If this is more than a mere furphy, then get ready for the inevitable round of glib speculation about the redundancy of musicians… Apparently, a pair of ubergeeks who made their millions as VoIP developers, have been squirreling away at the problem of polyphonic MIDI transcription and finally found a way of making it viable. (Polyphonic transcription is the ability to translate a piece of music with more than one note playing at one time (ie chords) into MIDI code sequences. Up till now, this has been only 80% possible, which means that 20% of the notes are lost. So it hasn’t really been viable…)
In a couple of weeks time, however, the VoIP geeks are promising to debut faithful MIDI reproductions of old recordings by two long-dead piano virtuosos. Naturally, the recordings contain plenty of polyphony, and if they can pull it off, it will be like cold fusion… that works. We await the debut with serious interest… (via Music Thing)
Ever wished there was a straightforward way of recording the audio streams of net radio? Something as easy as the home taping of FM stations that you used to do on your stereo?... Well there is!
Basically you just need to download Streambox VCR (which lets you download audio streams), dBpowerAMP Music Converter (to convert the streams into mp3s), a few codecs, and a "file selector"... and you're ready to rip! For a more detailed run down of the process, go to this entry in Swen's blog.
And while you're there, you might want to check out the rest of Swen's site, which is primarily devoted to posting links to mp3s by artists featured in that avant-music journal The Wire. His most recent crop features Iron & Wire, Bark Psychosis, Mum, Pixies reunion concert bootlegs, groups from Weilheim, Germany (eg The Notwist, Village of Savoonga), and China's first all grrl punk band, Hang on The Box.