I've always loved the idea of our kids having a "first song;" a song they can tell their friends was the first piece of music they ever heard, a song which hopefully conveys a message to them.  I got the idea from my oldest buddy Kyle, whose dad remembered the song he first heard as a newborn.  Kyle had a cassette tape, the j-card in his dad's own hand, where that track had a big start next to it to denote the significance - I always thought this was a neat concept.

And with both kids, Keaton first and now Cohen, the songs I chose jumped right out at me without much thought - leading me to believe they've always been their songs and I've always known they were... they were just waiting for babies to be associated with.

The song that maybe always wanted to be Cohen's song and now can be is a standout from John Lennon's 1980 Double Fantasy album, "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)."  At first, when it popped into my head, I worried it might be too... "fay"... but after listening to it a few times and getting the  sentiment vs. testosterone "OK" when I queued it up for my brother-in-law those fears were put to bed.  It starts as a simple reassurance, a father to his son, after what might have been a nightmare - and develops into an awesome statement of how rad little boys can be.

Anyway, here then I present to you Cohen's song:

Cohen's first song: John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" from the Double Fantasy album, 1980.

Monday Keaton and I laid on the bed with Cohen and put this song on repeat.  I taught her the words and we both sang it to him over and over again, five times total.  Cohen was awake the whole time and listened to each go-'round of our crooning, a solid twenty minutes.

Guess he liked it.

Hey Friday, good to see you again... feels like a long time.  Let's hoist a drink to putting a point at the end of a fine week.

Again my days, each one, were overripe; swollen with work and not-work, stretching and bulging and going soft in spots.  In the end, though, things were good.  Work was rewarding in a way it seldom is, with several pieces of outright praise and formal acknowledgment; the kind of stuff that can keep a worker motivated for half a year or so (not to mention the kind of stuff that can give a worker a God complex and therefore needs to be basked-in cautiously).  Outside-work was evenings filled with activity... not a one left wanting for something to do (also something that can be a blessing and a curse).  Anyway, I expect the whole thing will lead to an exhausted collapse of a Friday.

Wednesday night Sharaun and I hit up the Black Eyed Peas show she won tickets to over the weekend.  While they're not my favorite act by any stretch, I can dig a few of their more melodic dancey tracks and have enjoyed seeing them live a couple times before.  In fact, the last time we saw the Black Eyed Peas Sharaun was pregnant with Keaton.  We joked that both of our kids will have "seen" the Black Eyed Peas in utero.  The show was OK but the free radio tickets were in the nosebleeds and the sound was sort of echoey and bass-heavy by the time it bounced its way up to our ears.  Plus the couple sitting directly in front of us had brought their kids, a ten year old and maybe a five year old, both little girls.  Seeing the little one out so late covering her ears and looking all mopey and bored while her mom bounced around ignoring her made me sad.

Goodnight.

Work continues to press close, choking out most of the day and leaving an orange afterglow around my mind well into the evenings.

Today at work I decided to limit the iPod's shuffle to all Velvet Underground. Sometimes, the alternate fey and noisy qualities of their "heroin rock" is just what the doctor ordered. As I indulged I remembered back to my first experience with the Underground. I imagine I was introduced to them in much the same way that most folks my age were - by picking up the soundtrack to the 1991 biographical movie about The Doors. Remember the scene where Morrison meets Warhol at the party? The song "Heroin" is playing in the background and, at the time, it was an odd a piece of music as I'd ever heard. I can remember it playing a large role in my pre-drugs teenage romanticizing of drug use. The song seemed to flaunt the fact that it was made to hear while one was wasted... and I felt like I was missing out. Anyway... it's more than drug music, and it was a good backdrop to my hectic day.

Tonight after putting Keaton to bed she called out from her bedroom, "Mom, when I get older and I'm a mom, what will you be?" Sharaun chuckled and answered, "When you're a mom I'll be a grandmother. I'll be your babies' grandmother." "Oh," she replied thoughtfully, "Then I'll have to cook food!" Sometimes I wonder what thoughts spur these kind of questions. She must really be laying in there thinking about the things that'll happen to her when she grows up. Earlier that night she told me that her friend Jake was her "best friend" because when she grows up she's "going to marry him." I can remember being a kid and looking at adulthood as something so foreign; purely incomprehensible from my then standpoint, like trying to imagine what it's like to be dead or a monkey or a woman. It must be super abstract to a four year old.

The baby growing in Sharaun's stomach is a super active one. She says he's moving and turning and punching and kicking and doing all sorts of comfort-impairing things inside her all the time. Keaton has grown quite attached to her swollen belly, kissing it and resting her hand on it and even talking into it to her coming baby brother. Sharaun and her have "decided" on a name they like and have adopted using it even in utero. I, on the other hand, am yet to be 100% convinced of the viability of the name and thus am the sole detractor amongst the family. This puts me in the "stubborn" category as far as Sharaun is concerned... but I'm not on the same wavelength this time around. "Keaton" was a slam-dunk, and I'm kind of hoping for repeat in finding another name we both immediately gravitate to. We'll see.

Goodnight.

Good Monday to ya, online friends.  Hope your Easter weekend was relaxing and whatnot; ours was.

For her birthday Keaton got a "toddler cookbook" from friends.  It has a small selection of fun recipes which kids can help with.  Since she and I have a history of enjoying cooking and baking together, we've been anxious to try it out.  So on Saturday morning we paged through looking for something to cook for Sharaun that evening.  We settled on cheesy bread rolls, which we'd serve as an appetizer, and chicken satay skewers, which would be our entree.  We told mom we'd be cooking dinner and even made up a fancy menu and lavishly set the table.  We went on a shopping trip together for a few ingredients we were short on, and then we set about cooking.

Even though it's a toddler cookbook, the recipes are fairly demanding in time and prep.  I actually liked it, because Keaton got an idea of how much time can go into creating something yummy.  We did the biscuits from scratch, kneading and rolling the dough by hand and then leaving the rolls to proof while we worked on the chicken.  She learned to how juice a lime, grate ginger, dredge chicken, and even stir a sauce while simmering.  She also learned that the cheesy bread roll sheet is hot when it comes out of the oven, and you get burned if you touch it (a good lesson, despite of, or maybe in owed to, the pain).  Anyway, it was a truly fun thing to do together and, as much as dad's opinion counts, the cookbook was far and away her best birthday gift.

If your eyes work and you feel like it, you can check out some pictures of the fine dining and prepwork just below.  Despite  her apparent absence, Sharaun was indeed the guest of honor and was there... she somehow just managed to stay out of any photographic evidence.

OK let us move along.

Ever since I told Sharaun that Black Eyed Peas tickets weren't in the budget this month, she's been on a quest to win them from the radio.  Her track record here is quite good, so I was pretty sure she'd actually end up scoring them.  She called all day long all week long, and I suffered an entire Saturday listening over and over and over again to same stinking seven songs that the stupid radio has in heavy rotation while she tried and tried again.  She even enlisted me to help, and I'd dial and hangup and dial and hangup and dial and hangup right alongside her when she'd hear the cue to call.  In the end, though, around 11:30pm that day, she (of course) did win the tickets.  I half wish the lottery did call-in shows; I'm reasonably confident she could win us millions if they only gave it away over the phone...

Check out her winning moment below:

When she decides she's going to win, she wins.
(direct link for those on mobile devices without Flash)

I really should start keeping an index of things that are given away this way... and have her start doing it more strategically... I think we'd have to start claiming winnings on our taxes.

Goodnight.

I've heard it said that there are three things which, in life, you should never want to see being made: 1) sausage, 2) hot dogs, and 3) laws.

I verified this yesterday by actually watching the House wrestle with this health care legislation.  Only, I watched on C-SPAN.  Minus all the commentary you get from the cable news outlets things become very procedural.  After watching the way these "adults" act, I can only imagine Mr. Robert rolling over in his grave.  Most people know that I'm one of those odd-duck, oil-and-water, socially-liberal, emerging church religious persons, so it won't come as much of a surprise that I'm happy with the way the vote went yesterday.  And since I don't want to mire us down here with politics, let's move onto something a little cooler...

Lately I've been pretty enamored with a couple albums, my second favorite of which is a freshman effort called Gorilla Manor by Californians The Local Natives.  There is a brilliant track on the record called "Airplanes."  Not only is it musically chill-inducing but the lyrics are poignant and relevant to what's been going on lately for me.  The singer sings the song (I love that that's a grammatically correct sentence intro) to his grandfather, who has passed away, and it's basically a statement of loss and anticipation towards one day meeting again "in the sky."  You lose the studio version's strings in this live performance, but what you gain in rawness is more than an even trade in for passion and power.

Man, the tiny imperfections present in live-performed harmonies are always super endearing to me...  Anyway I predict at least some part of this song will be on a commercial by year's end.  Seems to be a safe bet based on what's gone down with standout tracks from word-of-mouth "indie" records of late (I'm looking at you Grizzly Bear).

And that's all the writing I've a mind for this afternoon.  Sharaun's got another one of  her pregnancy migraines and is laid-up in the bedroom so I'm on Keaton-entertainment duty.  Today we planted garlic, pruned the grapes down to the strongest vines, and trimmed the old growth off Pat's hops to make room for all the new green that's starting to show. We also spent some time hand-watering the planters because Keaton loves doing it (the drip system is cool, but nothing beats hand-watering with your girl).

Goodnight.

There was a semester in college, sometime around my third year or so, where this record was everything to me.  I can remember listening to "Madame George" over and over again.  The parts of the song that sounded like nonsense, wordplay, syllabic musical accompaniment... were the parts that most amazed me.  Never have I read a review that so closely captured my own personal emotional response to a record more than did than Lester Bangs' famous essay on Astral Weeks.  Read it; before or after you read this - either will work.  But read it.

There were days in Gainesville in the kind of winter Florida gets where it was actually quite cool.  Even then it was usually sunny.   It's that combination of chill and bright that seems stuck in my head listening to this song.  The little fluttery string bits about a third in, wowing and hesitating underneath.  If you've never heard this 1968 album, you owe it to yourself to buy it.  When you do, try and get some time to really listen.  Try headphones.  Try somewhere removed if you can.  If not I suspect it'll adapt to your surroundings anyway.  Why, though, am I writing about Astral Weeks?

Tonight the choice seemed inspired.

Sharaun arrived in Florida after midnight east coast time.  I'm so glad she finally decided to go.  The first thing she said to me from there was a tired, teary admission, "Not being here has given me a false sense security."  It will be a tough next couple of days being apart from her and hearing her upset.  I tried not to cry when she told me how real things have become to her since getting there.  It's not that I want to seem unflappable or strong or brave; I think it's more some fool man notion around conveying a sense of calm.  There will be a time when I'll go wailing right along with her, I'm sure of that as sure as I love her grandmother as my own.  Tonight wasn't that time though.

Astral Weeks is not a sad album.  It's all shimmery and freckled with emotion almost giddy.  But over all it's contemplative.  Tonight is all about contemplating.

Part of me wishes we would've all gone.  Not being there it truly is easy to misunderstand the gravity or reality of things.  Nothing substitutes for experience.  Sharaun said she wished we were there with her; said she thinks it'd make things easier.  Maybe so.  On the other hand I feel like her having time alone with her family is important.  It's not an easy thing, "planning" in this regard.  Everything seems inconsequential by comparison and any rationalization feels callous or self-serving.  Start thinking maybe you shirked the one responsibility that's clearly definitive of humankind.  Nasty thoughts, gauging what you stayed back for; not thoughts that make a body feel real good.

Tonight the end of this record feels like sad prophecy.

Goodnight.

O what a productive Monday! No, really. No sarcasm to be found. Dust rose around my desk as I set up then knocked down to-do after to-do. Vacation tried to make me soft, but I came back with a heat in my eyes. I left the office dizzy at five, the sun already down past the horizon in this idiotic light-deprived time of year. Ruined bodies of undone tasks cast away in my wake, nothing more than bloodied shells of their one-time threat. Work lost today.

Sometimes I slow things down and just listen to my daughter's voice not for the words but the sound alone. The pitch, the timbre, the tone. Small and almost miniature feeling. But confident and well-versed for her age, her vocabulary seeming overmatched to the sound of her own voice.

Sometime in the earlier days of our dating relationship, Sharaun and I were going through a box of old things in her room to kill time. In there was an audiotape her folks had made of her reciting the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme around the age Keaton is now. I can remember thinking how amazing it was to have her voice on tape at that age... to be able to hear the youth of it and try to reckon it with the voice I knew at the time.

I think having heard that tape is partially why I record Keaton as much as I do. Even though we're really bad preservationists when it comes to video, we've got audio and still images down I think.

Yeah I love her voice. Talking, praying, singing. I just love it when she sings.

Too bad most of the stuff she seems to parrot is the Top 40 junk Sharaun listens to. I did, however, catch her singing the hooks to a couple catchy tracks the other night and made her repeat herself for the iPhone so I could capture the verses for posterity. Here, then, is our little songbird flexing her pipes on her own takes of some popular tunes. Enjoy.

Keaton sings the Black Eyed Peas' "Meet Me Halfway"
(direct link for those on mobile devices without Flash)

Keaton sings Alicia Keys' hook from Jay Z's "Empire State of Mind"
(direct link for those on mobile devices without Flash)

And yes, I do some minor editing for continuity's sake - she's not that perfect. But for really though, isn't that something to hold on to? I've locked it away in my head as a memory, but the aural reminder these recordings may offer in ten or more years will surely be acutely appreciated. I can't remember everything, you know. Humans fail.

Oh and before I go, a note about some small enhancements here and there to the blog. If you view any individual entry (not sure many regular readers do this, as, if it was me, I'd just be checking the homepage every so often or reading via RSS) you'll now see a list of other entries written on the same date in the past. With more than six years of blogging-past to exploit, I figure these "also written on this day" links might be a neat window into the past.

I also tinkered last night at getting a running list of what I've been listening to on my iPod for the sidebar, but gave up when it proved to be too stupid to deal with. Maybe I'll give it another go on an evening when I have a little more patience. Always looking to make this place more readable... shoot me any suggestions.

Goodnight.

Still haven't managed to take down the Christmas tree, although I did get the lights off the house before the rain came this week.  Not all the gifts are properly stowed away either.  Still work to do.

Speaking of work to do...

I almost had an honest miss of 2009 with this entry.  It's just that I usually do the year-end music list thing earlier in December, but I didn't this year.  In fact, I forgot all about it until I today.  I was sitting at work, listening to one of the albums shown below and thinking about how much it's grown on me in the past month or so... to the point where I'd probably rank it among the 2009 efforts I enjoyed most, and that's when it hit me: I'd not done my list.  Spent some time today to rectify that, and here is the fruit thereof.

First up, the almosts:
(click for more info)

Honorable Mention

And now, the real-deal.  I tried to go back and write some fresh content on the portion of these records I've already given accolades in my halfway post, but a careful comparison would reveal at least a little blatant plagiarism betwixt the twain (hard to come up with original thoughts on the same content twice, y'know).  Even still, enjoy.

10. The Most Serene Republic - ... and the Ever Expanding Universe

While not as immediately unstoppable as some of the MSR's previous efforts (which have all, unfailingly, ranked here on previous blog toplists) - the Canuck collective's latest release is nothing to turn away from. Still layered and dense and thickly sung by many voices, it still seems a tad bit dialed back from the all-out cacophony of their earlier stuff, and might benefit from being a little less unapproachable this time around because of it. For me, it may be that this band continues to do no wrong... but I liked this album from the first time I heard the first few seconds of the first song. Good stuff here folks; good, exciting stuff.

9. The Flaming Lips - Embryonic

Of all the records on this 2009 list, I got the least amount of time with this one. Released in October, and only really seriously appreciated by me beginning in December, it's a squeaker. But, even with the limited exposure I knew it had to bow here. I think the last Lips album I really dug was 1999's The Soft Bulletin. Oh sure, Yoshimi was listenable but wasn't anything I flipped over. Then again, the band has always been hit or miss for me - maybe because they seem to approach each record as a new experiment in what they can sound like. Sometimes I like the results, sometimes not. Well, ten years have passed since Bulletin and, on this album, they have an entirely different sound. It's a consistent new sound though: fuzzed-out bass punched-out by distorted rhythm and wandering bells, picked accents, and the familiar Flaming Lips "trippy" vocals and various random-sound accoutrement. Might be the closest we'll get to a modern-day reincarnation of Pink Floyd, if that makes you want to hear it.

8. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest

At the halfway mark I called this album "opium party music."  I stand by that classification. Made for lounging around on satin pillows letting lethargy drive an academic listening. It's no secret that "Two Weeks" buoys the record from a broad-appeal perspective, or that the rest of the tracks dazzle more through subtlety than fireworks - but there's a wall-to-wall beauty of perfectionist production here that demands intent listening throughout; even after things seem to "slow down" off the high that is "Two Weeks." And yes, I'll admit that I just plain don't like "Dory" at all... but that's no reason to shun this sparkly, sometimes slow, quiet beast. With each perfectly placed strum or beat or whisper, it proves it deserves the spot.

7. Wild Beasts - Two Dancers

Oh Wild Beasts, how far you've fallen.  Mid-year, you were #2... and here you are finishing at #7.  What happened?  Now look... this album is still super-fantastic.  It's still seductive, slippery, effeminate, growling, dirty, teasing, young, and dripping with aural sex. It still has the same plucky harmonics, sparse woodblock percussion, and should-be-offputting-but's-instead-entrancing female/male range of the lead singer.  It's even still got one of the best lyrics of the year in, "This is a booty call; my boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your asshole."  So what changed?

Back then, I'd just then discovered the record and I was simply enamored.  As the year wore on I realized that it was merely #7 good, and that other bigger and badder records more rightly deserved the #2 spot.  But hey, a spot in the top ten ain't nothing to cry about.

6. Islands - Vapours

I don't know why, but I didn't like this album immediately. On first listen, I was disappointed that it wasn't such an instant pleasure they way all previous Islands/Unicorns records had been to my ears. Maybe this is because I read a review online that called it "safe" compared to their last effort (which also charted on last year's personal "best of"); perhaps I let that influence me too much. But then Ben commented offhandedly that he was really digging it, and I gave it another go. Lo and behold, on repeat listens, my fondness for the sometimes slower, more plodding and deliberate Islands sound grew and grew. So yeah, maybe less wild or spontaneous in some ways, but let's think of the new-found structure and brevity as "development," OK? If you try this record, I'm convinced that you, too, will end up digging the plucky keyboards, marching synth percussion, and, as always, the instantly recognizable vocal styling.

5. The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love

What can I say about this record that won't make you automatically write it off as just some pretentious concept album? Oh, that's right: nothing. That's because this, moreso than any loosely cohesive so-called "concept" record of the last few years, is indeed a supremely pretentious album-length story-arc. A shamelessly complex tale starring a multi-character cast built on the foundation of Meloy's trademark wordy, arcane songwriting. Through a hefty dose of "thou" and "wilt" and "irascible," you're treated to a classic tragedy involving a maiden, a shape-shifting animal-man, a wicked forest queen, and... uh... yeah...

And, as much as that whole mess above might turn you off (and believe me, Sharaun could barely bring herself to listen to this thing after I'd ranted and raved about the story and concept), the music on here is just piss-pants brilliant. Thematically tight, brilliantly instrumented, and entertaining throughout, you'll want to hear the album if only to dismiss it as trying-too-hard smarmy art-rock.

4. Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros - Up From Below

I'm trying to recall where I heard about this record, but can't. I do remember that I downloaded it simply because I liked the name of the band... sounded intriguing. Turns out the music sounds like the kind of stuff a bunch of proto-hippies might make if they decided to up and leave LA, move into a bus in the desert, and make music as a collaborative sort of commune-thing. Sounds like that because that's exactly what it is. And while there's no one named Edward Sharpe in the band, you might recognize the lead singer's voice from his previous work in Ima Robot. Bottom line though, this is great 60s-ish roots-rock with doses of psychedelia. Worked great in Mexico in sunny warm weather, and would be a fantastic driving album. It'll remind you of other things at times: Arcade Fire for the modernists, maybe Jefferson Airplane or even early Bowie for the classicists. See, something for everyone.

3. Phoenix- Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Back at mid-year I had bone to pick with the "breaker-upper" that is "Love Like a Sunset."  Since then, though, I've actually learned to appreciate the turned-down track as a sort of "naptime" in between the unrelenting saccharine of this record. Phoenix has ranked for me in previous years, and back then I wrote about them that, "Every summer deserves a summery album. Like a sweet, dripping ice-cream cone, It’s Never Been Like That plops perfect little circles of melted goodness all over your favorite Hawaiian shirt." And, aside from that being a pretty decent descriptive sentence, the underlying statement works for Wolfgang... too.

I want to bring this album back in time with me when they invent the machine; use it as the soundtrack to the saccharine over-emotion of a tweenage bout of puppy-love. The smiley songs could bounce along like a mirror image of my infatuation-fueled heartbeat as we held hand for the first time. Does that make you want to hear it? It should.

2. Mew - No More Stories/Are Told Today/I'm Sorry/They Washed Away//No More Stories/The World Is Grey/I'm Tired/Let's Wash Away

Mid-year to year-end and Mew jumps four spots to take the silver medal.  Quite a move.  It's a well warranted uptick for this record, however.  As the year went by, I realized more and more what a frontrunner it was.  I'd find myself going back, back, back... over and over again to delight in the wash of keyboards and guitars and that oh-so-indie falsetto.  But what are you, reader, going to hear if you go snag this album?  I've heard the style of music called "space pop," but I have no idea what that means.  To me this is something like "modern prog."  The stuttering tempo of the peppier tracks recalls classic Yes, ELP, and King Crimson, while the dreamier slower stuff sometimes reminds me of the downtempo full-chorus stuff turned out by Canadian mutli-player collectives like Broken Social Scene or Most Serene Republic.  But maybe that's just me.

Oh, and, after writing my own reviews of these albums, I always go to some "respected" music site to read and compare  my thoughts with their formal review.  I was quite happy this time around to see Pitchfork name-check King Crimson in their someone-got-paid-to-write-it review.  I promise I didn't cheat.

1. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

What more can I say about this album?

People have written about it to death this year.  So have I.  If you're not an Animal Collective person, you'll likely never share my appreciation for it.  Sometimes I even wonder to myself, "Heck... am I really an 'Animal Collective person,' or am I just caught up in the internet lovefest for this band?"  But, be it true love or crowd-influenced love, it's most certainly love.  More than any other effort from 2009 I find myself coming back to this one again and again and again.

I understand you might think it's not "music."  It's too experimental; too repetitive.; too dense.  Yeah it's all that, it really is.  It's out of my comfort zone too.  So really, I don't know what happened with me and this album.  Perhaps it is some sort of mass hypnosis, but it was fully seeded and completely germinated in my brain if so.

I'm not even going to talk about the music.  It's been done enough.  Hands-down, though, this is it.  #1 for 2009 beyond a shadow of a doubt.  I drank the Kool Aid; you should think about it.

And that's it folks.  If you haven't heard any of these records and want to, go buy them.  I recommend using Amazon's MP3 store over iTunes, as you get DRM-free downloads you can take with you and load onto any device in the years to come.  Or, head on over to your favorite pirate downloading spot if you feel like risking prison rape.

Hope you're setup proper for 2010.  We're as ready as we can be.  Ten years married and a second youngling on the way and we're pointed heavenward as much as possible from this cluttered Earth.

Goodnight.

There's something about Christmas songs. Well, the traditional ones.

By "traditional," I guess I mean the ones you'd expect to hear in church. Songs like "O Come, All Ye Faithful," "What Child is This," "Angels We Have Heard On High," and, most of all, "Silent Night" knock something loose inside me. If they're sung right, these songs can illicit the most striking, unbidden, emotional response from me. Especially "Silent Night." A well-done version of that song and I'll have trouble holding back tears. I don't know why this is, or how the association got made in my subconscious, but it's for-sure there. This Sunday at church they did a run of mostly these holiday tracks and my chest swelled as I sang along. There's just something about Christmas songs.

Ahem... do I get to keep my man-card? OK, moving on then.

We're supposed to get our car back Wednesday, but if things aren't looking good I'm going to rent a vehicle to get us through Christmastime while my folks are here. Something of comparable size to the out-of-commission Acadia, on the off chance we want to do something as a family while my folks are in town (in my head I see us doing a whole lot of nothing, but you never know). The bill came to $6,000 or so of damage... although it was all superficial and the body shop says there's nothing wrong with the underlying chassis of the vehicle. All the same, I'd rather it never had been in an accident, let alone just a few months after we'd gotten it. But, such is life. We can roll with it.

As predicted, work has slowed considerably this week. As the holidays approach there are less and less cars in the parking lot each morning. By Thursday the place will be a ghost town. All this makes for and environment that's 1) very quiet, uninterrupted, and work-conducive as well as 2) hard to stick around long in, even being super productive. The desolation and thoughts of everyone else being at home enjoying family or a good book just makes a man want to cut-out early and call a few hours work "good enough." Maybe, since things come so easy in the silent solitude, I can justify a few hours work as equal to a busy interrupt-drive day's full eight hours? Yeah... that's the ticket.

Goodnight.

After I wrote all this mess, I decided to break it out from the regular day-to-day stuff that makes up the bulk of sounds familiar, just to spare the typical audience from something they likely wouldn't be interested in.  But for those who may get down with the music/audio/technical junk, here's some.

Well folks, I thought I had it all.  A while back when I got the new 2009 Beatles remastered catalog in lossless FLAC format I figured I had the best sounding version of the stuff to be had by humans. I was even super happy that I was able to losslessly transcode the FLAC files into Apple's own lossless audio format for pristine playback on the iPod (I know, no comments about my 6G iPod Classic's crappy DAC or sound quality in general here, please).  Anyway, put short - I was pleased that, on my portable device, I had the best-sounding versions of the Beatles' records you could get.

Then EMI (not Apple, and the subtle distinction is important here for Beatlemaniacs) goes ahead and releases the entire catalog again in digital format, via a special USB key, and this time they offer a "24 bit"  lossless FLAC option.  What does this mean?  I dunno... not a lot unless you want me to get way technical... oh wait, you do?  If you wanna skip the techy stuff, move forward to the very last paragraph here ("Goodnight") and just know that the 24 bit version is, for some scientific reason, better than what I had previously.  For the smarty-pantses out there...

Regular readers tuned-out?  Gone?  Good.

See, normal, CD-quality tunes have a bit-depth of 16 bits per sample (a sample being sized as 1/44,100th of second).  Higher-definition audio, such as DVD-quality audio, often comes at at an increased bit-depth of 24 bits per sample, and a smaller sample size (sometimes 48 kHz, sometimes 96 kHz, sometimes as much 192 kHz).  If you're nerdy, you can think of it as an analog-to-digital thing, trying to take enough discrete points of digital data to accurately represent a continual analog sound.  The more often you "record" the analog sound, and the higher "resolution" in which you make the recording can be thought of, respectively, as sample-rate and bit-depth.  (And for the real nerds those last two links are to a couple far-better explained Wikipedia articles on the subject.)

Anyway, EMI's straight-to-digital release upped the Beatles catalog ante by offering the lossless files in 24 bit format (albeit still sampled at 44.1 kHz, which some maintain is akin to a cliffhanger ending in a summer blockbuster... leaving open the door for yet another "upgrade" to a higher quality version of the set at a later date).  Oh great; this now means that my heretofore "best quality" 16 bit files on the iPod are, in fact, now trumped.  And while folks will argue with me about an iPod's ability to, with any noticeable difference in sound quality, reproduce 24 bit audio... I of course want to get these new recordings on my trusty portable device.

Problem is getting 24-bit FLAC files converted over to 24-bit ALAC (m4a) files - using Windows - hasn't historically been the easiest thing in the world. At this point in time, it's rather trivial if you're in the MacOS environment, but quite a bit more tricky in a Windows environment (especially if you prefer open-source stuff or you're not overly-anxious to spend money on a pay-for piece of software to do the task).  If you're a Mac person, you've got XLD or Max at your side and'll have hardly any issues getting high-def stuff onto your iPods (provided you're stubborn like me and want to do it regardless of whether or not the playback quality warrants it).  If you're a Windows user, you're options are significantly more narrow.

However, I'm here to report my personal success in the hopes that others out there may share in it.  See, just last week the venerable application dBpoweramp released a version of their great conversion software that supports encoding of 24 bit Apple lossless files.  What's more, the software does the conversion in a batch format, from the original directories, in mere seconds, and it's completely free for a 28 day trial period - no strings attached.  Wonderful.  And, as a check, the final files imported into iTunes show 24 bit / 44,100 Hz as expected (and I'm sure would match the sampling rate on a 96 kHz file as well).  Losslessly perfect!

For what it's worth, as long as you can get files encoded into an Apple container, an iPod classic will indeed support 24 bit playback (I have the 6th generation 160GB, your mileage may vary).  And, even with the internet, it's pretty hard to nail down the sampling-rate limitations... but from experience I can tell you my 6G classic has no issues at all with the 24 bit / 44.1 kHz Beatles ALACs.  Apparently, however, the iPod does have a sampling-rate ceiling of 48 kHz, and reportedly trying to load anything sampled at a higher rate than this onto your iPod will cause iTunes to spit it right back (yet my Apple TV is able to play 24 bit / 96 kHz files via the optical output, which is fantastic).

So for me, I'll ignore the audiophile mantra of "you'll never be able to tell on the iPod anyway," delete my old 16 bit ALAC files from the iPod, and go with my newly-FLAC-transcoded 24 bit / 44.1 kHz ALAC versions of the Beatles' catalog for portability.  I mean, even amongst all the stuff I read online about the quality of the iPod's DAC, there's reason to believe you might be able to tell a difference.  But at home, I'll try loading the ALACs onto the Apple TV and playing them back via optical to the surround system for the "best" listening... (since I don't want to have to buy one of those mega-expensive iPod DAC bypassing docks/transports anytime soon...).  Anyway, I've said it before: I'm no audiophile.  I obsess about it, but, when it comes down to it, I can't hear the difference.

Anyway, if you're a Windows user and dBpoweramp worked for you, you'll likely end up like me and buy it despite doing all you needed to do with it long before the free trial expires... I mean, it's worth it  - and down the road when more stuff comes in higher-definition format you're gonna want to be able to re-encode on the fly anyway.  Drop me a line if you had luck with it, or go buy it... whatever.

I got some Beatles to go listen to...

Goodnight.