Music

After listening through Lyra Vesperi’s entire track listing of Singles/EPs on my music subscription service, I was happy to see a recent addition when I left work. Not only that, but it’s a pretty freaking great requiem.

The bandits poisoned every cup and slit my party's throats
Now I am drinking in the dark wearing my armor coats
I pour a tankard on the wood to bait the angry dead
The shadows gather in the room demanding to be fed

I don't need water from the shrine to wash your curses out
I only need the tavern ale and a familiar shout
I speak the jokes we used to tell before the bloody night
And drag your screaming twisted souls into the holy light

The iron binds the dwarven bone
I will not let you walk alone

So raise your glasses to the sky!
I came to watch my brothers die!
I break the chains that hold you here
I wash your phantom in the beer
Go find the halls of shining stone
I'll finish up 
This keg alone

I take a sip and close my eyes to hear your roaring laugh
An axe swings right behind my neck to cut my spine in half
I duck the blade and kick the chair, I know your heavy swing
I punch the ghost of my best friend and hear his armor ring

You always dropped your shielding arm when charging for the kill
I strike your spirit in the chest to break your evil will
You curse my name with rotting jaws and bare your phantom teeth
But I will send you to the forge and let you rest beneath

The iron binds the dwarven bone
I will not let you walk alone

So raise your glasses to the sky!
I came to watch my brothers die!
I break the chains that hold you here
I wash your phantom in the beer
Go find the halls of shining stone
I'll finish up 
This keg alone

The magic fades, the tavern clears, the shadows start to crack
I feel the tears upon my beard, but I won't pull you back
The Maker calls your weary names to sit beside the fire
I did the duty of the priest, I built the tavern pyre
My hammer aches, my knuckles bleed, my spirit starts to bend
But you are walking in the light, my brother and my friend
The silence hurts more than the blade, the victory is cold
But you are free to drink the mead from mugs of solid gold!

The iron binds the dwarven bone
I will not let you walk alone!

So raise your glasses to the sky!
I came to watch my brothers die!
I break the chains that hold you here!
I wash your phantom in the beer!
Go find the halls of shining stone
I'll finish up 
This keg alone

Here’s one that I stumbled across the really resonants with me–especially the chorus, because the notion “I’m exactly who I am meant to be / the missing piece is me” is one that I would love on a t-shirt. Between a relatively rare personality type, and being someone who actually cares what kind of person that I am, I rather like this tune.

Plus the entire damn thing is rather ear wormy. As a whole, the lyrics fit that “Wherever you go, there you are” quip I learned from Buckaroo Banzai. I think perhaps as a culture, we put too little thought into philosophy in the modern era, but self-understanding has always been a fundamental concept to me. Knowing yourself is a key that unlocks a lot of mysteries, it’s certainly allowed me to like myself as a person far more than I ever was capable of before then.

I spent my winters in the grey
Just watching seasons slip away
I had a gift I could not name
A spark without a proper flame
The world was loud and I was small
I felt like nothing much at all

But then the clock began to chime
I stopped wasting all my time

Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!
Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!

I used to walk the background lines
And read the fading, dusty signs
They wanted blades and iron shields
To fight the terrors in the fields
But now my spark has found a way
To turn the night to golden day
The sun is bright, the air is sweet!
The path is open at my feet!

The fog is gone, the air is clear
I’ve finally conquered every fear

Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!
Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!

I walk with purpose in my stride
With nothing left for me to hide
I spent too long in hollow space
Just trying to find a solid place
Now every morning is a prize
With open hands and looking wise

The world can keep its epic tales
I’m the wind within my sails

Whoooaaa!
Whoooaaa!
Whoooaaa!
Whoooaaa!
Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!
Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!

I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!

One of those quips I can blame on my mother is, “They’re coming to take me away, ho-ho, hee-hee, ha-ha / To the happy home / With trees and flowers and chirping birds.” It’s something that I heard often enough growing up, that whenever my warped sense of humor references the idea of being dragged off to the funny farm, it’s likely to pass through my grey matter.

Oddly though, despite it being one of those almost burned in ROM things, I never managed to remember who the bloody hell sang that song.

Of course, most quips like that that ma caused to stick in my brain are some kind of ear worm. Ahh shit, now my mind is thinking of

In my continued adoption of MiniDisc, I’ve done been experimenting with my N707‘s record function. Dealing with analog sources, it works about the same as I remember cassettes without a deck.

The interesting thing of course is the optical support. Synchro-recording doesn’t really shine without using a mini-TOSLINK connection and S/PDIF for input. I’ve also figured out that, amusing to me, using a USB-C to TOSLINK dongle on my MacBook is far more consistent than using my desktop’s optical port when it comes to controlling the LED. But in the end, I’d say that incorporating intentional silences into the playlist is ideal, at least if you care about track marks.

One of the things that I’ve found rather nice about MD as a format is it combines everything useful about CD in a more compact form, and it avoids the problem of self-contained devices. In the later case, while devices like my Rockbox’ified iPod and H2 offer greater storage capacity, they also have their own sufferings.

In the iPod’s case, it’s simply slow as fuck. Likewise, the SD adapter board inside couldn’t handle 128 GB cards, so it’s rocking a 64. The H2 can easily swap cards, if you account for the firmware and system data being stored on them, but that’s a pain and MicroSD is tiny-as-fuck. Contrasting of course to less purpose built devices, where the storage tends to be both fixed and having to share with all the other data on tablets, phones, etc.

The funny thing of sorts, is I’ve never really minded physical media–so much as I’ve tended to be network centric. My main issue with physical media has usually been the storage requirements, and MDs are nice and compact!

After discovering that there’s modern software that supports NetMD, I found myself acquiring something few people want anymore. Also, it’s my first Walkman since portability had more in common with books than floppy disk. I was always fascinated by MiniDisc, but they were never really a thing where I grew up–and now they’re basically thrift store material.

In terms of audio quality, at SP, it’s definitely close enough to CD quality that I can’t complain. In LP2 mode, it’s certainly no worse than the older MP3s in my music collection. While I don’t consider LP4 to have enough bits for more than a Bluetooth microphone (and an old crap one at that), I’ll admit that the few samples I’ve encountered sound just fine. Being second hand, several of the discs had music already in various SP/LP2/LP4 combinations.

The battery life is also pretty impressive. Playback time is forget about it off one of my eneloop AA rechargeable, most of which have about 4-years of charge cycles between game controllers and other small peripherals. Only thing that really seems to put a real ding in it is recording, since SP record uses the recorder’s own ATRAC3 codec rather than the PC.

Using LP2 may actually be worth it, since that appears to do the encode on PC, resulting in a lot more write speed. The Walkman’s codec is probably a higher quality than what comes bundled with ElectronWMD, but it is still a twenty year old chip.

Encoding at SP seems to run about 2/3 to 1/2 of real time, which isn’t great since we’re talking about 20-40 minutes an album. Minutes per track. By contrast, throwing my laptop’s processing power at the problem, it’s seconds per track. In terms of disc runtime, 74-80 minutes at SP is on par with CD and the 140-160 minutes or so at LP2 will usually fit longer albums this side of ‘not made for physical release,’ but I’ll admit, encoding time seems to be a bigger factor than audio quality. ATRAC3/LP2 is actually a lot better than I expected.

In any case, I do have to admit, it’s a lot nicer to do File Server -> Laptop -> Walkman than it ever was dubbing to cassette on my mom’s stereo 🙂