couw

it was a foul, not a penatly. that was the mistake of the arbiter. you can blame Davids, but he is not the kind of player to fegh around like that.

same error as we had before, that SQL fegh up message with "too many users."

so Germany fails to win and is out. The Dutch did what had to be done and played 3-0 to Latvia. Difficult team to play good against, Latvia, as they play some very disruptive football. Still, with twice as much ball contact as the baltic dudes, the Dutch were pretty convincing, even if that penalty was a bit overdone (then again, was this the first time shit like this happened? no). The second one got much discussion and no, it was not okay according to the old rules, but yes, it was according to the new rules. Especially the German television seems to have a hard time to remember those new rules when they don't help them...

lekker biertje d'rbij....

Listening to Art Pepper - Complete 1947-1951 Small Group Studio Recordings now. This is a very nice disk that collects some pretty interesting Pepper sides. Two Babs Gonzales tracks stand out a little on the corny side, but nothing to detract too much from it all. Sound quality is very much okay considering the age of these recordings. I haven't a clue what the original source of these is, whether it's a rip off or vinyl transfers or what. Anyhow, the package is nice, inspite of the crappy nearly non-existent liners. ...and listening to those Babs Gonzales tracks again: these are quite funny actually, just that they don't fit at all with the rest of the music on the disk. The soloing of Pepper and JJ Johnson throws some interesting deep contrast on Babs's scatting.

if you have damn good ears it is, even at 192. With 256, you will need a helluva system in addition to damn good ears. As noted before, quality loss will be below the variation that good CD masters versus bad CD masters offer us now and it will be below any background noise that interferes. Still, using good headphones and a nice system, nothing beats the good ole vinyl...

1. VBR is a choice you make. It makes files smaller without losing any or much of the quality. Whether you rip at 256kbps or set 256kbps as maximum value in a VBR rip should not matter. If the algorithm that decides what bitrate it's gonna use is any good, the dense passages will be done at 256kbps and only sparse sections will be encoded at lower bitrates. In CDex go to [options] > [settings] > [encoder] and select a VBR method, you will notice that you can now also select a maximum encoding rate a bit further up. Play around a little and see how much the difference is in file size and sound quality. As noted, a good (or conservative) VBR algorithm with a certain maximum bitrate (say 256kbps) will produce results that are as good as a straight rip at that same bitrate (256kbps in our example). 2. mp3 is a method to compress the music. It is a completely different way to encode. CDs hold something similar to wav files, where each time segment has an equal size in terms of ones and zeros. Compare it to a bitmap where information on every pixel is stored separately. An mp3 would then compare to a jpg, where there is vectorisation allowing to describe bunches of pixels at once. Depending on the settings, the quality can be indiscernable to merely okay. 3. not. CDs are all 16bit in the end. the 20 (24) bit stuff refers to the remastering process. The music on 20bit CDs was remastered using files encoded using 20bits, i.e. using 2 to the power of 20 encoding values instead of 2 to the power of 16; mostly the rate at which the original analog waveform was sampled is higher too (88Hz or 96Hz instead of 44.1). The redbook standard for CDs is 16bit though, so the masters are downsampled before the music is put on the disks. The sampling rates of mp3s have little to do with these CD bits as we're talking about a different encoding system entirely. 4. you will have to select a minimum and a maximum value for your VBR. if both are set to 256, there isn't much to vary. I should say that if the VBR algorithm is good, you can make the minimum as low as 32 kbps, it would simply never be used (or only during silent passages).

Thanks John! Good stuff! Did you upload that from an LP? Is there... ahem... a side B? yup, but side B is by another group, the Hubert Katzenbeier Quintett. Pretty interesting inside/outside stuff with some nifty flute and tenor work by Konrad Körner and some strong trombone by the leader. With every one of these LPs I find, there are new names added to the long list of GDR jazz musicians. These people never cease to amaze me. In spite of all the restrictions, this must have been a lively scene.

you should be able to hear some compression, making it all sound a bit obtuse. Also the cymbals are often distorted to produce that swooshy sound. edit: this in reply to andy's post above.

I just tried that last night. Does that make it sound better Bill or use less space? I never got round to understading the reason for it? Any light shined here in would suffice . The other thing was which vbr to use as there are many! VBR, or variable bitrate, adjusts the bitrate to what is needed. Some passages will not need a very high bitrate to produce good results. Others do. You can adjust the minimum and maximum bitrates allowed. It's to reduce file size. Haven't got a clue what the different VBR settings in CDex do, must be different algorhithms. I use the default one, as I'm a lazy bastard.

who's that? looks like Helge Schneider...

Just to put it all into some perspective, here's one for all you funny people. The Friedhelm Schönfeld Trio with "Dimensionen," a three part suite recorded in 1972. With Friedhelm Schönfeld (cl, as, ts), Klaus Koch (b), and Günter Sommer (ds). Pretty nice euro free jazz from when difference still mattered and there was still that big ass wall these guys were hidden behind. right click and save to listen (6.5Mb mp3): this link don't click directly, that doesn't work somehow. sound quality is pretty low, but I had to make it manageable somehow. Enjoy!

see, told you so.

try Dutch, it works wonders in some places.

does it hurt to have those? I had the measles once, that was okay.

who's this Д.Д. guy then? ahhh! space oddity, revel in there for the little moment...

you can visit me if you go by boat to Sassnitz, you'll drive through town then.

parbleu!

yet, probably somewhere in central W-Germany would be very suitable geographically speaking. Is Luxembourg big enough for all of us?

just fill them German speaking dudes up with some wine and they'll start talking French in no time.

flying iszzz niczzze

ouch, the Italians had just scored and were celebrating when the news came in... Tears of joy fast became tears of sadness. Bye bye Italia, I cannot mourn. Saw some great football tonight watching the Denmark-Sweden game.

we can have yoghurt! bzzzz!

I have these thick scrubby hairs sticking out all over. Should I see a doctor?