Before multi-track tape and LONG before DAW’s, records were made by cutting direct to disc. Check out how it was done in 1937.

Find out here. Be patient, it loads slowly but is worth the wait.

Going hand-in-hand with the Loudness Wars posts you’ve seen here in the past is a new article in the Wall Street Journal titled: Are Technology Limits In MP3s and iPods Ruining Music? You can download sample files from their site and even participate by sharing your thoughts in the forum.

CRAS Instructor Chris Bailey has a great site called Creativity To Spare that deals with a lot of very cool audio and video techniques, tips and tricks. His Podcast #5 above teaches you how to make your own condenser mic for $20.

We originally flagged a You Tube vid about the Loudness Wars back in July. Here’s another interesting article that expands on the topic and talks about the effects of overcompression.

An interesting demo of how compression works when used across an entire mix.

When you or a mastering studio sends a CD-DA to a manufacturing plant, the plant has two choices when it makes your CD. They can either play the CD in real time directly onto a glass master or onto their server, or rip the audio using Digital Audio Extraction (DAE). Each method has drawbacks. Real time playback uses error correction for drop outs and must be properly clocked, while DAE pulls small segments of the audio files off the CD and then reconstructs them back together on the server. Although DAE has greatly improved over the last few years, it can be susceptible to seek errors and jitter, especially at high speeds.

A much better option is to deliver a DDP (Disc Description Protocol) file set. DDP’s can be delivered on any media that a plant will accept, like CD-ROM, DVD-R, Jazz or hard drives. Manufacturing plants simply transfer the files onto their server the same way you would copy any computer data. The difference is that the DDP files are transferred using data redundancy. Every bit is accounted for. There is no ripping, no re-clocking and no error correction. When the files are copied to the plant’s server they are exactly the same as they were on your computer.

Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality audio. It is in the same class as the MPEG-4 (AAC) compression scheme but it is in the public domain and completely free for commercial or noncommercial use.

Did you know that if you use the MP3 format to sell your music, you must pay the Fraunhofer Institute a percentage of each sale because you are using their patents? With Vorbis, you don’t. So it’s a great way for game developers, webmasters, bands and music listeners to get their audio product out there, at high quality, without owing a cent to anyone. Right now Vorbis is used in games such as 007: Nightfire, Black & White 2, Crashday, DEFCON and Deus Ex: Invisible War. It’s also used in hardware such as Pinnacle Audio’s Athenaeum, Nokia/Philips/Sagem DBox2, Microsoft Xbox and Sony Playstation 2.

It operates from 8kHz to 48kHz, 16-bit, at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel which means you can scale it for a variety of uses. For instance, if you’re just compressing the spoken word for the internet, you can scale it down so the file is small and easily streamed. On the other hand, if you’re compressing a mix for approval and sending it via ftp or disc, you can up the quality appropriately.

If you’d like to hear comparisons between different competing compression schemes, go to the Vorbis website and try their Dare to Compare test.