Topic: Tounami Diabate's Boulevard de l'Independance & extending WMP for FLACs

[Cobra951]

Thanks to the controversy over "Tapha Niang" (the 8th track on this album) and Little Big Planet, I now have a new artist to listen to and follow.  I can't stop listening to this.  I think it's fabulous.  I was already partial to the tonalities and rhythms of African music.  This guy adds something I don't recall ever hearing before--the kora, a 21-string lute that sounds like a mix of guitar and harp.

If you look "out there", you'll find decent VBR MP3s and FLACs.  Due to the complex harmonics of African choirs, I recommend the FLACs.  Because of their audible superiority with this music, I finally found enough motivation to search for solutions to WMP's limitations.  I was shocked to find that it's easily and fully extensible to FLAC.  Here is a FLAC Direct-Show filter, and here is a tag-support extender.  They work beautifully.  Now FLACs show up in my WMP library with all fields present, and of course they play just fine.  Yay!  I think I'm all set for OGGs and M4As too.  I already have filters for them, and WMPTSE handles them.  Oh, and AAC too.  Cool!

[Quemaqua]

I'm curious, but not curious enough to take the time to hunt anything down just yet, mostly because I suspect it won't be my cup of tea.  Still, I'm curious.  Music is something I used to engage in so much more frequently, and these days I just don't have the time for it like I used to.  Which is a real shame.

[Cobra951]

The image is a link to an Amazon page, where you can preview music excerpts. 

[Quemaqua]

Aha!  Perhaps my laziness will be swept away in the ease of previewing then.

 ... interesting.  Definitely not my cup of tea, but oddly enough, it seems like a perfectly quirky fit with Little Big Planet.  But yeah, this is more or less the sort of world music that I can't stand and have grown to hate mostly because of how frequently it seeps into other forms of music that I do like.  That isn't to say I hate all of it or all facets of it (Wasso, for instance, I thought sounded awesome, along with all the tracks that followed, whereas the stuff prior I thought was wretched), but... yeah.  I'm... musically complicated.  Interesting to hear, nonetheless.  I still wonder about his use of the quote, though.  It doesn't seem to make sense in the aural context of what we're listening to here.

[Cobra951]

The problem with the World-music category is that it is way too broad.  It basically means music from somewhere else, particularly if it doesn't fall into a locally recognizable category.  Most popular music is somehow influenced by African music.  That's nothing new, and it's particularly true for Latin-American music--my music. 

Fair enough.  I know your tastes are very different from mine.

[Quemaqua]

I wouldn't say that.  Honestly you and I like a lot of similar stuff... we just branch off in directions that are foreign to one another.  I don't care for *directly* African-influenced music, such as stuff with a heavy Latin vibe.  I don't really care for Latin jazz most of the time (though I can't say I don't like it *all* the time, and there are some artists who use it in interesting ways that I happen to enjoy from time to time), but I'm a huge fan of jazz, which has a lot of roots in African music, particularly in the mechanical sense.  And by an extrapolation of that, some of my favorite metal does rhythmic stuff that has roots in African music and jazz, even if you couldn't directly identify those roots just by sitting and listening to it as a casual observer.  Music's odd that way.

[scottws]

Thanks to the controversy over "Tapha Niang" (the 8th track on this album) and Little Big Planet, I now have a new artist to listen to and follow.  I can't stop listening to this.  I think it's fabulous.  I was already partial to the tonalities and rhythms of African music.  This guy adds something I don't recall ever hearing before--the kora, a 21-string lute that sounds like a mix of guitar and harp.

If you look "out there", you'll find decent VBR MP3s and FLACs.  Due to the complex harmonics of African choirs, I recommend the FLACs.  Because of their audible superiority with this music, I finally found enough motivation to search for solutions to WMP's limitations.  I was shocked to find that it's easily and fully extensible to FLAC.  Here is a FLAC Direct-Show filter, and here is a tag-support extender.  They work beautifully.  Now FLACs show up in my WMP library with all fields present, and of course they play just fine.  Yay!  I think I'm all set for OGGs and M4As too.  I already have filters for them, and WMPTSE handles them.  Oh, and AAC too.  Cool!

You know I have to chime in any time formats are concerned...

I stopped pursuing FLAC.  It's the most popular lossless format, but I'm not really sure why.  It must have something to do with the fact that it's open source, and also partially due to the fact it's decoded very quickly in comparison to some other lossless formats.  However, it isn't a quick compressor.  To compress quickly, you give up quite a bit in reference to packed size.  I like TAK.  It's similar to FLAC in many ways, but it compresses way faster meaning you can select the higher compression settings and still have it complete the compression relatively quickly.  TAK doesn't do multichannel yet, but I don't use that anyway.  Support for FLAC is definitely way higher than TAK, but it's not like FLAC support is universal either.

BTW, M4A = MP4 = AAC.  Sorta.  MP4 is a container format, usually containing AAC audio and H.264 video, though it can have one exclusive of the other and still be an MP4.  It can also have different audio and video formats, but this is somewhat unusual.  Apple created the M4A, M4V, M4B, and M4P file extensions.  They are all standard MP4 containers.  The extension just indicates what's in the container.  M4A = audio only.  M4V = audio and video or video only.  M4B = audiobook.  M4P = M4A with Fairplay DRM (might be M4V and M4B too, not sure).  I guess it's easier to program against... parsing the filename to determine filetype rather than having to look at the container metadata.  You can have AAC files by themselves, but this is not common.  AAC doesn't have a tagging format in its specification; it's just the audio data.  Tagging is handled in the MP4 container, generally.  MP4 doesn't have a tagging format in it's specification either (that's a whole other subject), but has the ability to store several tag types.

[Cobra951]

*Smacks head*  I knew that.  I knew MP4 audio, M4A and AAC are the same thing.  I don't know what I was thinking when I posted that.  I guess the excitement of the moment lopped off some IQ.

I had not even heard of TAK.  APE is the only other lossless format I knew about.  Well, now there's WMA lossless as well, though I have no experience with it.  I have yet to try encoding to any of these formats.  With hard drives getting into terabytes, I guess that's the next logical step.

[scottws]

I got something called MAREO.  It's a pseudo-encoder you plug into EAC.  Then that runs both the Nero AAC encoder and the TAK encoder for each song so I don't have to rip twice to get both formats.

Edit:  Wow, I found some really bad grammar here.