The sound of music

My elder daughters both play piano and flute, and have the shared use of a piano and a flute between them. So far that’s worked out really well, but contention for the flute has been getting difficult, and is getting worse now that they are both starting to talk about joining flute ensembles and the (same) school orchestra.

Meanwhile our youngest will start junior school this year, and will also be offered music lessons. Fortunately she wants to play something (anything?!) different to her sisters, but this means finding yet another instrument for her. We’d been starting to think about what we could do about this, when as though by magic, everything came together this weekend. My eldest daughters godmother mentioned that she had a flute that she no longer used, which she was happy to lend to “J” long-term, and a clarinet came up for sale through our local church at a very reasonable price.

So on Saturday I went to visit “J”s godmother to collect her flute. I had a great time too… Kirsty lives just far enough away that it’s difficult to just pop in, so I’d not seen her in several months. We spent a great morning quaffing coffee and chatting about everything and nothing, before going out and grabbing lunch together. It was just like the old times. It’s hard to do things like that now that we’re all so busy with work and families, but this convinced me that I need to make an effort to spend more time with my friends – it’s too easy to let it slide for too long.

Meanwhile my beloved wife had been persuading talking to our youngest about the clarinet, and playing her some clarinet music to see if she liked the sound of the instrument. Fortunately she did, so by the end of the day we became the proud owners of a rather beautiful Yamaha clarinet, for an extremely good price. Her school offers clarinet lessons, so with a little luck we’ll be able to get her enrolled in those when the autumn term commences. We’d like her to learn the piano too, but with three piano players in the house now I’m hoping that we can at least get her started on that with some informal lessons from within the family.

Saturday evening and much of Sunday the house was filled with the sound of flutes as my two eldest tried to play some pieces together. A job for this week is to find them a book of proper flute duets to play. Meanwhile our youngest has started learning the fingering on “her” clarinet, and can already extract a series of notes from it. It occurs to me that when the kids finally start leaving home, it’s going to be very much quieter around here. I’ll miss it.

Silver linings

While waiting for the details on my cancer, I seem to have ended up with a lot of time on my hands. I’ve not much work on at the moment, what I do have I’m working through quite quickly, and no-one expects me to take on any new tasks given that I could be imminently off work for 3 months or more.

So I’ve found myself kicking my heels somewhat. Which is definitely a mixed blessing. It’s nice not to be under additional pressure from work, but it does leave me a lot of time to start imagining the types of scenario that frankly, its better not to think about. So I started looking at the honey-dew list for some things to do, until I realised that the reason stuff was on that list was because it all required lots of planning and effort to complete. Ie, no short-term tasks to speak of.

So I finally got around to one of the boring tasks that has been sat on my personal “todo” list for nearly a year now, and digitised my entire CD collection. It’s not as though I actually have that many CD’s – no more than a couple of hundred or so, but it’s still taken several days of almost continuous effort, feeding them into the CD drive, ripping and encoding them.

The original plan was to put them all onto my home server so I could then play them back through my Squeezebox “classic”, and never have to mess with the physical CDs again. Of course, since then time has passed, and I’ve realised I also need those same tracks on my laptop, on my phone (which I use as an mp3 player) and on my kids MP3 players & laptops. So, the question was, what format to rip to?

In theory my Squeezebox supports MP3, FLAC, OGG, WMA and PCM/WAV/AIFF audio natively (ie, without needing transcoding) plus a whole lot more via transcoding at the server. So FLAC was the original “obvious” choice, simply because it is whatever the CD was, and didn’t put any transcoding load on my server. However, compression isn’t as good as the lossy algorithms, and support on hardware devices is patchy. So despite being the biggest archive, I’d still need to maintain extra copies to allow all my playback devices to be supported.

So in the end I’ve ripped everything to MP3 using LAME’s “V1″ option, which gives me ~240kbps variable bitrate encoding. I know its not as good as FLAC, but when I compared the original CD’s to the squeezebox playing back the rip, I honestly couldn’t tell the difference. And I’m saving so much storage space that I can even afford to easily maintain a second copy of the music, transcoded down to a lower bitrate for the phones/mp3 players etc where storage really is at a premium, and the 240kbps rips are too large.

Interestingly, there were several of my CD’s that are starting to exhibit signs of failure … and this is not scratches … rather the actual disk seems to be perishing in some way. Fortunately cdparanoia managed to retrieve all the data (though in one case it took it over 6 hours to do so!) but the original claims for CDs of perfect music lasting forever are clearly not holding up in practice.

Anyway, I finally spent most of today fighting with “EasyTAG”, which whilst not in practice as easy as I hoped, did allow me to get the tagging sorted for all my music relatively quickly. And I’m amazed at the breadth of CD information contained within FreeDB … it knew every CD in my collection, including some short-run private pressings from very small niche artists. Amazing what a big enough cooperative effort can achieve I guess.

The nice thing about having done this, is that since it’s so easy to dip in and dip out of my music collection, I’m finding that I’m listening to stuff that I’d probably never have chosen if I’d had to go find the CD, put it in the player, etc.

Software:
Grip (front-ending LAME and CDParanoia) and EasyTAG under Ubuntu.

The amazement of parenthood

Today my eldest daughter got the results of her recent piano exam, a pass, but only a few marks shy of a merit. She’s been learning for just on 3 years now, and took her ABRSM Grade 5 exam (from a standing start) a fortnight back. She was incredibly nervous, but controlled it, went in, answered all the examiners questions, and played her three pieces beautifully.

As someone whose musical talents roughly extend to pressing “play” on the squeezebox remote, I find her talent and abilities quite simply unfathomable. But I am incredibly proud of her too – she worked hard for this, and deserved the good result.