Archive for ‘Music’ category

Never rip MP3 with variable bitrate enabled encoder, since various players don’t have good support for that. Several Linux music players (like Rhythmbox and Muine misreport the time and/or bitrate with absurd values. Even more amusing thing is, Nautilus reports a random song length every time I want to check their file properties.

The worst among them is Real Player. How does Real Player handle VBR mp3? Chops it randomly. At random location near end of song (random location even for the same song), so random that there is even a small chance that the song is played at full length, not chopped at all. At first I tried it on the Real Player bundled with Motorola E680i; a while ago tried it again on PC, and got the same result.

One shall pay the price for saved disk space.

她年輕時的演奏是出了名快（在我的標準來說有點狂亂），而且她踩踏板的方式也是最受爭議的話題之一，不過勁度十足也是無可置疑的。現在已經六十多歲人了，想不到那種力量絲毫沒有退步，演奏 Prokofiev 的第七首鋼琴奏鳴曲也還是一樣，尤其是第三樂章，和以往的一樣出色。對於這種力度、節奏都要強的樂曲，她的演奏手法完全是對了頭，不然也不會吸引那麼多人去看了（看的人比前兩個樂章要高幾倍）。以往那種散亂好像收歛了一些，不過我還是看多幾次演奏才判斷吧。

2006-09-29：所謂的狂亂，是指這種情況。她的 Rachmaninoff 第三首鋼琴協奏曲那個錄音是經典沒錯，不過真是自我得有點過分了（雖然沒有 Prokofiev 自己的鋼琴協奏曲錄音那樣離譜，鋼琴和樂隊幾乎是分開演出的），快慢對比太大，有些地方像是爆炸般湧出來。

相比之下，Lilya Zilberstein 的錄音又是另一個極端。她的錄音我可以用 crystal clear 來形容。我只有她的 Rachmaninoff 第二和第三首協奏曲的錄音，但聽這個已經大概知道她的風格。兩首都幾乎沒怎樣踩踏板，即使是快極的音符都聽得清清楚楚，不過覺得有點刻板。或者說，Argerich 的演奏像是整個樂隊被她牽着鼻子走，Zilberstein 的卻像是被樂隊壓制着不能發揮。

還記得很早以前（12 年前左右吧？）在文化中心聽 Donohoe 的 Rach 3，仍是記憶猶新，因為第一樂章 cadenza 臨尾一段兩隻手像握着拳頭滾筒般碌過去那種情景，看到 Mouse 和 Eos 兩個發了呆 — 當然我也一樣。

I have always been hoping to bring mup support to figurerender plugin for Wordpress (http://www.chris-lamb.co.uk/code/figurerender/), and this is what I get after several hours of work:

(click on fragment to see the rendering code behind it)

Cool uh? This is the last few bars from the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s 3^rd Piano Concerto. The basic function is there, but some more bugs must be ironed out before make it public (either as patch or independent plugin):

• The option about showing music or latex source in ALT text must be turned off. If the source contains double quote, the HTML tags can be very confused, causing the rendering broken.
• I really want to make it work with PHP 4.x. Currently I’m using some hack on my own server, but…
• Making it less prone to security problems (temp file creation etc)

2008-06-22 edit: Removed code since it can be viewed when one clicks on image.

I just discovered my TODO list is too long:

1. Improve CJK support in Ubuntu
2. Organize GNOME and Ubuntu translation teams
3. Update Hong Kong locale data in glibc (or better, belocs for Debian/Ubuntu; I also know glibc maintainers are frustrating to deal with)
4. Creating word list for Taiwan to Hong Kong translation
5. Study natural language processing and Chinese grammar, and research how to perform a low-error-rate translation between simplified and traditional Chinese (!)
6. Continue my typesetting of Prokofiev’s 2^nd Piano Concerto
7. Create LiveCD for OSFarm and write article
8. Company related work
9. Learn how to do Debian packaging

Each of these is enough for keep me busy for months. Now I can just wish I have the health to strive through all of these…

Finally, I really made up my mind. In the end I can only use mup despite its limitations. Typesetting music in lilypond is like writing program — although lilypond is more flexible, it takes a tremendous effort even to typeset a single passage, not to mention multi-stave music. I’ll try to summarize the pros and cons for using lilypond and mup on orchestral work:

1. In lilypond, the accidental of each note is automatically handled; what you type is what it would sound like in c major, and lilypond would automatically add/subtract sharp or flat sign for each note according to current major/minor. In contrast, mup purely takes care of the visual appearance; you would typeset according to how it appears in score. If there is a sharp on the sheet, you add a sharp. Lilypond has an advantage here, as it allows changing accidental style readily (20^th century music, cautionary accidental etc).
2. Mup input is entered in a per-bar basis; this is the same for multi-stave work. Enter all the staves and voices for one bar, group them together, then enter the 2^nd bar. In contrast, lilypond handles it in a per-voice way — yes, even polyphonic passage in single staff is entered voice by voice. No, I didn’t mean you are forced to do so; what I mean is you would find it even more clumsy and time wasting to enter it bar by bar in lilypond.
   I find mup’s treatment much more convenient, as it is way more easy to debug non-fatal errors when something goes wrong. With lilypond, especially when using relative octave mode, changing one note may affect the whole score’s layout and note positioning (all notes may increase or decrease 1 whole octave, sometimes even 2). That’s very hard to trace. But lilypond’s treatmeat isn’t always that bad — treating the whole passage of a voice as a unit allows cross-bar beaming easily, and that’s why I want to try out lilypond in the first place; just that I realized lilypond style isn’t my cup of tea.
3. As a result of per-voice handling, lilypond allows a per-stave setting for virtually every attribute, like time signature, key signature and so on. This is a big plus. As of Mup 5.1 there is still no such thing as per-stave time signature yet, one has to do some hack to get it done, and it’s really painful to get it work in multi-stave scores (think about changing time signature for every stave but one).
4. Vertical collision detection between staves — basically lilypond has no such thing, while mup handles it almost perfectly. Bad for me.
5. Another sore point — dynamics (e.g. sfz) between staves. Again, mup handles it readily. Well, there is a ‘hack’ documented in lilypond user guide that does this. But guess what? Dynamics is treated as an empty stave containing only spaces and dynamics themselves, in between 2 staves. Weird huh? This shows the flexibility of lilypond, as well as the sutpidity. Besides it is really hard to merge the hack into the score, it’s complex. For orchestral work this is Pain In The Ass ™.

So based on the last 2 points I decided I can’t use lilypond at all, since it may take me many years (literally) to typeset a whole concerto. It takes me 3 days to figure out how to adjust the vertical position of a dynamics mark. I’m not really willing to work like a programmer in order to typeset something.

This is not to say lilypond is bad though. Its flexibility and the scheme support allows it to do quite a lot of unusual layout, which is not possible with mup (unless you know PostScript internals). However, it really was using too much time for me to learn, and time is what I am lacking of.

前幾天在火車上聽到香港人有份在國際蕭邦鋼琴大賽中奪獎，那時有點驚訝，因為香港人拿這類獎項已經幾乎沒有聽到了。作為中國人整體來看，李雲迪、馬友友和朗朗等都是很知名，中國大陸和台灣比起香港這彈丸之地來說地大物博，有幾個能夠揚名國際，不是甚麼希奇的事；香港這個小地方也有，的確是很難得 — 最初我是這樣想的。不過細心再想一下，其實即使是香港，本來也該有很多，只是因為不同的原因 (大多數都是環境所限，或者受了污染)，而不能再進一步而已。

只是這樁新聞逼我想起了些往事，也不知是該覺得羞家還是慶幸了。特別是想起當時參加學校鋼琴比賽那位小女孩 (好像是叫蘇芷柔吧？不記得了。)，自從知道她轉到演藝之後就沒問 Eos 了。或許真的如 Eos 所說，她是不齒這間學校的老師沒眼光才走吧？也不是沒可能的，想當初自己彈的很差，都是草草帶過就算，相反在台下聽她彈 Chopin 的 Etude No. 3，雖是覺得有點過快，但在控制和 style 方面都自愧不如；可能老師們都不太懂欣賞 ，只是知道 Chopin 的 Ballade 難度較高，將冠軍隨便塞給我就算。這種獎，或者丢掉比較好。

現在回頭一看，當時覺得遺憾的事，現在都沒有太大的感覺了。這世界有 50 億人口，有幾個能爬上頂峰？安安份份做個普通人也不錯的，就算是爬山也要準備充足，萬一不行可以退下來；連先決條件也沒有就去爬，只會摔死自己……

相反地，或許沒有那次比賽，就認識不到那班人。同時也第一次明白甚麼叫天外有天；第一次接觸他們，就知道有正統訓練和沒有的分別了。現在他們都在音樂方面有點發展，對我來說，縱使以後不會再接觸，知道了他們的情況不壞，也算是值得開心的。以後有時間的話聽一聽 Dennis 的節目當是捧場吧。最後一次觸摸鋼琴的時候幾乎連 scale 都彈不順了，那種感覺已經消失得一乾二淨，更別說再學過。

不過，嘖……這種事早就該抹掉的，要不是新聞的話，也不會想起來。近來的記憶力漸漸衰退了。

Finally, the 3^rd movement is done:

Prokofiev’s second piano concerto is not an easy task to begin with; probably that’s why the only published full score is hand drawn (?!). Another probable reason is that, typesetting such difficult score is not profitable…

It feels like as if I started working a few weeks ago; but actually a whooping 7 months have passed, I’m spending more than half of my spare time on it during this half year. There are still much to be done even after data entry has finished: checking error, adjusting appearance so that notes look more pleasing, and so on. One thing troubles me: should I travel to Moscow and ask for permission to check manuscript? Are Prokofiev’s grandchildren kind enough to give me such privilege?

Quoting a sentence from Fibonacci Engraving:

Music engraving is not just typesetting.
Music engraving is an art.

Everybody who has spent enough time on it will say so. This is especially so for hand crafting, though it also applies to computer assisted ones.

Mup really worths the money I paid; up till now it has been helpful, saving me lots of time on arranging placement of notes, stems and beams, though it still has its fallacy: