This is the pain clinic up the street from the shop. I had to get you a picture, since I’ve noticed the small office building next door has had to hire an armed security guard to patrol their entrance. The offending operation is called “The Art of Pain Control”. My opinion is that such places should not be silently plunked down in reputable areas. By reputable, I mean there was no overt drug problems in the vicinity until this placed arrived. Maybe the problem existed, but it wasn’t driving customers away.
In hopefully unrelated news, not a single customer came in the door, but this was still a successful day. I have found software that creates MP3+G. Read back far enough and you’ll find I knew what these were at a time I did not suspect they could be created on a home computer. Here is another instance where the “specifications” did not offer any clue about how to use the technology. I had searched the Internet to find only that these disks were either very rare or very expensive. (These archives show it was Sept. 30, 2008 that I found the first information about this format.)[Author's note 2016-01-22: if you read ahead a bit from this date, you will see that I was correct about the "pill mill". It seems the local authorities didn't think much of the operation either.]
Today was a quantum step forward . My MP3s are the original with the bass sounds equalized out, sort of. I don’t have MIDI accompaniment. Thus, my “live Karaoke” show is but a few days away. All I do is cut and paste the lyrics and create my own MP3+G disks. As always, it took months to find the answer because nobody had a clue what I meant. Story of my life, in fact for a while there I was wondering if I had to go back to college and get an engineering degree to pull this together. Sound familiar?
Today is dominated by this occurrence. Somebody who knows MP3+G could have shown me in minutes how this works, but that person never appeared. Look no further if you wonder why I have no use for whiz kids. I see that I earlier hit snags using the “+” sign as a search criteria, so I may refer to the format as CDG (Compact Disk w/Graphics). My policy is to document all such learning experience, so skip today unless you like information for its own sake.
This development does not help Arnel. His show is based on MIDI files, which are not music in themselves. MIDI is a set of “triggers” which connects to a separate device which produces the musical sounds. The “patches” I’ve referred to are the sounds generated by that device [called a sequencer]. This also explains how Arnel’s act works. He gets the MIDI file with the lyrics and removes the guitar track. He does not display the lyrics to the audience, rather so he needn’t memorize them.
It is MIDI files that allow [many] Karaoke acts to vary the tempo and key. I don’t require such capability. Since Arnel sings, he often has to change the key to his range. Now it makes sense why he needs a quality device that will convert MP3s back to MIDI files, and also why such a device is probably not going to work very well. Extracting MIDI tracks is akin to unscrambling an egg.
I’m not out of the weeds myself. For instance, I do not know how the resulting CDGs will play on my extant equipment. The problem of two different displays remains, but if need be I’ll put duct tape over one of them. The show must go on. Eventually I want MIDI tracks because the quality of sound can be fantastic. Until then, I’ll have the closest thing to “live Karaoke” in this town.
Naturally, my mind is racing ahead to other possibilities. In the end, the ones that make money will survive. Since I can already make MP3s out of anything, so give me $20 and I’ll display your name on your birthday. The priority is the music I play, but shortly thereafter, the music I can’t play looms large. And I know how vocal removal software works. One thing I can almost guarantee is that my Karaoke will never sound like, well, Karaoke.
Trivia. I saw a diagram today of an iron forging operation around 300 C.E. in Spain that could produce 350 pounds of quality iron per day. I find that incredible. I also saw a photo of what looked like a man holding a hole in the air. It was, of all things, a “perfect” mirror. This is totally new to me and I read on that ordinary mirrors can never reflect 100% of the light because they conduct electricity along the reflecting surface. The new mirror was made of non-conducting material and it really appeared like I said. Amazing. Sorry, no photo, I wasn't fast enough.
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