Darkoshi

A little something to make you smile, maybe.

Luckily not all of the things mentioned in the song apply to me so far, but several do!

I am still working, really!, I just opened Youtube to turn on some background music.



Video title: Chamomile - Gangnam Style Parody Song for us Older Ones!
Posted by: Shirley Șerban
Date posted: 2025/03/05



This is what I'm going to be listening to:
Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals *FULL ALBUM*
My clock radio played the last song, "Red Cave", this morning. The sound was special and intrigued me about the rest of the album.

That's happened a few times lately. Google Sound Search comes in very handy to identify the songs. Twice, it was able to identify a song based solely on the last two seconds of the song (when I was slow to open the app), with only the winding down sounds of the instruments - that seems so amazing (especially with audio from an over-the-air radio which has a certain amount of static rather than perfect digital sound quality).

One of those other songs is worthy of mention here too. But it is not light-hearted so I'll leave it for possibly another time.

I got a strange voicemail in Chinese on my cellphone from the number 202-495-3793 (a Washington, DC area code). It's a short official-sounding recorded message in a female voice, with a simple musical tune in the background. (I like how the Chinese language, being tone-based, is itself melodic even without the music.)

I was curious as to what the message said, so I saved it to an audio file on my laptop. Then I opened Google Translate in the Chrome browser (the option for translating from audio / microphone input is only available in Chrome, not Firefox). The page's text input box has a microphone icon in the lower left that you click for it to start listening. But first you need to select the language; it won't auto-detect when using the mic input. Then I played the audio file.

The translating didn't work very well. I tried it several times. Mostly, it didn't recognize any words, and showed no output. A couple of times, it showed the following output. This is only a small portion of what was said:
Zhongguó zhù mei dàshi
Chinese Ambassador to the United States

But I'm not even sure that much of it is correct. In the audio, I can hear "Zhongguó zhù" at the very beginning, but not "mei dàshi" after it. Maybe that is from a different part of it. It's spoken so fast that I can't tell.. I do hear "shi" a few times but not sure about the rest.

I tried again and this time got:
Zhongguó zhù mei dàshi guan
中国驻美大使馆
Chinese Embassy in the United States

Zhongguó = China
dàshi guan = Embassy

I also tried playing back the recording at 2/3s speed, in hopes that would let Google Translate hear the words better. But it did not help.

Hum, this is sort of fun: Try to say Chinese sounding things and see what it translates to. But you have to click the mic to stop and restart in between, as otherwise it seems to output the same thing over and over again. ("No no no")

I seem to have learned how to say "China" (Zhongguó) pretty well! (But I doubt I'll remember it.)

Ah, in my trying to read "Zhongguó zhù mei dàshi guan", it instead translates it to "The beauty of life".

But I tested translating from me speaking German, and it translates that very well! I can hardly say anything that it doesn't understand! Even with my not-so-great speaking voice.

Yesterday, I was inspired to continue the task of converting my audio cassettes to MP3 files. The longer I postpone it, the more the audio on the cassettes may degrade, and the more likely that the equipment I've been using to do the conversions, will break.

I had already converted all 26 of the cassettes that were official purchased albums. The remaining ones (45 to 50) have music that I recorded from the radio or which other people sent me. The former were simpler to do than the latter (which I'll call mix-tapes even though that term may not be accurate). With the albums, I simply recorded each side of the cassette onto the computer as a audio file, applied noise-reduction, then split the large file into a separate MP3 file for each song.

Right now I am recording the remaining cassettes to audio files, without yet doing any further processing on them. 15 cassettes are already done, leaving about 30 more. I could finish them in another week or two if I keep at it.

Then I'll eventually have to decide:
Should I keep each long 45 minute file, without splitting it by song? That is how I used to listen to them, and would keep the original experience. But some of the songs I really don't care to listen to anymore.

Splitting the files by song would require much extra effort. With the albums, there was silence between each song, and software was able to split them with minimal manual effort. My "mix-tapes" don't have the silences, and they have many more clips per side, all of which I'd have to manually split.

Once I split the songs, I'd be tempted to delete the ones I no longer care for, and to find better versions of the ones I still really enjoy. But the "lower" quality cassette versions of some songs still have a special nostalgic quality, which higher-quality versions simply can't replace. So I'll end up with multiple versions of those.

I think I'll do this:

Keep the full long versions of each cassette for archival/nostalgic purposes.
Also split them into individual files, and keep a full copy of those files just in case I ever want them.
For the remaining songs which I still enjoy listening to, put them in folders where my random-play MP3 player will be able to pick them up.
For the songs which I especially like and don't already have other versions of, see if I can find better versions online to purchase.

I have embarked upon converting my audio cassettes into mp3 files.

Found a working cassette player. Check.
Found a spare audio cable. Check.
Decided which program to do the recordings with. Check.
Adjusted my laptop's microphone settings. Check.
Figured out how to apply noise reduction to reduce hiss on the recordings.

Now I can't decide if I actually should apply the noise reduction to the songs, or not. The music sounds much cleaner after the noise reduction. But compared to the noisy versions, it seems to be missing something. I can't figure out if the noise reduction is removing some of the important high frequency sounds of the music along with the noise. Or if it's simply that my cassettes have always had a background hiss, so that I am not used to the songs without that noise being there.

.

I also have a CD version of one of these songs I recorded from this first audio cassette. The quality of the CD version is totally different from the cassette versions. Yet I can't say that the CD version is definitely *better*. They're just *different*. The cassette version is perhaps more nostalgic, as I heard this song on cassette more often than on CD. Yet, when I first heard the song on FM *radio* back in the 1980s, I wonder if the sound quality was more like the CD version than the cassette version? Perhaps the cassette versions even sounded better back then, before they were partially degraded by time and repeat playings.

It's very hard for me to tell the difference between an MP3 file encoded at a constant bit rate of 64 kbps and the original WAV file. Using foobar 2000's ABX comparator* on John Williams' "Duel of the Fates", I found one small section of the track where I could discern a very faint difference between the 2 versions. With 2 other songs, I couldn't find any sections where I could tell a difference.

With a constant bit rate of 48 kbps, I can tell a slight difference compared to the original WAV.
With a constant bit rate of 24 or 32 kbps, the difference is pretty obvious.

Considering the above, and considering that LAME's V9 variable bit rate setting is nominally 65 kbps, it makes sense that I can't tell any difference between the V9 VBR files and the original WAV files.

And yet V9 is LAME's lowest quality VBR setting. V0 is the best quality, at a nominal 245 kbps.

It puzzles me that some people can discern a difference between the V0 and V2 settings. Their hearing must be phenomenal. Or mine must be really bad. I know that I'm rather tone-deaf, but I didn't think that my overall hearing was bad. Maybe it is because I'm getting old and am missing out on various high notes.


*along with my headphones, or my computer speakers

For Christmas, Qiao got me an 8GB MP3 player with a microSDHC slot and a 16GB card. Now, I've embarked on the task of converting/ripping my collection of 300-odd CDs into MP3 files. My old MP3 player was only 2GB, so till now I never bothered ripping more than a few of my favorite CDs.

First I had to decide what quality and bit speed settings to use. Based on several tests*, using various speakers and volume levels and different songs, I can't tell any difference between the quality in tracks at 128 kbps vs 320 kbps. I decided to use 256 kbps.

I am using EAC (Exact Audio Copy) with the LAME MP3 encoder to do the rips. It has a fairly simple interface (once it's been configured, anyway) for retrieving the freedb song/album info and album artwork.

When I think about it, it would be nice to be able to play songs based on certain criteria. I'd like to be able to rate each music track, for example from 0 to 10. And then I'd like to be able to choose to only play songs with a rating of 10 (in a random order). Or to play songs with ratings in a certain range such as from 5 to 10. Or to play all songs from 1 to 10 randomly, but weighted so that the ones with higher ratings are more likely to be played than the ones with lower ratings. And I'd rate a song as zero if I never wanted the song to play unless I manually selected it. Unrated songs could get a default rating of 5.

I still have to finish reading the MP3 player's manual, but I doubt it has that kind of functionality. But maybe some computer-based audio players do? It would be nice if you could store your ratings in some standard format, so that they could be used no matter what player you were using.

* foobar2000 along with the ABX Comparator component lets you switch back and forth between 2 tracks in order to compare them. This video explains how to do it.