the music is what I wrote, Leonard-Cohenesque endless whining for life, harmless, fateful, nonsense. Please note that while MP3 is capable of brilliant crystalline CD-like quality, here I have striven for the encoder level “broken AM radio”, a work still in progress — but then again, since I got my Muvo and listened to them with headphones, it’s not so bad! ... After all, I recorded them with headphones; I didn’t bother with any stinking near-field monitors or whatever the pros use. ... So, to experience the true Owen Music Experience, you might try listening to them that way.... Now with All New Improved Broken AM Radio Sound! + Smaller Files! (See discussion below; actually it’s more like “Broken Tape Recorder” now — an occasional burble, perhaps unnoticeable to one unfamiliar with the music, but otherwise surprisingly presentable.... Also of course 2 instead of 3 meg!) ... Well look here these poor folk what for years provided access to my legions of fans at http://owenlabs.iuma.com — well they fell on hard times, and turned to the dark side. Downloads didn’t work, although I can’t be sure; maybe the site was just falling over. But to finish it off, they emitted pop-under ads and worse, probably deploying spyware. ... Well they’re better Wednesday, January 25, 2006; no pop-unders. ... But the download was about 2K/sec, useless. ... Ah it was sweet while it lasted; fortunately in the interval, AT&T has discovered untold realms of extra web space, so we’ll go back to the way the Deity intended and provide individual links for each song. You can download those (right-click, “save link as”) to listen at your leisure, or for all I know clicking or double-clicking will stream them; the earth moves beneath our feet even as we ponder. ... Well actually that works pretty-good on our giant big pipe cable modems; only a few years ago these MP3 files used to be so big, and now they’re just a few megabytes. ... ... I wouldn’t want anyone to think I don’t appreciate Iuma’s efforts; after all, I’ve been thrown off Geocities. And back in the day of the dot.com frenzy — and for a time afterwards! — Iuma would send me these pitiful 54¢ checks so I wouldn’t sneak off to a competing MP3 community. ... So anyway, this page contains thoughtful commentary, pictures, life-story, tech notes, etc. — and now, once again, as it was before, genuine links to MP3s!

home	JGX THE DISK DESTROYER

freight (right?) click me

This c&w number’ll get your feet a tappin’ and your hand a reachin’ for the razor blade. Synopsis: The artist argues with God-like beings. • Words & music copyright © 1992 j.g. owen

hello (right?) click me

Stat stat this guy needs resuscitation; this is so cheery it makes freight look positively gay. Our story so far: The artist interrogates himself or perhaps harmless strangers. • Words & music copyright © 1986 j.g. owen

1. You can do it when you will; I don’t know why you stay here still. You feel at home in empty rooms; you don’t want to leave too soon; you know everything so well. 2. e d c e I don’t have a tale to tell; I could never make it sell. And I always thought it ends itself; I never knew I’d have to help; I never knew you very well. 3. I didn’t know what you would do; I always thought we’d see it through; you said we’d have to wait and see; and now you’re finished and we’re free. 4. You and I, we’ve had our fun; but the game is gone ... it’s done. We know the moves too well, it’s done. I know the rules too well, I’ve won. 5. Where are you going to go? You know I’ll miss you even though you told me stories every time; but I loved your every line; and I believed you every time.

6. But who knows what is true? It all depends on what you do. It all depends on who you know. Starting with me I suppose. 7. e d c e Do you think we’ll meet again? Have a drink before the end? Tell the same old well-worn lies? Dream a dream, have a cry? Do you know how to say goodbye? 8.g g e d c e? Who are you waiting for? Who will promise something more? Who is waiting with a prize? Who will always hold you tight? Who will be here in the night? 9. repeat 1 more or less::::: I can do it when I will. I don’t know why I stay here still. I feel at home in empty rooms. I don’t want to leave too soon. I know everything too well.... (right?) click me

vietnam (right?) click me

The artist discusses with his brother the latter’s war service; a conversation that never occurred in real life and almost certainly couldn’t’ve, at least not sober.... Then again of course it may have occurred.... Anyway it’s my political song, and also a sad object lesson in the abuse of compression. • Words & music copyright © 1980.

The Messenger (right?) click me

The artist stops arguing with strangers, relatives, and deities, and complains about his girlfriend, apparently using a microphone from Woolworth. • Words & music copyright © 1988, 1989 j.g. owen

anyway (right?) click me

Well he’s back to arguing with God; this is that existential despair you’ve heard so much about, here it is in living broken-AM-radio stereo sound. Bottom line: The Devil has the people by the throat in the American Century. • Words & music copyright © 1990 j.g. owen

Tales of the Tapes Freight exists in the form of two cassette copies [//actually it turned-out in some past rehearsal of this nonsense I had archived things on minidisc]. There’s a Cakewalk file somewhere which is supposed to play with a Fostex R8 tape containing song pointers or some bizarre MIDIism, but the poor R8 hasn’t been feeling well for a while, and has been replaced by a Roland VS840ex which will probably react poorly to 1/4’’ tape. So I recorded the cassette using the ever-faithful Goldwave program, and then had Goldwave compress it to MP3. The result sounded like the poor artist was singing in a well. After much cable checking, it turns out that my powerful great Compaq 5140 has phase reversal [//?] on one line-in channel. Fixed in a trice with Goldwave, producing the exciting broken-AM-radio sound linked-to above. // Ooops; wait a moment ... The Well ... Around 4/19/2000 8:38 am [wednesday] turns out this unfortunate well was deeper than I thought, Compaq perfidy worse than imagined. It wasn’t phase-reversal; somehow the incoming sound has its out-of-phase elements emphasized in mysterious ways. I “discovered” this — actually it haunted me for a while — when I saved something to mono MP3, and it pretty-much disappeared; which behavior is characteristic of a stereo source where some idiot has reversed the phase on one of the channels, as I had been doing to “fix” my artist-in-well problem. That is, (1.) the Compaq chose to emphasize out-of-phase elements in the original stereo source, much of which was my Alesis Microverb™ reverberation; like many such cheapy units, it “fakes” stereo reverb by playing phasing tricks; and (2.) I “fixed” the problem by reversing the phase of one channel, which would cancel-out much of the over-emphasized out-of-phase reverb. Unfortunately it was also sending the mono elements 180° out of phase. Idiotically I guessed it was something to do with cheapo AD circuits where I gather they might switch the input real quick to avoid needing two of the things — but wrong yet again!.... Anyway, I trundled my minidisc over to another computer with an actual $16 sound card I had purchased for it as a special treat, and the echoey well it was without — although I still thought I could hear some; actually I think I hear it in my dreams sometimes now.... So I was all ready to build a wonderful mono control to adjust incoming stereo, and maybe figure-out how to shoot the Compaq sound (motherboard of course) and treat it to a fabulous $16 sound card — I was this close (the soldering-iron was hot, and I had drilled-out the rivets on a tiny antique control box with the appropriate RCA receptacles) when, playing with stupid software controls, I found the fabulous Compaq spatializer©™®%#^%@*!!. That’s start / programs / accessories / entertainment (!) / volume control / advanced, bottom of form. Imagine what happens if you leave that box checked? Which of course is the Compaq default? Can you can you can you? ... Yup; it’s the famous Artist-in-Well effect! So handy, so helpful.... I had actually gone to the trouble of obliterating the Aural something 3d special Compaq effects software, suspecting the giant computer manufacturer was trying to torture me as it has done so many times before — but I killed-off the wrong software! ... I finally discovered all this when I checked the “monitor recording” box on another screen; I suppose the idiots who build this junk figure if the guy is trying to monitor the input, he might get huffy at giant echoey A-in-W effect.... Monday, March 27, 2006 1:47 pm. And then, in a 2004 (?) XP emachine, I found the Artist-in-Well effect again! Here it was “control panel / sound effects / sound effect” tab; “Environment” box has a drop-down on the left with “speaker / headphones” and, on the right, “Generic” — but I’m sure it’ll be completely different on your machine. ... Just be warned that apparently every crate has this wretched “feature”. ... I spent a few amusing minutes trying out “concert hall” and “cave” before setting the stupid thing to “generic”, and I must say it’s the same old Radio Shack cheapo bucket brigade echo-chamber effect (I actually have one of those!). ... Amazing!

Well, that was harrowing.... So the source for Hello is in even worse shape, only existing in the form of a j.g. owen MIDI file; that is, years ago I wrote my very own software to make these synthesizers dance and sing from plain old ASCII files such as are found around the house, and that’s what’s left of this brilliant musical score. The text up there is from a comment in the file. Some form of this software first saw the light of day in a CP/M Kaypro // or, wait!, perhaps it was that giant MP/M machine, even older than the Kaypro? I think I used the serial ports on that one, the printer port on the Kaypro.... // Nope I actually just went and looked at my source for the “dynabyte” MP/M machine (“midiout” in C:\GREGOR\DYNADIRS\C01MIDI\MIDI.MAC) — kept here, along with the entire 20-megabyte hard drive, in a tiny corner of my endless 30-gig — and it’s definitely sending MIDI to the “Centronics port” as it puts it; the Kaypro must’ve used the serial port.... Of course! The Dynabyte serial ports were incomprehensible since they were part of the operating system — the multi-user terminals of course were connected that way, so I had to use the printer port, which it more-or-less left alone.... Anyway as it turned-out in the fullness of time, there was a minidisc all the while, from which, for instance, the Freight cassette was made, and henceforth I’ll use this digital source. The other songs are in similar condition, each in its own way; but in these latter days, when perfectly functional PCs are virtually raining from the sky, I may yet set up an antique system with the old software in it and make it sing again! ... The Burble Was Me, Not MP3! Around 5/15/2000 2:02 pm [monday] realized odd blips in the MP3s were in my original WAV file, presumably because idiotically I ignored all the solemn warnings to close your windows while recording. In particular I probably had a DOS window or two open and running my precious DOS-based OwenView file whacker! The ignominy of it! // Well actually later intensive research suggests you should make every effort to turn everything off. There’s a program ENDITALL somewhere on the web which might help, although I finally broke down and wrote complicated batch files using another program I found “KILL95” (which I hacked a bit) to accomplish the requisite sterile atmosphere which seems to let these things work best. (And note I’ve never recorded at the 44k standard, sticking to 22k to avoid rousing the bats....) But then I only noticed (because it exaggerated what had been low-level burbles) when I used ... Ta-Da! ...

The PeakLimit Program: It makes WAV/MP3 louder. A kindly German concocts useful programs around http://www.sf-soft.de, and Peak Limiter (~$25) is one of them. It takes a waveform like the top and makes it like the bottom; obviously a fatter, happier, louder, waveform. I assume most pop music gets processed this way, but of course the 5 million music mags couldn’t be bothered. The “trick” is those little vertical lines in the top uncompressed sample (Goldwave pictures); those are momentary peaks. In the old days, you’d crank up your volume anyways, and nobody’d care as the thoughtful tube circuits obligingly squashed that stuff mostly unnoticeably. Digital makes very ugly noises if you do that, so you must keep the level below all peaks, no matter how short-lived. What Digital taketh, Digital giveth back, when it feels like; Peak Limiter does what thousands of tube / transistor / analog compressors have done in the past, but it does it much better, probably because at the least it has the advantage of seeing the future (it processes a file, and can look ahead as far as it wants). Whatever, Peak Limiter produced a good-sounding version of the file with a 2x higher average level. This of course is always desirable, to overcome acres of noise introduced by MP3 processing, and then the 3-inch speakers and abominable reproduction systems of the average music consumer. And of course, I can hear masked bits of burble in the louder output.

So ... How to Record Music for the Web with Tools Found Around the House, like a Windows 98 Computer At least, how I recorded it.... These instructions were officially obsolete some years ago, but I figure they may still be useful as a vague indicator of how much trouble you can get in. Get music into a WAV file. Moderne composers will work directly in WAV (or some easily-convertible digital format); old doddering fools will have various media filled with existing music. In the latter case you get a stereo cable that, on the computer end, would typically have a mini-stereo plug, and would be plugged-into the line input of your sound card. The music end, where your original sound is at, is up to you. If you don’t have a sound card, you’re doomed (recent computers have the stuff built into the motherboard; you could buy a sound card, but if you have to do that your computer is probably too old to be much fun recording music). In any event, you have to figure out the software that controls the sound card hardware, some of it “built in” to Windows 9x, i.e. typically incomprehensible; good luck. • You probably need some additional software; I use Goldwave with the Lame MP3 encoder, which is cheap/good shareware (these days the free Audacity is probably a good choice also). • Close all windows while recording; turn-off screen savers. Etc. • You have to be careful to not exceed maximum digital levels when recording; any such overshoot will make very annoying noises. When in doubt, record at a safer lower level. • Record short selections and test them; play everything back, listen carefully, make sure it sounds right; I failed repeatedly at this step. • My pitiful songs were all, startlingly, about 5½ minutes long, producing 30 meg-or-so WAV files (producing ~2 meg lo-fi MP3), and that worked OK on my 8 gig hard drive. But I recorded them at only 22kHz, not the regulation 44 — since only bats can hear that other stuff.... Just in case anyone actually reads this, I want to re-emphasize the Audacity alternative, which I used recently, on the same machine where all these exciting events occurred now so long ago, and Audacity seemed much better at recording without blips and in numerous other ways; I just have to click the red button, for instance, to start recording; Goldwave still insists you setup a long-enough file. ... I found Goldwave still easier for doing things like saving in lo-fi MP3, and in Audacity you’ll have to “export” the music to a WAV file for processing by other programs, i.e. Peak Limiter.... Process the WAV file with something like Peak Limiter. Programs more elaborate than Goldwave may have this stuff built-in (although I doubt it, at least after all these years I haven’t detected such). ... The point is, after you were so careful to avoid recording too loud to digital media, or even if you contrived the stuff entirely digitally, you typically have a recording with soft parts. This of course must be avoided like the plague. • I think you want to “normalize” your maximum volume to less than 100%; something like 80%. I used 100% (and recently, 90%) and the resulting MP3s (still!) sound too distorted at the loud parts sometimes; I think maybe you have to leave a little “wiggle” room for the processing? ... Yes in recent activities I noticed the waveform depicted in one or another sound program was obviously peakier after MP3 processing — which makes sense kind-of at least compared to jpeg processing, where when I think about it they obviously reconstitute all the elements to “simplify” the image — and, by analogy, with MP3 compression processing, one of the important elements would be amplitude, although if the MP3 DLL were smarter it’d probably be more careful about peak levels.... So you save the resulting WAV material into MP3 files (I used Goldwave with the Lame MP3 encoder). • I saved to 16Khz/40 kbits flavor MP3, which resulted in 1.5 megabyte files from ~5½ minute/30 meg songs. Faster rates ==> much better fidelity, bigger files.... Then of course remember to use SETID3 or something to tack harmless copyright drivel/web sites etc. into files — like I forgot.... Then laboriously create your own web page; I get free pages with my $10/month at&t account, and I have no complaints about them; if you weasel around in there, you can get 150 megabytes! Then you upload your stuff, presumably using your giant cable pipe. And that’s it! Within days, talent scouts from distant lands will appear with buckets of money. — the dubious electronic musician Monday, January 15, 2007 12:31 pm

Gadgets: Goldwave is mentioned above (and Audacity); also Peak Limiter. • I found “Id3 edit” on a $10 CDROM, and it lets me edit the “tags” on the MP3 with my name, web site, email address, etc. so I can make $zillions when my grateful listener strikes it rich; many other such programs are floating around, including command-line versions so it can be done in a batch file.... Of course, no player actually displays this info — unless you right-click and beg or something.. • MP3 Recording: Goldwave wouldn’t record MP3 until I got it a DLL; there are two flavors, BladeEnc and Lame. These guys are typically on the lam, as giant monopolistic record companies — who for some reason object to us stealing their music and strewing it across the web — throw lawyers at them, and I wound up going to a German site somewhere around www.mpex.net/software/details/lamedll.shtml to get the Lame offering, which has something to do with Linux and, apparently, is much better than BladeEnc. I discovered this only after laboriously encoding everything the first time — also, of course, with the fabulous A-in-W effect (see above) so precise technical evaluation awaits reincarnation in a better world. ... If you try hard enough, both packages come with a DLL and an EXE version, which will encode on the command line all by itself. • Copying lame_enc.dll into the Audacity program directory enabled MP3 “export” for that program I think. ... Finally, if you like really bad MP3 try this, a 60k section of freight with an 8k “bit rate” — whatever that means; if only these programmers could speak! ... It’s so bad, it’s good; it’s like independent space-alien flute players have joined the ensemble.... Brand Name Complaints and Recommendations for music products I am hardly an expert, but I am also not a suck-up magazine, so I can write what I think, based on nearly complete ignorance leavened with a little experience.... I probably won’t buy another Korg or Fostex product. Actually I still have a giant Fostex-branded mixer which is OK, my Fostex R8 reel-to-reel tape recorder, aside from the plastic wheels falling-off in the end times, also came equipped — extra price — with a totally useless undocumented MIDI / synchronization unit. These were gadgets that were supposed to record a sync track that at playback time could send MIDI timing signals so you could play your MIDI orchestra in sync with a recorded vocal or whatever. I suspect none of these things worked; anyway, I never got one to work.... My Korg Poly-800, one of the early MIDI synthesizers, was apparently their practice model, which I kind-of resented when they released a working version later. I’ll probably buy something through Musicians Friend again someday — but I’ll be very careful to keep all paperwork. I bought an admirable Yamaha electronic piano through them, but the unit was left on my back porch in a almost-destroyed cardboard box. I didn’t buy anything from them for months but then, in a moment of weakness, tried to purchase a cute tube amplifier on sale, and they literally shipped me an empty box — and even after I made them take it back, they tried to charge me for shipping. ... So they must be watched very closely. Good guys? Roland often costs more, but I would say they have a conscientious attitude towards producing products that work. I bought a few Behringer toys and wasn’t disappointed. ... I don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed by Yamaha or Casio; for keyboards, I think Yamaha’s a little better. — the old philosopher Monday 3/19/07 2:35 pm

“God sees you but he understands” — an antique store plaque, in America