c# 2d barcode generator open source Figure 10-19. Make sure you check the correct output boxes when exporting from the jamin return bus. in Font

Generator Data Matrix 2d barcode in Font Figure 10-19. Make sure you check the correct output boxes when exporting from the jamin return bus.

The only sure way to know that you re on the right path with mastering is to test, test, and test again. You should use a variety of playback systems for the task, depending on the kind of listeners you re aiming your music at. Kitchen CD players, car stereos, portables with earbud headphones, and club sound systems are all very different in terms of frequency response across the audible spectrum. It s great if you re a professional mastering engineer and you can afford to invest in full-range reference speakers, like the Bowers & Wilkins 800D at around $23,000 a pair. But if most of your listeners have nasty plastic PC speakers like the models shown in Figure 10-20, available for under $20 in a chain store, then you ve got to test your masters on them at least once.

Figure 10-20. The PC Line PCL-201S six watts of raw power for the price of a pizza!

CD and DVD writers have been fitted to mass-market PCs for years, and the technology is now so ubiquitous that blank media is sold in supermarkets along with other everyday consumables like toothpaste and breakfast cereal. As a Free Software distributor, as well as a sound engineer and aspiring record producer, I m probably one of the only customers of my local bulk blank media store who isn t actively involved in copyright infringement. It s no wonder that the established suppliers in the readymade culture market are engaged in a collective panic over their future. Nevertheless, the CD writer has brought the means of production into the hands of the individual, whether you want to make a disc of your own music, a mixtape of a live DJ set, or a compilation of existing recordings. Subjective comparisons of digital audio with the warmth of vinyl miss the point, as far as home production is concerned. It was never this straightforward or affordable to make your own releases back in the DIY days of punk rock and 7" singles. With the advent of Blu-Ray, the price of a bare DVD writer for fitting to a PC has fallen below $40, and these cheap generic drives can easily burn a full-length audio CD in a few minutes. In cities like Los Angeles, it s common to be approached on the street by a young man holding a fistful of home-produced hip-hop CDs for sale, in a sort of twenty-first century take on busking. The URL of his MySpace page is invariably written on the CD-R with a marker pen.

It s almost too easy to throw together a CD, scribble a name on the disc, and stuff it into a paper case, but Free Software and GNU/Linux distributions offer a range of tools that can help you create a more polished article. The artwork techniques described in this chapter are equally applicable to data or movie discs, but you can use the audio CD as a starting point. The original Red Book specification for audio CDs was released jointly by Sony and Philips in 1980, describing a two-channel (usually stereo) format with 16 bits of signed PCM data. The Red Book specifies that recordings can be no longer than 74 minutes. The unlikely CD sample rate of 44100 cycles per second (Hertz) was derived from the frame rate of analog video tape. VCRs were used for digital audio master recordings in those days, before purpose-built DASH and DAT machines were invented. In 1988, the Orange Book offered a new specification for recordable CDs, with a format close enough to Red Book that most standard audio CD players could play correctly formatted CD-Rs. In contrast with movie DVDs, a conventional audio CD has no filesystem and therefore no directory structure. Instead, a subcode is multiplexed with the audio; these are the PQ codes, containing basic metadata about the start position of individual tracks, publishing information, and so on. In 1996, the CD-Text extension to the Red Book standard was released, allowing more complex metadata, including artist and track names, to be embedded in the subcode. However, not all audio CD players support CDText, and not all burners have support for CD-Text in their firmware. More recently, higher quality digital formats including SACD and DVD-Audio have flopped in the marketplace, a casualty of the rush to portability (the iPod and its clones) and downloaded lossycompressed music at less than CD quality (MP3 and the AAC format found on iTunes). This has left the venerable Red Book format toward the high-quality end of the fidelity spectrum, as far as music distribution is concerned, despite the fact that recording studio technology now employs much higher sample and bit rates. Free Software offers a solution: the 24-bit version of the FLAC format, which has begun to be adopted by audiophiles (people who care about sound quality in music recording). The aforementioned Bowers & Wilkins company, maker of some of the finest loudspeakers available, has settled on 24-bit FLAC as the distribution format for its Society of Sound record label, fronted by musician and studio owner Peter Gabriel (see www.bowers-wilkins.com for details). In the meantime, audio CDs remain a convenient way to distribute music on a widely understood and supported medium, especially when face to face with the intended listener. Because of the age of the Red Book format and its therefore relatively limited technical requirements, even PCs generally considered redundant are easily able to handle the amount of data involved in CD production, when your GNU/Linux distro of choice has been installed.