Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with digitalmusic

Help me create digital music.

flatluigi — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:52:08 -0800

I'd like to find some tutorials or general guides for editing and creating music on the computer. I'm very interested in mashups and making music out of other music, but I honestly don't know what I'm doing. I got a copy of Ableton Live from a very generous musician friend of mine for my birthday a while back and I've been using that to put stuff together. I can put together some basic A+B vocal over instrumental deals, but that's about it.

I can't do anything fancy and I'm sure I'm missing things due to my relative lack of experience with audio effects and methods. For example, just last week I discovered how to consolidate a cut-up track and make it loop without having to deal with all the pieces, which seems really obvious in hindsight.

What I'd love to find is a guide that takes me through the creation of a track, showing off what X effect does, how to do Y cleanly, ending a track successfully through Z -- that sort of thing. Otherwise, I'd like to find some general tips and methods.

how can I convert monolithic flac or ape disc images into tracks?

Grod — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:01:35 -0800

I'm fed up with monolithic flac and ape files with cue sheets that winamp can't use. I like 1 track to 1 file. Is there no relatively automatic way to split these files into individual, per track, files? It goes without saying, I hope, that the individual lossless files produced would be conveniently labeled (e.g. composer-work-movement) and properly tagged. Thanks.

Why can't I have my music the way I want it?

FlamingBore — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 07:22:42 -0800

Why is there so little innovation in car audio? It seems like car audio lags significantly behind other areas in terms of innovation. I have a few guesses as to why that is, but here we are five+ years into mainstream adoption of MP3 players and most car stereos still aren't set up to easily plug and play these devices. My understanding is the the new Civics (and perhaps other Hondas), as well as Scions allow direct AUX plugin for an iPod or similar device - but that means I still need to use the iPod's scroll wheel to select my music.

Admittedly, I haven't been looking seriously at anything after market, but why hasn't a new car been introduced (in the states) that would allow you to just pop in a SD card or a thumb drive (or a mass storage USB device!) that will allow the stereo unit to read the digital music files & ID3 tags and let you fling through them as you would on an iPod or similar device?

I can get a freakin' movie on my dashboard, but I can't get my tunes the way I want them. Why?

Classical Music taxonomy and digitizing

squishy — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 16:33:58 -0800

Help me with digitizing and organizing my classical music collection! I have a metric buttload of amazing classical music CDs that have been collecting dust because I'm too lazy and unsure how to rip and organize them effectively.

I'd really like to send them all to a CD-ripping service, but I want to make sure that the cataloging is done well, and most services seem to just use Artist/Album/Track fields. Is there some sort of standard tag system for classical music? This one looks good, but I think it's just one person's thoughts, not necessarily a standard.

I have two SlimDevices Squeezeboxes and I've read that there's a plugin that can let you browse by custom fields, so it'd be nice if my collection's tags could play nice with that.

Currently I find it really difficult to navigate classical music on the Squeezeboxes, and in iTunes, for that matter, because you just don't have all the information. I get items like "Track:Allegro, Artist:Beethoven". Grr.

What are my best options, both for digitizing and for cataloging? If there's not a service that can do it all for me, is there good software out there for classical folks?

Make my music free!

Heminator — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:41:12 -0800

I want to buy an iPod Nano. This makes sense given that I already have 70+ gigs of MP3s all organized with iTunes. However, I also love Rhapsody which uses DRM protected WMA files that won't play on an iPod. Still, I'd like to be able to use a Rhapsody-to-go subscription in conjunction with iTunes and an iPod. Is there a way to make Rhapsody's DRM protected WMA files play on an iPod? I'm aware of solutions like Tunebite and output stacker.. But those involve re-recording and subjecting relatively crappy sounding music files to two layers of compression, making them even worse.

Just to clarify -- not doing anything illegal here, paying for a service, just want to get around the evil DRM. (Or am I somehow violating the DMCA?)

Several AskMeFi threads have danced around this question but not addressed it...

Question number 13802

EvilKenji — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 04:39:21 -0800

[IDM music filter] If you've ever watched an IDM group perform live, usually all they have is a laptop. What programs do they likely have running live performances? [MI]

Question number 12477

Napierzaza — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 08:01:49 -0800

I have a question that relates to the recent announcement about Reason 3. Reason is a intuitive and relatively simple (probably the easiest) software based music program. Is Reason and other programs making music production to easy? Has it been demystified? Coupled with the internet there is certainly a lot of electronic musicians nowadays.

I just have trouble when I think about it because I make music (with Reason) and I'd like to believe it's original and everything, but maybe it isn't.

I have a friend who makes short movies and he says that it has happened to movie making because of Final Cut and Premiere. But I can't imagine this is so because films are (or should be) complex and there are so many things that have to be done right.

Is the musician not special anymore? [+]

Question number 11581

PinkStainlessTail — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 12:02:36 -0800

I've got a bunch of wavs. I've got a CUE file that references said wavs. Is there a program that will take that CUE sheet and normalize the volume across all tracks before I burn them to a cdr? Nero can supposedly do it as part of the burn process, but I'd rather not waste the disc if I don't like the results. I could use a rewriteable disc I suppose, but I'm curious about finding a better way.