Entries tagged with music

Entry tags:

short takes (link round-up, mostly)

Pesach has been going well. Tonight/tomorrow is the last day, which is a holiday like the first day was. Yesterday Rabbi Symons led a beit midrash on the "pour out your wrath" part of the haggadah; more about that later, but it led me to a new-to-me haggadah that so far I'm liking a lot. (I borrowed a copy after the beit midrash.) When I lead my own seder (two years from mow, I'm guessing?) the odds are good that it will be with this one.

Tangentially-related: a short discussion of overly-pediatric seders.

Same season, different religion: researchers have found that portion sizes in depictions of the last supper have been rising for a millennium, though I note the absence of an art historian on the research team.

Same season, no religion: I won't repeat most of the links that were circulating on April 1, but I haven't seen these new Java annotations around much. Probably only amusing to programmers, but very amusing to this one.

Not an April-fool's prank: xiphias is planning a response to the Tea Party rally on Boston Common on April 14: he's holding a tea party. You know, with fine china and actual tea and people wearing their Sunday (well, Wednesday) best. It sounds like fun.

Edit (almost forgot!): things I learned from British folk songs.

From nancylebov: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality looks like it'll be a good read. Or, as siderea put it, Richard Feynman goes to Hogwarts.

Real Live Preacher's account of a Quaker meeting.

Thanks to jducoeur for a pointer to this meta community over on Dreamwidth.

I remember reading a blog post somewhere about someone who rigged up a camera to find out what his cat did all day. Now someone is selling that. Tempting!

In case you're being too productive, let me help with this cute flash game (link from Dani).

Entry tags:

brain trust,
music

how do you tag your MP3s?

MP3s ripped from CDs or bought digitally (usually) come pre-tagged, including "genre". "Genre" has an eclectic set of options including folk, rock, soundtrack, children's, Christmas, gospel, international, electronic, and electronica/dance, to name just a few. Some CDs of Jewish music came tagged as Christian (!) or gospel, and I changed those to Jewish (a new category) at the time. An MP3 can have at most one genre (hence options like folk-rock, I guess).

Some of these genres are orthogonal to each other. Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds", "Pirates of Penzance", and "West Side Story" are all soundtracks, but they are not similar musically. Children's isn't a genre; it's an audience or application. "Nowell Sing We" and "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" are both Christmas songs, but they're not the same at all (I would sort the former with "early", another category I had to invent because "classical" just doesn't fit the middle ages and renaissance). (Ok, I wouldn't have the latter in my collection, but work with me here...) I have no idea what the difference between "electronic" and "electronica/dance" might be, and how the latter differs from "dance".

I think the makers of the tagging system conflated style and purpose. We're running into this a lot with international dance music (often dances are set to folk songs), or with everything from folk to blues to rock ending up together because they're "Jewish", or SCA dance music being scattered across "SCA" (this must have been a custom category for someone), "dance", "classical", "folk" (?), and probably others. And I'd like to be able to tag the subset of folk music that is children's music (for selective exclusion), without losing its folk-ness.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the correct way to do this is to use "genre" for what it is musically and some other tag for usage (if it has a primary usage). Looking at the tags available to me in iTunes, it looks like I should use "grouping" for this. (I've never seen this field filled in, so I don't know what conventions surround it.) So early music is early music and some of it might be grouped as "dance", folk is folk and rock is rock and some of each might be grouped as "Jewish" (or perhaps "Jewish liturgical", since that's what I'm really after), and the Hebrew folk songs that are used for Israeli dances would "folk" (genre) and grouped as "dance", and so on. (Maybe we want to distinguish SCA dance and international folk dance; that's an implementation detail.) But before I try to do anything along these lines I'd like input: how do you capture multiple dimensions of your music? (Another option, just to throw it out there, is to use playlists as buckets. We're doing some of that but it doesn't feel sustainable to me.) I want to be able to find music by genre or by purpose, which says to me I want two searchable fields.

We are currently using the comments field to support tags iTunes doesn't give us. For example, there's no off-the-shelf way to tag the language of a song! So for the languages we care about we have entries in the comments field like LANG_HEBREW. We're also doing something similar to tag the Child ballads (TAG_CHILD_#_) so we can easily find the dozen variations on "Maddy Groves" scattered through the library. (Child ballads are a special interest of Dani's.) We're also using this field for meta-data about our own recordings (e.g. TAG_WEAK); "comments" probably isn't a good place for that but those were the first tags we added so we grabbed the obvious field and now we're kind of stuck unless we want to do a lot of work.

A problem with using "comments" is that you can't systematically add to a comment field, only replace it. So if we wanted to use it for other tags (like usage) and wanted to apply those in bulk, we couldn't without stomping some of our existing tags. Well, we could write a perl script, I guess, but I looking for something a little closer to the GUI.

So how do the rest of you track extra information? Or are we the most finicky among our circle of friends? :-)

Entry tags:

random bits

Purim was this past weekend. We continued the tradition started last year of having "Esther's banquet" after the evening megillah reading and Purimspiel -- adults-only, food, alcohol, study/discussion. This year we had about 50 people, I think, up from last year, which is good to see. Last year I had brought some homebrew along. I hadn't planned to repeat that this year because there hadn't been a lot of takers -- but then one of the rabbis, in announcing the event to the morning minyan, said "and Monica's going to bring her homebrew, right?", so I shrugged and did. I brought 12-year-old horilka (made with spiced brandy) and some mead, and both were very popular. (They polished off most of a liter of horilka! Last year they drank maybe a cup.) I haven't actually been making stuff for the last decade or so; I guess I should queue up some more horilka in the fall when cider is in season again. (The ingredients in horilka are unprocessed cider, honey, brandy or vodka, spices, and time. Thanks,

hlinspjalda!)

I talked with the vet today. The test of Baldur's liver function came back normal. As we were discussing next steps (the ones that could produce answers are dangerous), she asked me just what he eats. There's dry food out all the time and its rate of consumption hasn't markedly changed in recent months, but of course I don't know who eats how much. Baldur has ready access, though. He gets tiny amounts of tuna and canned food; basically he gets to lick the spoon when I feed such to Erik. Baldur wolfed down half a can of food in about 15 minutes at the vet's on Thursday, so my vet suggested giving him real amounts of canned food. I've generally avoided that because it's unhealthy, but y'know, he's 17 years old now -- am I really worried about him picking up bad dietary habits at this point? So I'll give that a try; he enthusiastically ate most of a can of food today (between morning and evening), so we're off and running.

I see that the post office wants to cut a day of mail delivery to save costs. I don't mind the cut, but I think it would be much better for us customers/taxpayers if they chose a day in the middle of the week, say, Thursday, instead of choosing a schedule that sometimes means four days between mail deliveries. I assume that giving up all their Monday holidays isn't on the table. (There actually is a segue from the previous item to this one: this morning I refilled a mail-order prescription for Baldur.)

Dani recently ordered some Israeli CDs, and the MP3 tagging has been strange. Two or three different two-disc sets tagged one disc in English (transliteration) and one in Hebrew, for instance. Sometimes song titles will be one way and performers the other. In one case we got gibberish, presumably a unicode failure or something, and Dani typed stuff in by hand. Any one of those cases wouldn't have surprised me, but mixing it up on the same recording is bizarre.

Entry tags:

talent show

My congregation's talent show was last night, and I thought it went really well. We had 14 performers (some individuals, some groups), three of them kids (two piano players, one violinist). A trophy was awarded by audience vote, and the ten-year-old violinist, who played really well, got it. I'm glad. Populace-vote systems have all sorts of problems, but fortunately, no one was really treating this as a competition and the winner performed very well, so it wasn't just that he was a kid. I'd estimate that there were about 200 people there, which is more than they were expecting. This was announced as our "first annual" talent show and the organizer confirmed later that yes, she has been asked to do this again next year. Yay! Maybe next year I'll get that Rossi quartet together. Or compose another song. Or both.

Material covered a pretty broad range -- show tunes, Yiddish songs, blues, jazz piano, baroque, old-timey banjo, and original poetry. One performer is a pro (someone said he sings with the Pittsburgh opera) and it showed. He didn't do operatic style (which I loathe -- can't understand the words and the vocal qualities are grating, though less so with basses I guess). He sang a couple of Frank Sinatra songs, very well.

My performance was very well-received; lots of people praised my singing, and I got lots of positive feedback for composing the song myself. ("I didn't know you composed music, too!" "Well, it's been mostly renaissance dance music and the like until now." "Um, ok." :-) ) The pianist told me he would like to play this again. I said that he is much, much closer to the decisions about what music gets done for services than I am and I hope he understands that it would be awkward for me to push at all. So we'll see. I also made sure he knows that transposition is a matter of a few keystrokes. (I'm betting that our cantorial soloist would want a different key.) The pianist also agreed to (later) give me some feedback on a few parts he found a little awkward to play, which I would definitely like to get. I had sent the music in advance with an invitation to do that, but he and his wife had their first child a few months ago so I don't imagine he's had any cycles to spare for that. (I asked if he is getting to sleep through the night yet and he said heck no.)

The pianist described the style of the song as "American" and "Reform" (he didn't elaborate), while a fellow congregant thought it sounded "renaissance". I'm not sure what it is, but not that last. :-) I would enjoy doing renaissance-style Jewish music, but that pretty much means choral works, not soloist stuff, so there are additional hurdles there. (We have a choir, but would they do work written by a congregant, or would that be all kinds of awkward if people didn't like it?) I wrote a singable (not "artistic") piece for solo voice and piano because (1) I could perform that in this show (I wrote the piece for the show) and (2) it has the best chance of future adoption. If it never gets used again well that's life, but I wanted to at least have the chance. The opportunities for a regular congregant like me to sing on the bimah are practically nil, so writing material that others sing on the bimah is as close as I'm going to get to sharing my work beyond one-offs like this talent show.

I understand that the show was being recorded; I hope to get a copy of that. Meanwhile, if anyone can point me to a summary "idiot's guide" to Garage Band or Logic Express toward the end of combining a MIDI piano track and my voice, I'll see what I can do. (I've played through the tutorial videos that Garage Band offers and worked through some Logic Express exercises from a book, but I'm not really getting it yet, and nothing has talked about real-time recording as opposed to just using samples.) I don't have good equipment, mind, but my USB headphones also have a mic that's at least Skype-grade. This would be so you could hear what it sounds like with the words as opposed to just MIDI instruments.

Entry tags:

I guess "it's only snowing a little" adds up eventually

My synagogue is having a talent show on Saturday night, in which I'm performing. (7:00, show + desserts, $10 adults/$5 kids, all welcome; write before Shabbat if you need more info.) We were supposed to have a rehearsal tonight -- blocking/coordination, sound check, and all that stuff. I had hoped to be able to post tonight saying how good all the other performances sounded. (I heard about half of them at the try-out session I attended and that all sounded quite promising.)

But it's been snowing today. It didn't snow a lot, though it's been steady. But it's been snowing a little but steadily for a few days, and tonight the roads are a little slick. So, no rehearsal. We'll take care of sound/logistics stuff right before the show instead. I don't think they would cancel the show on account of weather.

I'll be performing a new composition of mine, a setting of Psalm 113 (the first psalm in Hallel) for voice and piano. Well, I'm not playing the piano (for which you should be grateful); our excellent pianist will be accompanying people who want him to. I'll be singing. This is the song's first public exposure. (Opportunities for a second seem limited, but who can say?)

Entry tags:

music,
sca

SCA dance music: trip down memory lane

We have gotten to the SCA dance music in the digitize-the-music project. Last night, specifically, I got to the Tape of Dance, the tapes that accompanied a dance newsletter started by

jducoeur, then edited by me and Dani, and then passed along to others.

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

interviewed by shalmestere

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

sound editing on the Mac

Dani and I had been digitizing the albums and cassette tapes we still want that aren't available on CD. Then we both switched to Macs and things bogged down for a while until we figured out the new tool chain.

We're still doing the original ripping on a PC. This doesn't require real-time intervention, so the lag inherent in using VNC to connect to another machine doesn't matter. However, we needed to do something different on the editing side, as keeping a PC with direct monitor and keyboard connections around in addition to my Mac wasn't going to work.

Some of you gave me various recommendations, which I appreciate. In the end I bought Amadeus Pro for $40. The workflow is pretty easy: load WAV file representing one side of a tape or album; find the first track break; cut from beginning until there into a new file; edit that file (trim silence, fade in/out if needed); save; iterate. Once I have a directory full of WAV files, use the batch processor to convert to MP3, filling in most of the tagging as part of that process. If I have been clever enough to name the individual files 01.wav, 02.wav, and so on, I can feed file name (sans extension) in as the track number, saving a tedious step. So the batch processor can do everything except track name, which is fine. Finally, import into iTunes (in a "tmp" playlist created for this purpose) and type in the track names. Move the new tracks to the "to be verified" playlist. Done.

I can do almost everything in Amadeus Pro using keyboard shortcuts, including fade in/out. If I could figure out how to deselect without having to click somewhere else in the file, I'd be golden. I've used the program to do several tapes now and it's going very smoothly. This might even be faster than what I was doing on the PC (WavePad to edit, DAK software to batch-convert to MP3 (but no tagging built in), Tag & Renamer to tag, and then import into iTunes.)

We're just starting the early music now. For those who care, yes, Mt. Holyoke did eventually re-issue "The Medieval Lyric" on CD; they sell an upgrade for people with the cassettes. ("Upgrade" price excludes the books, which you are presumed to already have.) They have a web site but can't take digital orders, so we've just put an actual check in an actual envelope with an actual stamp. :-)

Entry tags:

random bits

I have book lust that I can't immediately satisfy. Imrei Madrich is a copy of the torah text that shows the root of every word. Because it's not always obvious, and it would be a big help. Google found me someone who wrote about it on a mailing list, but I haven't found anyone who's selling it yet. I guess I'll call the local Jewish bookstore and see what they can do for me. (Do any of you know this book? Should I be looking for it under a different name?)

Apropos of that, I love studying with both of my rabbis. It is so cool that I get to do this. With one (known as "my rabbi") I'm studying talmud (and occasional other stuff), and with the other I'm reading midrash in Hebrew and not completely sucking at translation. :-) (Though I still have a long way to go.)

Speaking of my congregation (sort of), we are having a talent show in January, and the song I'm writing/arranging for it seems to be going well. kayre rocks for giving me some really great feedback on the piano part. I was also trying to get a quartet together for a Salamone Rossi piece (the organizer encouraged me even though I'm doing the other thing), but altos (among congregants) seem to be particularly elusive at the moment, so that might not work out.

Also speaking of my congregation, we sell Giant Eagle gift cards at face value and get a cut. (I know other congregations do this too.) If you're local and inclined to help us out in this, and we see each other frequently enough for it to work out, I would be happy to turn your check made out to the congregation into gift cards. Just ask.

Speaking not at all about my congregation now, a question for the "Stargate: SG-1" fans out there: do we eventually get an explanation for why almost everyone on various distant worlds speaks English, or am I supposed to just ignore that? The conceit is that many of these folks are humans who were taken from Earth, but that was thousands of years ago. Just wondering, since this show doesn't bother with the conceit of a universal translator. (Which is fine, since the show that did didn't always use it correctly. :-) )

Entry tags:

music,
my synagogue

a musical possibility

My congregation is having a talent show in January (fundraiser). They're limiting it to five minutes per performance and congregants only, so I can't bring in On the Mark, alas. (I'm also not too motivated to spend 45+ minutes tuning the hammer dulcimer to concert-level precision for five minutes.) I told the person in charge, who was encouraging me to participate anyway, that a-capella solo vocals probably wouldn't be very interesting to audiences and she said our pianist would be available so long as we provide sheet music. Our pianist is really, really good, so that's an interesting idea.

I've been trying to figure out what to sing. When On the Mark was a possibility I'd been thinking of "Denmark 1943". I don't have a piano part for it, but maybe I could cons one up from what On the Mark did. But that idea isn't grabbing me. Then I thought to maybe do something by Neshama Carlebach, as she does some good music that often has nice piano lines (I assume I could procure sheet music), but again, specifics are eluding me right now.

Then it hit me this morning: I could compose something for voice and piano. It's a talent show, after all; let's broaden the definition. I've only done this once before (not counting arrangements for OTM) and I am not myself a pianist, so I'm not sure it'd be any good, but I've got some time to find out. (The last time I did this I had a professor critiquing drafts and making suggestions.) Now I just have to identify a text... (I want Hebrew; it needn't be liturgical, though it could be.)

I'm pretty happy with the one piece I did do, but while the text is from Psalms, the language is Latin and the Hebrew text doesn't fit the music well. (Already tried.) I'm not going to sing in Latin in a synagogue. So I'll roll this idea around in my head for a little while to see what ideas hatch. I haven't done serious composition in a while (in part, limited opportunities), and this idea appeals.

Entry tags:

Mac updates

Thanks to

mrpeck for pointing out that the just-released 10.6.1 OS patch fixes my printer problem. Yay! This patch rewrote my network settings (resulting in no Internet), so if you get it, be careful. In order to fix it I had to set a manually-configured IP address on our home network; I hope machines getting addresses via DHCP don't bump into me.

I have a few Windows-only applications, and earlier this summer a friend of

ralphmelton's pointed me to CrossOver, which is a less-expensive way than Parallels to run such applications. Their list of supported apps runs largely to games and Microsoft products, but you can try your luck with unsupported apps. So I downloaded the free 30-day evaluation copy.

Trope Trainer works, which removes my need to move the printer back and forth between the Windows machine and the Mac. (I use it to print out nice large copies of torah portions that I'm learning.) The UI is a little garbled, but I can manage. I also succeeded in installing and running Tag & Renamer, the tool I was using on Windows to tag newly-minted MP3s. (I hadn't found anything comparable on the Mac, other than working directly in iTunes.)

The big failure for me, alas, is WavePad, the program I have been using to edit WAV files as part of the music-digitizing project. There exists a Mac version of this program, but it sucks mightily -- among things, the keyboard shortcuts are mostly absent, and the program is just too hard on my wrist if I have to do everything with a mouse. It's also the only Mac program so far that I have had to shoot down by process kill because it locked up badly. Repeatedly. So the Mac version of WavePad just doesn't cut it.

I also have Logic Express on my Mac, which I understand I could use to do this, but I'm finding no joy in the documentation, Google, or just exploring the UI there. I bought what seems to be a pretty good tutorial and am working through it, but that's going to take a while. Editing WAV files isn't Logic Express's core feature, so it's not a focus of any of the documentation. But I'm told I can do it, and maybe someday I will. But I want to be back to editing WAV files sooner than that.

I tried Audacity, which was also very mouse-intensive and slow for me. Basic, essential functionality seemed not to be there, which presumably means I'm using it wrong. I'd like some reason to believe that this really is the best candidate before I spend much more time on it. I tried running the DAK package under CrossOver (no Mac version); it installs fine but fails at runtime with a cryptic error code. I've even tried running WavePad on the PC over VNC; you can probably predict the results of that. I don't have a spare LCD monitor, nor really the desk real-estate to support it, a keyboard, and a mouse, so continuing to do this on the PC doesn't seem promising.

Anyone have other suggestions? This sure feels like it ought to be a solved problem; what clues am I missing? 95% of my editing is: load WAV file representing an entire side of a tape or album, split into tracks, smooth out the edges, and convert to MP3. (For cassettes in particular it's important to fade in/out because of the tape hiss.) I decide where to cut by listening while watching the wave pattern; at the magic moment I stop the playback and cut from the cursor position. (This is what Audacity doesn't do for me; the edit cursor and playback cursor are different! I'm willing to go to a menu for the commands to fade in/out or to do any other adjustments (like volume), but I don't want to have to do everything via mouse, most especially routine playback. It's slow and it hurts too much.

Entry tags:

Pennsic

Pennsic was quite good for me this year -- not for any big reasons, but for a lot of small things that went right.

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

kallah notes

It's been a few weeks since the kallah ended and there are things I'd meant to have written about by now. Well, better late than never.

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

music

musical parlor game: scores and answers

It's been three days since the last guess, so as promised, here's the followup from the music game. Thanks to everyone who played. First, the scores:

And now the answers to the ones that weren't guessed:

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

music

followup to parlor game

A first round of hints has been added to the musical parlor game.

I've been surprised in both directions. One that I thought would be hard was the first one identified (19 minutes in); one that I thought was easy hasn't received any guesses yet. 11 of the 26 have been completely solved (and one more is close).

Entry tags:

music

musical parlor game

This is

fauxklore's fault. :-)

There is a parlor game called Encore, in which the object is to sing a portion of a song containing the challenge word. You have to include at least eight consecutive words (including the challenge word) for it to count. What makes this fun for the challenger (in this case, me) is to try to come up with words that aren't found in a lot of songs. (And where I fail in that, maybe I'll learn about some previously-unknown music. :-) ) I promise that I have not used any language-analysis or statistical tools in assembling this list (which I mention because I used to work for a company that did such things).

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

music

a pleasant musical surprise

As we've been digitizing our music from albums and cassettes (replacing if we can, ripping if we can't), I've been listening for the first time to some of Dani's music. One of his tapes never jumped off the shelf at me: it has a hand-written label and was recorded by someone he corresponded with via email some years back. She plays hammer dulcimer and sent him a tape of her stuff. Everything about the appearance of this tape screamed "living-room recording" to me. Nothing wrong with that (I've made those too), but I just never got that far down in the queue.

It is not a dub of a commercial recording -- or if it is, it's a commercial recording we have been unable to find via Google. Dani sent email to his best guess at a valid address; no reply. Probably stale.

So I was pleasantly surprised when "Ellen Eades: The First Thirty Years" turned out to be quite high quality, both musically and technically. (Dani, it turned out, already knew that but didn't know I didn't.) If this was made in a living room, it was made in an accoustically-adjusted living room with good equipment. And it's not just one track! There are rich arrangements on a variety of instruments here. Very pleasant listening. (Alas, a couple glitches that seem to be the media, not the recording, so I can't do anything about that.)

Google tells me that Ellen Eades plays a bunch of different instruments. The sparse label on this tape doesn't identify any other musicians. I wonder if they're all her. :-) I also wonder if this was a demo tape or a draft that never made it to publication, or if it did get commercially published but has since gone out of print, or what. This is good stuff; I'd like to hear more from her.

Entry tags:

random bits

Having completed the first pass at digitizing or replacing our folk music on old media (we still need to do some proof-listening), Dani and I are merging our iTunes libraries so this might be easier going forward. Oof. We're up to "S" so far. "T" is big because it includes all the "The"s. Tracking changes (e.g. to tagging) going forward is still going to be a bit of a challenge.

Was Joe Biden president of the US for about 5 minutes today? (We were watching in a conference room at work, and it was several minutes past noon before they got to Obama's swearing-in. So I'm curious.)

In English we say "it's all Greek to me". What do speakers of other languages say? Whom do they implicate? Wonder no more; Language Log has a nice graph of some of these. I admit to being surprised by China's designee.

What if the stop sign were designed by corporations? (link from

filkerdave)

As

dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah. (Yes, I saw the note that they recanted.)

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh. And sigh, because while I haven't had to deal with quite that level of mess, even 20ish years after mailing lists started to become broadly accessible, there are still an awful lot of people out there who don't behave appropriately.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Note to self: if Shalom Hartman Institute is too expensive this summer, the Aleph kallah might be an alternative. It could be good or it could be too esoteric for me; I can't tell from the available information. When they post class descriptions I'll have a better idea. I had a similar concern about NHC but it turned out to be good, so I'm keeping an open mind. Has anyone reading this gone to one of these?

Entry tags:

extracting audio from DVDs?

Dear LazyWeb,

I have one -- count it, one -- DVD from which I would like to extract the audio. Google leads me to many, many software offerings, some trustworthy; alas, the half-dozen I've tried so far all have built-in limits of 3 to 5 minutes for the free trial. If I were going to be doing this a lot I'd buy the software (as I have for other pieces of the great digitization project), but I really just want to do this once. I'd pay a small one-time-use fee if that were available. Because I only want to do this once, I'm not fussy about user interface and features -- if it does DVD in and WAV out without quality loss, I really don't care about anything else. Any suggestions?

(Clam Chowder, "Kosher", in case you're wondering. I want to be able to listen to it on my non-video-enabled iPod.)

Update: I ended up with a two-pass approach. HandBrake (recommended by some of you) turns DVDs into several other video formats, including AVI and MP4, but no audio-only formats (as documented). However, this free tool converts MP4 to MP3. Both of these have a batch mode, so I can just set 'em loose in turn. A small trial worked just fine, so now I've got the big job running. Thanks, everyone.

Entry tags:

music

there's got to be a story there

Turlough O'Carolan was a 17th-century harper who wrote some gorgeous music that is often recorded by modern folk musicians. (In addition to the obvious harp, the hammer dulcimer is also well-suited for his music.) Many of his songs are named after people, presumably patrons -- Planxty George Brabazon, Planxty Eleanor Plunkett, Blind Mary, and many others. One of his songs is usually listed as "Squire Wood's Lamentation".

The complete name of this last is actually "Squire Wood's Lamentation on the Refusal of his Half-Pence". My Google-fu has not yet led me to the story behind this. There's got to be one, right? It would be a shame if it went to the grave three centuries ago. What was he trying to buy that was worthy of commemoration?