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....

Long-ass article in the NYT about the record industry. [link]

Mostly about Rick Rubin (who I think is most famous for starting Def Jam) working for Columbia.

The mighty music business is in free fall — it has lost control of radio; retail outlets like Tower Records have shut down; MTV rarely broadcasts music videos; and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple. "The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content," David Geffen, the legendary music mogul, told me recently. "Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it's no longer about making music, it's all about how to sell music. And there's no clear answer about how to fix that problem. But I still believe that the top priority at any record company has to be coming up with great music. And for that reason, Sony was very smart to hire Rick."

...

"Until very recently," Rubin told me over lunch at Hugo's, a health-conscious restaurant in Hollywood, "there were a handful of channels in the music business that the gatekeepers controlled. They were radio, Tower Records, MTV, certain mainstream press like Rolling Stone. That's how people found out about new things. Every record company in the industry was built to work that model. There was a time when if you had something that wasn't so good, through muscle and lack of other choices, you could push that not very good product through those channels. And that's how the music business functioned for 50 years. Well, the world has changed. And the industry has not."

But then Rubin starts going on about the subscription model being the industry's salvation. I think most people still want to own their music, you know?

I bookmarked that article to read later, but you know I have been reasonably happy with the subscription model. The only irritating bit is the constant negotiation going on behind the scenes that means that my Black Crowes are available one week and not the next. But other than that, as much of a music fan as I am, I seem to be perfectly content between XM & Napster.