Friday, September 29, 2006

Baroque Ornamentation & Why PC > MAC for audio

I made a recording of Bach's Invention no. 3 and added it to my site today.

From a musical perspective, the inventions are usually delivered to very early piano students (a year or two of study). As such I used to regard them as "easy". After many years, I can finally appreciate the fact that these pieces are absolutely unforgiving. It's not hard to get the notes, but it is extremely difficult to get the touch, style, phrasing and ornamentation correct. Revisiting the ornaments, I'm trying to play them as slowly as possible rather than as fast as possible: I feel that taking some time with them helps to add some tranquil grace to the piece.

In any event, I am growing more and more dissatisfied with my Mac PowerBook. This is a machine that is supposed to be perfect for the multimedia user. Instead, audio quality suffers from the lack of available inputs. I had to buy a special USB adaptor to use stereo audio inputs. This level of distortion in a $64 input is completely unacceptable. Further, it has been my understanding that ".mp3" format is pretty much universal these days. I had to convert my output file three times and fiddle with a bunch of advanced settings in iTunes to get this from garage band through .aif to .m4a and finally to mp3. I thought this was supposed to be easy? Maybe I'm just used to Sound Forge on my old PC. Oh how I miss thee.

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