harry for the holidays

Feb 4

SeanMiscellaneous , Comments Off

amy and i went to the harry connick jr. — harry for the holidays concert on monday. actually we went to the tuesday showing as well, amy is a big fan and i picked these tickets as a surprise christmas gift.

i was very impressed with his concert. not only were each of the concerts unique but they kept you watching and tapping your feet. one of the things that most impresses me about harry is that he doesn’t have the ego that so many other performers do. during both of his shows he gave the stage to many of the musicians in his big band and they were knock outs. the first evening the drummer performed a solo playing on the piano. yea, he didn’t actually use his drum set, he played his sticks on the top of the piano. not only did he use his sticks but his palms, knuckles, and elbows. there were also performances by his trumpet and trombone players we well.

another thing that i noticed about the concert was how much the lighting affected the impact of the songs. i found myself really engrossed in the songs and really experiencing the words. it hit me during the concert how well the lighting matched the mood of each song. stage design is a subtle yet important part of so many performances and i don’t think any of the previous concerts i had attended had taken it to the level of detail that the harry connick jr. concerts did.

if you’ve never seen a jazz concert or any other concert for that matter i highly recommend that you check out harry connick jr. the next time he’s in town.

out with mp3 in with aac

Feb 4

SeanTechnology , 1 Comment

i’ve successfully converted my collection (2500+ songs) of 256 kbps mp3’s to 192 kbps aac. it’s essentially mp4 if you look at the standard, except that it’s more advanced thus it has more benefits. it has improved compression which means that i get the same or better quality as my mp3 and it takes up less space. typically, a cd of mp3’s imported at 256 kbps was taking up about 120 mb. with aac i get the same high quality sound in only 80 mb. that means i can fit more songs on my ipod. aac also supports mulitchannel audio, higher resolution audio (rates above 96 khz), and improved decoding efficiency (i.e. your machine isn’t pegged when you importing). i was able to take my collection from 18 gb of space to 16 gb. of course while i was reimporting all of my audio i found a bunch of cd’s that i wanted to add in so now instead of having 2500 tracks i have 3000 tracks in the same space. not to shabby if i do say so myself.