Sunday, February 28, 2010

Parish Notices #8

I was a bit puzzled by a comment Ravel made on my Josephine Taylor post. He liked the song, but thought the sound quality was awful. Well, I thought, I know the record wasn’t exactly nice and minty but I was pleased with the way the music for the most part drowned out any slight crackle. Checking out Ravel’s blogger profile I noticed 78rpm record collecting was a listed interest – so he should be used to a bit of crackle and hiss I thought.

So I played the mp3 I had created and found that Ravel was right, it sounded pretty nasty. Hmmm.

After some head scratching and frantic googling I worked out that I had somehow managed to mess up my recording software’s settings and created a mismatch between my MPEG version and sampling frequency (dontcha know!). So I was using MPEG1 encoding with a sampling frequency of 11.025 kHz which is designed only for use with MPEG 2.5. I was sort of aware of these various settings but until now hadn’t appreciated their significance.

If this has in any way aroused the geek in you (as you can see it did with me), Wikipedia, as usual, is your friend.

On my Feel It CC post the Josephine Taylor track has been refreshed and now sounds a lot better. So revisit it if you want.

Back on the subject of Josephine Taylor for a moment I notice that I just beat Sir Shambling to the punch (by 3 days) on featuring the "Depend On Me" song. I was excited when I saw that SS had posted JT as I thought I might find out some more about her. But it seems even the great John Ridley has been unable to track down any substantial background on her. He mentioned the excellent book by Robert Pruter "Chicago Soul". I bought this book only recently and even this seemingly exhaustive document on the Soul music that came out of the Windy City mentions her only twice in passing. So once again, if anybody can fill in any background on Josephine Taylor I would be interested to know. 
    
Right. This little episode put me right off my stroke, but I can start posting again now. Be with you soon.

5 comments:

Ravel said...

Hi again! It was hard for me to describe the sound of Taylor's 45rpm, but I expected you would listen to it. My English is not that good to explain all that.
Glad my profile was of some help. For my own fun,I make transfers from records with a turntable and Cakewalk + Audacity programs. It's a minimum quality but it does the job. And such fun !
Thanks for the comment, I feel special, hahaha!
p.s.: Because of you, I buy Candi Staton 45 rpm now.

Darcy said...

Hi Ravel. I've always used Acoustica, they all do a similar job I guess.

Re Candi, I try to spread the word, glad you like her. And it's coming around to that time again hereabouts...

Candi had four of her Fame era singles released on Capitol in the UK, I've managed to track down three of them. I think they were also released in Canada - have you managed to find any of those?

Ravel said...

I didn't really search for Candi Staton, but happened to "fall" on 45's and purchased them only because you made me aware of her. It seems to be 70's stuff...
I could list them for you if you wish.
Thanks again.

Anonymous said...

Sounds all good now! Thank you for fixing up the sample rate prob. Cheers from Mark in Australia.

Ravel said...

A couple more tunes on this excellent website:
http://www.sirshambling.com/artists/josephine_taylor/josephine_taylor.html