I don't know if you all paid attention to the stories about OurMedia, the Internet Archive-sponsored initiative to provide free hosting for Creative Commons content. It's a nice idea, but I tried to use it to host the Polyphonic Spree-related sound files from the post below, and the experience was so buggy and tiresome that the related post ended up even less entertaining than it otherwise would have been. The registration system didn't work right the first two times I tried it, their client-side uploading tool didn't upload the larger file to my account properly, and I'm still waiting for the smaller clip to go live. Yeesh.

So screw it. Instead, I just put the files up on this server and used CORAL, a free content distribution system provided by NYU. I won't bore you with the details, but the ten second summary goes like this -- take some URL:

http://www.zunta.org/some_directory/some_big_imaginary_file.zip

and change it like so:

http://www.zunta.org.nyud.net:8090/some_directory/some_big_imaginary_file.zip

And CORAL will magically pick up the bandwidth bill for distributing that file. They've got a bandwidth limit, but I'm sure it's big -- Slashdot leans on CORAL from time to time to prevent the destruction of sites it links to. Not sure what their IP policy is, but you might want to have a look at it before you start up that MP3 blog you just thought of.

You'll still burn some bandwidth as CORAL periodically fetches the file from your server, but all in all it's a pretty slick solution. Worth a look if you've got something big to distribute that doesn't merit a torrent.

say you were planning a concert to do with your -ist blog. just, you know, hypothetically. and say it were taking place at the black cat backstage, featuring a couple of good, local bands. say you had NO FREAKING IDEA what to name this concert. the name should be brief, funny, and maybe punny on DC and/or the music scene. any ideas? anything involving capitol, district, and/or blog puns should be acceptable.

Here's a story about how amazing technology is.

First up: the internet. Going through my daily work-avoidance kata, I found myself ambling through this blog's archives after going looking for something and getting lost. Eventually I stumbled across a review of a Polyphonic Spree show that I wrote a while ago.

That put me into a mood to listen to their latest CD, so on the walk home from work I started playing it through piece of technology number two: the Etymotic earphones that Catherine gave me for my birthday. Then a curious thing happened. Thanks to those little wonders, I heard something I had never heard before. On the final track of the CD (the title track -- "Together We're Heavy"), around the 2:36 mark a woman's voice starts whispering into your left ear. It's very quiet. Too quiet to make out the words.

So after getting home I fired up my copy of Goldwave, grabbed the MP3 off of our music server and started trying to extract the whisper.

Turns out it's a lot harder than they make it look on Alias. I tried a bunch of things, but the most successful seemed to be to throw out the right channel, run a bandpass filter to only keep frequencies within a range that (mostly) included the whispering, then normalize the track to bring the volume back up. Whispering is a nasty thing to extract, though. It's all sibilant and high frequency, with a broad frequency profile and (so far as I no) no one fundamental frequency. It also features occasional bursts of low-end that can't be chopped off without losing a lot of information. If a friendly audio engineer is passing by internet way I'd love to hear what the proper way to do this.

But, for now, this is all that I could come up with. By way of comparison, here's a snippet of the original. The whispering is more isolated, but it's still damn hard to tell what the hell is being said. I can't really make much of it out. I think it begins with "before anybody began ... created a giant banana ... the joint was filled with ...". Yes, I'm perfectly serious. Sounds like a Polyphonic creation myth to me, but I'd love to hear other theories.

I haven't forced my addled ears to listen to much more of this considerable segment of whispering, but if anyone feel like giving it a try, help yourselves.

fyi - decemberist tickets are on sale this thursday at 10 a.m. the show is may 6. anybody interested? if their live act is anything as enjoyable as a) colin meloy's solo show or b) their adorable video for 16 military wives, it'll be fun.

update: CMJ has a feature/interview/review thingy with the decemberists here. (via chromewaves)