LCA 2006 Arc Cafe Night
I love going to the Linux
Conference Australia (AKA LCA). My first year (2005) it was in
Canberra, my home town; for 2006 it was in Dunedin. Once again
the music and media mavens had organised a night at a local
music-friendly cafe where people could bring their equipment along and
do sets - mixing music, live performances, play your iPod, whatever.
It
was slightly disappointing, because only Conrad and I had anything to
play. I started with a slower set that I'd started to put
together the previous night (to get my mixing muscles limbered up, so
to speak) and then Conrad played some tracks from a CD of music created
with Open Source tools released under the Creative Commons License.
Conrad then did a 'live' set of scratching and looping using his
own program, Sweep, which was generally well-received. Then I
played another set, this time yielding to my own 'what the hell'
impulses and other people's urgings to put on a full Goa Trance blast.
Needless to say, when a couple of people said that this was
exactly the kind of music they loved to do hard-core hacking runs or
designing sessions to, I was mighty chuffed. (Fortunately for me,
the fact that I was using proprietary, closed-source, for-money
software to do the mixing didn't lead to any violence...)
At
some stage I'll open the mix files in MixMeister again and read the
track listings. But for now you can get them in a bewildering
variety of flavours:
For
MP3 files, high quality is around 160kbit/sec and low quality is
80kbit/sec (both average bit rate, not constant), and for OGG files
high quality is the -q5 setting (again around 160kbps) and low quality
is -q2 (around 80kbps). OGG file quality is generally higher at a
given bit rate than MP3 file due to superior encoding.
These mixes are only available as complete files and I do not trade in the
albums that these tracks are compiled from. On the other hand, I welcome feedback
of any description about the mix, especially if you have recommendations of
tracks I might like. My email address is at the bottom of the page.
I welcome any suggestions, criticisms and recommendations for new
music to listen to. I will consider doing specific mixes for people,
but this is only a hobby. Hope to hear from you!