Thursday, March 05, 2009

Interesting mp3 trivia and other stuff

Just read this at Wikipedia:
Suzanne Vega's song “Tom's Diner” was used as the reference track in an early trial of the MP3 compression system, earning her the distinction of being the Mother of the MP3. It was chosen because her a cappella vocal with relatively little reverberation was used as the model for Karlheinz Brandenburg's compression algorithm.Brandenburg heard “Tom's Diner” on a radio playing the song. He was excited and at first convinced it would be “nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice.”  [referenced here -- ed.]
Been catching up on discographies of various artists in my collection to see what's been going on since I lost track of them.  When I got married, settled down, bought land and a house, had kids, and so forth, my expendable income for luxury items like music albums pretty much vanished.  These days I have a little extra cash that I can spend on such items now and then, so I'm starting to investigate how much catching up I'll have to do.  Vega has released only two studio albums since the last one I bought in 1996.  That should make it pretty easy to catch up with her.

On the other hand, Michelle Shocked has been very, very busy.  Two other female musicians I need to catch up with are Enya and Kate Bush, but I don't think they have been all that busy, either.

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