…tonight. Beautiful over the Thames. Reading the encyclopedic The Moon: Myth and Image by Jules Cashford:

Some North American Indians see a cat in the moon, unravelling the wool of the waning days.

Tools sink into extended being: it takes craft and intent to keep them visible. I’m wondering if there’s some connection with Shklovsky’s thoughts on art: that art exists to make perception difficult. Is art, amongst the other things it is, what makes us aware of what is the kernel of us, minus our embedded tools, yet through their use in its creation? Is that some of what art does, and how?

Ink that in five lines
becomes a bunch of nettles,
in the night points one step north; where the colour of water
gets over the road,
over the pearl of the three-quarter moon, gets in
after, before
the first thought

The paleolithic cave painters, on their backs in the long dark, representing.

Now that I’ve moved most of my music onto my music box, I’ve been looking at the possibility of building my own surround decoder, a fantasy which has quickly led me into a void of tools: there is very little in the way of PC hardware and open source software to help. The lack of open source software I can understand, as Dolby is obviously a proprietary format. But the dearth of hardware is more surprising — so far I haven’t been able to find a single pro or semi-pro hardware decoder card that does Dolby Digital. Creative Labs have a few Dolby-compatible cards/drivers, but they’re really designed for gaming (tiny plugs! tiny plugs!), and besides I would prefer to have the decoding and DAC functions on separate cards so I can mix and match performance and capabilities.

So for the moment I’m stuck. I haven’t really had time to play with building a software-only solution using say gstreamer, and anyway suspect that even if it worked, I would rapidly run into latency issues. Any ideas on hardware?

Walking from home to lunch and the Helen Chadwick retrospective at the Barbican the other day, discovered, down a sliproad of London Wall, the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons’ herb garden, in a little park in the shadow of a fragment of the wall. Perfect place for a picnic ala Jeffrey Smart, in the shadow of some of London’s ugliest buildings.

That’s the crucial fork between my view of digital media and the more traditional one (wherein MP3s, for example, replace vinyl as object in one’s possession). If your local copies are simply expedient cacheings of that to which what you’ve purchased rights, then restrictions on formats, limited freedoms of transcoding, and the other restrictions that are currently being wrapped into DRM, are obviously inappropriate, arbitrary restrictions the only benefit of which is to support particular business models.

This isn’t new news. But…

Back in the day, Mac programmers had to deal with what their tattered copies of Inside Macintosh called handles: doubly indirected pointers to data structures. Handles made memory management easier — the actual data structures can be created anywhere, and moved around, without software authors having to explicitly deal with garbage collection and other memory management issues. Good Mac programming involved always working on objects only through their handles (^^PictRect for example).

Back to digital media: the progression {unique original to instance of clones, to pointer to — not originals — but architectures in flux, constantly being revisted and tweaked by their authors (c.f. the Web!)}. A culture where this is anticipated requires rapid, near zero-cost perfect distribution. In my version of DRM, content owners effectively license not content, but handles to content: consumers would purchase a signed key which only (doubly?) indirectly points back to the media source. Not only lightweight and respectful of consumer needs, this model supports the current acceleration of mutable media: {remix culture -> director’s cut -> reduxes (sic)}. DRM as secure handles, coupled with a robust versioning and inheritance model, enables many interesting possibilities for content creators, licensors and consumers. And an inheritence model where you can fork version trees also suggests a possible future form of {scarcity -> value -> market}, even with instances: version 1.00.34.7 of Apocalypse Now might still be an object with a specific, market driven value… more on this later…

Music, through the imminent DRM format wars, will become increasingly ghettoised through branded delivery mechanisms — already iTunes and Sony software insist on transcoding from one expedient but lossy format to another if you want to play tracks on competing players. And there seems to be a lot of pressure from all involved to pass off such low-quality formats as worthy of purchase and collection, presumably to create a profitable market of low-res, ‘throw-away’ copy-protected music, and to encourage ongoing waves of repurchase as listeners demand better quality or support of later playback technologies. I think these effects result from conscious decisions on the part of content owners, rather than being, as often presented, problems inherent in DRM per se.

But there’s a more abstract right at stake: I want the right to listen to the music — not to possess a particular data file containing an instance of the music in a particular format, locked with a specific DRM mechanism. Once I’ve paid for my right to listen to that piece of music, then I want the right to listen to any other copy of it. Technologies which acknowledge and support such rights should support some sensible real-world behaviours. For example, I should be able to register all the CDs I already have, and instead of having to rip them myself, have access to the tracks off them, anywhere that they are available digitally — in other commercial formats, or some BitTorrent-style peer-casting service that can suck a speedy copy for me from other proximate instances.

Any coming war over DRM and formats should be fought over rights to platonic content, not rights to instances. Potentially, DRM offers a real guarantee of quality and authenticity for consumers, rather than simply an enforcement of restrictions on hardware choice and the usability of specific media files.

I want my music wherever I am, but not necessarily locked into a particular technology or branded player. For me, that’s a digital right actually worth paying for.

{Performance -> canned performance -> mass reproduction -> -> nude media -> -> -> what?}

Fetishism of the playlist (post-DJ culture, is everyone with a jog dial a performer)?

Fetishism of scarcity? What is scarce? Provenance {DRM -> digitally signed limited edition, patina of handlings transcribed via PKE}?

Recently, having upgraded my amplification, I decided that I had really had enough of listening to lossy audio on my Otto jukebox. Following some research, I’ve built a new device which plays FLAC-format lossless audio. Fed via balanced AES/EBU to my Meridian 518 for dithering to 24 bit, decoded by my ageing AX-1 and then into the Bryston, the sound is to my ears, far superior to that of CDs played on my FMJ DV27 through the same signal path. The next step will be to replace the Yamaha as decoder. More on that later…

Currently, the box is comprised of the following:

• Digigram VX222v2 audio card
• Travla C137 Case (90-Watt version, to fit in the audio card (Digigram have however just announced a short-form version of the VX222v2, which would probably fit in the 120-Watt version of the case)), with internal fan disabled. There were two reasons for this choice of case: it seems to be the only compact mini-ATX case which can take two PCI cards, and it has a form factor almost identical to the Meridian 5-series
• Old Epia 5000 C3 motherboard that was lying around, with BIOS updated
• Fujitsu MHT2040T as boot disk (very quiet)
• Netgear MA311 802.11b card
• Samsung SP1614N in an external no-brand enclosure with USB/Firewire interfaces to actually store the music. Again, very quiet

Playback is via Mplayer through ALSA, with Otto as the jukebox interface. The whole thing runs on Fedora Core 2.

The only real issue with the install was that out of the box, FC2 won’t actually install on C3 processors without a recompiled kernel. Sigh. And I can’t get the Xorg X implementation to work with the hacked Trident driver that on XFree let me get widescreen S-video onto my plasma screen — for now I’m using my iPaq as remote, over wireless, which is actually more convenient than having to turn the screen on anyway. There is no particular reason for the choice of (obviously bug-ridden) Fedora. In fact I’m sure that some playing with, say, LFS, could get the core components down to something that would happily boot from flash. But at the moment the box is a testbed rather than a product, so I’m happy to heave it the way it is for now. And in any case, it’s the music I’m interested in, not the tech.

And I am genuinely amazed at how good it sounds — music simply has more space to breathe. Acoustic string bass in particular is more languid and rich, and every element of complex arrangements has more depth and detail, compared to CDs played on the Arcam. I’ve been literally rediscovering things I thought I knew inside out. And that makes it all worthwhile.

I’ve also discovered than Digigram genuinely care about open source use of their hardware — within a day of posting a question regarding another of their soundcards on an ALSA mailing list, one of their people contacted me directly to find out what I was planning and what features would be most important to me in a possible future ALSA driver release for the card in question. So they don’t just make excellent hardware, they’ve actually read Cluetrain. Impressed.

[Update: later moved to alsaplayer with jack as the sound server]