS!!! I am telling all my friends to vote for her.

ETA it has been b'logged

[link]

Also, randomly, a friend ran into Flava Flav at a burger king in the Las Vegas airport a couple of weeks ago. Best. Celebrity. Sighting. Ever.

Okay, but he owned that tape, right?

Clearly, his own fault.

The smoking gun of the loudness war is the difference between the waveforms of songs 20 years ago and now. Here is an example:

[link]

My friend and neighbor Joe has written on the same issue, although his use of Mastodon as an example of overcompression leads me to believe that his ears are more finely tuned than mine. I can hear it on many CDs, but Mastodon is too fuzzy for me to hear the overcompression.

[link]

I don't know much about audio, but isn't that [compression] what they do with television commercials to make them louder?

(Shoot 'Em Up being a recently egregious example.)

but isn't that [compression] what they do with television commercials to make them louder?

Yep.

Unrelatedly, my Ford Focus had a stereo that could compress the audio so quiet parts would be easier to hear over the engine noise, etc. Except it wasn't perfect - there was a bit of a lag. So if the stereo was playing something quiet (with the volume boosted) that suddenly went very loud, it would blast out the loud part for half a second before reverting to the normal volume.

I ended up just turning off that feature.

Yeah, it's a huge problem. It is for us in the studio, too, because the bands expect to hear something coming out of our work that is as loud as their radios, and I refuse to compress the hell out of it on basic principle. I don't spend all that time in the session encouraging dynamic variation just to flatten it all back out in the end.

Usually I end up compromising, or I give them what I want, and they can take it to mastering to crank it up. I give up responsibility at that point.

I don't spend all that time in the session encouraging dynamic variation just to flatten it all back out in the end.

Preach it!

Yay I'm not the only grown-up (ish) person who loves Fall Out Boy!

I quite enjoy them myself!!

"The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'"

shrift, that song broke my Windows XP. It is too long for it to handle. I can't do ANYTHING with it in Windows. Rename, move, delete, anything. The other song that did it is by Of Montreal:

"Upon Settling On The Frozen Island, Lecithin Presents Claude And Coquelicot With His Animal Creations For Them To Approve Or Reject (The Rejected Inventions Walk Towards The Reverse Magnetitizer)"

For those who may have similar musical tastes to me, here are some music recs from the Oakland Art and Soul Festival.

Short version: Audrye Sessions, the Lovemakers, Great Northern.

Worst song lyrics evah!: [link]

This one is "good":

Young, black and famous
With money hangin'
Out the anus

But i dunno - there must be worse lyrics out there....