Comments on: The Hard Way

By: Sam Dodsworth

Sam Dodsworth — Tue, 27 Jan 2004 12:04:19 +0000

I am surprised to learn that I and all my friends were, from the time that we first got access to a tape-to-tape deck (around age 15) to the point when we became able to afford to buy CDs instead of copying music from each other, practicing an art form requiring immense skills. We thought we were just making lists and then turning those lists into tapes. Does Joel Keller sport a jazz haircut, perhaps?

By: ahem

ahem — Tue, 27 Jan 2004 04:29:09 +0000

However, moving your collection from vinyl to MP3 is transferring from the sublime to the ridiculously compressed. FLAC is your friend. Or WAV, to be honest, given that today’s hard drives are big enough to cope with uncompressed versions of those albums that really matter to you.

By: Sigivald

Sigivald — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 23:33:39 +0000

Likewise with the snotty iPod remarks, sebastian. Mr. Tuzzeo apparently thinks that having severeal thousand songs at hand while not at home is somehow a bad thing because someone might listen to music that he doesn't like. And, further, viz. Killer that a larger market for music will somehow keep good music from being produced... as if, seriously, there was ever a time when most music was not crap. He should try getting XM and listening to the 50s/70s/70s/80s channels. Most music is crap and always has been, and the only reason people recall [insert decade here] as "the time of good music" is because they have emotional investment in the music and forgot all the bad stuff. Cry me a river, Sal.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 18:44:32 +0000

“If making a compilation tape at all takes hours of work, and requires skills that only a music enthusiast will bother to acquire, a lot more effort and judgement will go into the selection and ordering of the tracks, correction of the levels and so on, than if a 14-year old can put together a CD in five minutes, as is now the case.” I think you are correct about this being the key. As someone who has taken great pleasure in making mix tapes for more than a decade (and I hope they have been enjoyed by those who received the tapes) I still must admit that my sister’s musical sense of the flow of a tape is better than mine. The fact that I had a good sense of music, good technology skills, and a willingness to spend hours using them doesn’t mean that my sister can’t make better tapes now that she has the ability to do so in a fair amount of time. The fact that people who are worse at it than her can do the same doesn’t mean that the technology shift hasn’t made things better for her. This article is basically making the argument akin to ‘the average quality of books has gone down since the invention of the printing press’. That may be true, but the absolute number of truly excellent authorial works available each year has gone up greatly. And I wouldn’t trade that away for a higher average.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 16:31:23 +0000

No audiophile, I can’t speak to the issue at hand; but I want to make a suggestion that people who read this post of Dr. Quiggin’s and find it interesting go into Mr. Davies’ archive and read his post on The Economics of Pound’s Canto XLV.

By: Dave F

Dave F — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 12:58:47 +0000

However, moving your collection from vinyl to MP3 is transferring from the sublime to the ridiculously compressed. Still, more precious vinyl for the rest of us.

By: Dave F

Dave F — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 12:56:08 +0000

He has completely missed the point. As the narrator makes clear in the movie, the art of it is making a compilation tape that will work for someone, not just the hard labour of sifting through records and taping bits. I think John Cusack actually says “for someone you care about”, but I could be misremembering. CD-R/W just takes some of the drudgery out of it so you can concentrate on the art, as word processing has done for writing poetry (or whatever).

By: Grant

Grant — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:27:29 +0000

Randomise. If necessary, group things together into a playlist and randomise. Hours of varied entertainment, within genre controls if desired, with automated track merging and pleasant surprises along the way. (“Hey, I’d forgotten about that one …”) Don’t like what’s playing? Hit the Skip button. It’s like favourite radio with better quality and without the ads and inane chatter. Also without the tracks you don’t like much. 21st century stuff. Paradise. Grant

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:59:23 +0000

And, after the apocalyse, we’ll be back to sliderules, at least.

By: Belle Waring

Belle Waring — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:46:12 +0000

This guy is full of it. The mix-making capability of iTunes is my favorite part, and the fact that I don’t have to sit there with the tape cued up futzing around with the levels just means that I can make even better mixes, and more of them, and easily duplicate them for all my friends. Our external hard drive started having problems recently and it looked like we might have to re-input all 18 days of music, and I told John I’d rather do that than lose my mixes…The fact that some 14-year-old can make bad mixes featuring the Offspring and Evanescence doesn’t appear to have had any impact on my life so far.

By: dave heasman

dave heasman — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:35:52 +0000

I don’t think anyone who’s used Sibelius would go back to manually writing music.

By: ahem

ahem — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 08:12:42 +0000

Biting at the heels of the mix-tape (and yes, there’s something to be said for the effort in cueing songs, calculating how much you can fit onto a C90, etc) you have the mashup/bootleg, in which songs aren’t just mixed from albums and singles, but transmuted. (‘A Stroke of Genie-us’, for instance.) Instead of the tape-to-tape stereo system, we have CoolEdit and GarageBand and all manner of cool stuff, with dozens of sites devoted to it. And I still make mix CDs, and treasure the ones I receive. The art of the segue hasn’t been lost. And if anything, it’s harder, because you don’t always have the instant feedback that you’d get from the clunky old tape recorder. (As james russell has said: it’s not just rip, mix, burn… if you want your friends to remain friends.) That said: a friend who works in a law firm noted that there’s a section of the archives—dating from when WordPerfect started handling multiple fonts—which looks atrocious: the classic ‘five fonts on one page’ thing we’ve all done when first exposed to a word processor. Ted Hughes wrote about judging a children’s fiction contest, and complained that in the age of the word-processor, the entries got more profuse and elaborate… and dull, and cited the way that pen-and-paper writing remains a primal kind of experience. (Personally, I always go back to the pen when I’m blocked, or when I’m overly stuck in the world of cut-and-paste and need either to make progress, or see the work-in-progress as a whole, rather than a few zoomed-in grafs.) And Tufte talks about the evils of PowerPoint. But you’re right about Keller: if he’s complaining about the standard of ‘today’s music’, then he’s really not looking in the right places for it. It’s out there waiting for him. Music isn’t a zero-sum game: all the crap on corporate FM radio doesn’t prevent other, good stuff from being made. Especially now that in the age of online (and gig-based) digital distribution, you’re not likely to lose your musical outlet to the public because re-signing Vacuous Popstrel empties the record company’s pockets.

By: James Russell

James Russell — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 08:10:47 +0000

I saw this article linked from another message board, where someone described it as “a load of innacurate, snobby, elitist shite”. I see no reason to disagree with that. Keller’s mixes are probably shit anyway. CD-Rs haven’t made the mixing process any easier for me, at least. Any time I make one I do it in much the same way Keller says he used to make tapes; I constantly have to reorder tracks, drop tracks, work out what other tracks, can I fit another one in there or will it make the CD too long, what can I get rid of to let another song stay, etc. Can take days to work out. Just whacking tracks onto a CD is something any dickhead can do, sure enough. But if you’re going to do it properly, it requires more effort than Keller seems willing to allow.