Continue reading »]]> Primarily, there are three worlds which I inhabit:

• The real world/objective world/material world
• The dream world/subconscious/astral/mental world
• The virtual/digital world of the internet

The virtual/digital world is not very unlike the dream world as it also has the property of non-locality, it is the direct result of people’s imagination, it is instantaneous, and it is an abstract mental world. The only thing we ever experience is our perception of the world. We never actually experience the real objective world. Everything we know about any of these worlds is only an abstract idea in our mind. The world is not actually composed of solid things (atoms are mostly empty space) nor is there color. Colors are only different types of photons reflecting into our eyes, in the objective world things aren’t really colored. When we experience something it is only our mind’s interpretation of the sensory input we receive.

It is important that we human beings do not get too caught up in our mental abstractions and remember to look through words/ideas/concepts to the objective realities for which they are pointers. When we think of things, we must objectively see through our mental abstractions and think of the objective thing which they refer to. Once we forget to do this we only hold abstract ideas in our minds and these ideas spring forth a universe of their own, since they do not refer to anything objective anymore. We must be careful when creating complicated intellectual abstractions to remember the reality for which it was intended. For once we lose track of what is an abstraction of this world and what is objective, we forget what is real. Centaurs are not real. There is no objective being in the form of a centaur in the physical reality we experience. It may exist in your mind somewhere though! So we must apply this to our everyday lives. Words like ‘Terrorist’ have become so abstract that they have lost meaning in objective reality. We must ground them again or else the world will begin to be very confused. Otherwise we mix the real world with the fictional world. When we read Lord of the Rings we enter a different mental world, one different from our objective physical reality. We must not get confused when talking about religion, politics, ideology, science fiction, academia, suffering, pretty much any mental construct of our human minds.

This is what is happening with the world right now. People are stuck in abstract ideologies, not looking through them to the objective reality, fighting each other. People killing each other in Israel because they claim some sort of land as their God given right, the others have to get out! How ridiculous! People have loved to get away from the physical reality, so they create mental abstractions, they dream, the go on the internet. What people have forgotten is that these are all separate worlds! But once the internet is threatened everyone cries out because that is what has become reality for them. We must learn to separate all of our realities again. See through mental abstractions to their objective realities. This is what is wrong with this world. This is why it seems like the world is getting more and more ridiculous.

Internet is acting as a sort of buffer between our dream/mental/abstract worlds and the real world. It is an enormous catalyst, a good thing in my opinion. It is helping abstract ideas manifest in physical reality much faster. Before the internet this only worked through books, art galleries, magazines, etc.; not everyone involved themselves in these types of things. Now all the people’s abstract mental worlds have an interface medium: The internet. This is where worlds clash. This is where people battle it out on forums and on YouTube comments. Let’s use this medium to our advantage but let’s remember what this medium truly is: It is a melting pot for abstract mental ideas. So we must treat all the mental concepts we deal with as separate entities and sort them out in our minds. We must see through them and remember what exactly they refer to and if they even refer to our real objective physical world at all or if they are part of some sort of other mental world such as art and music for example.

This is all I have to say for now, I have to get back to my Differential Equations homework… Namaste

Continue reading »]]> The following is a plausible (brief) description of the universe as I have come to understand it so far:

Space/Time
All of the following is based on the assumption that matter is not the primary foundation of the universe but rather consciousness is, in which case matter would only be a distortion/manifestation of consciousness. I will not dwell on why consciousness is more primary than matter – however, I encourage the reader to research this on their own as there is much scientific discussion regarding this in recent years because it would explain many anomalous phenomena. The three dimensional space/time we experience, consisting of what we call the visible or the known universe, is a manifestation and distortion of the larger multidimensional reciprocal space/time-time/space complex, which is infinite. Our three dimensional space/time is a very solid distortion, it is the final distortion – the most solid. Any change in higher space reflects itself, ultimately, in our three dimensional space/time distortion as a manifestation leaving a solid and measurable imprint. This is what we call *matter* and its present moment configuration is the imprint of a combination of all conscious/intelligent and natural/physical interaction. Thus this matter is what makes up the present moment. The present moment is the only moment that exists and is up to change, the future can be extrapolated using probability vortexes – the past can be traced back using extrapolation as well. The past is how the present moment was configured at a certain point in space/time, but the present moment no longer reflects this configuration due changes caused by conscious/intelligent and natural/physical interaction. The future is the conglomeration of probability vortexes extrapolating what is a possible upcoming state of configuration of matter in our space/time. The past and future can never be precisely extrapolated in very long dimensions of time due to alterations caused by intelligence (which cannot be explained by natural/physical laws). It should now be clear to the reader that our three dimensional space/time is the lowest plane of existence and is a distortion/accumulation of the changes in all higher spaces.

Continue reading »]]> So, I have tried many different digital music organizers from obscurities like Helium Music Manager (which is just way too slow with the SQL database) to more popular ones like Media Monkey. However, I always go back to iTunes because I just like the feel of it. The reason I sometimes switch away from iTunes are the limitations it has (mainly, the limited number of tags).

In order to workaround this I have, over time, devised an excellent method for tagging music in iTunes. As a result I can easily browse music exactly how I like while still using god-awful iTunes. I will iterate through all the Tags that iTunes offers that I use so that you can gain an understanding of how well this works and perhaps implement it yourself (if you are a music fanatic as I am lol). I designed this method of organization so that my MP3 files can be easily used in any media player software – in case I do switch to something that I like in the future. I am only using simple tags that are saved directly to the MP3 files, not stored merely in the iTunes database.

BTW – no you do not have to tell me how much iTunes sucks – I know! Nevertheless, I choose to use it because I just don’t like how some of the other players out there feel.

Name
- In this field I obviously put the title of the song/piece.
- If any other artists are involved in the song that are not part of the rest of the record I will append something like the following: ‘(Feat. [artist], [artist], & [artist])’
- If the song is a remix I will append the following: ‘(Remix)’
- If the song is part of a mix album or a DJ set I will use this scheme on the title field: ‘[original artist] – [song title] [anything else appended]‘   (while I will put the name of the DJ or album artist in the Artist Field)

Artist
- Here goes the name of the Artist or group responsible for making the whole release/album/record/DJ set/compilation or whatever. If more than one artist is responsible for the release then something like this may be entered: ‘[artist] & [artist]‘

Album Artist
-  In this field I write the standard name of the artist. For example, if an artist is known by many different aliases I will place here the main name he/she goes by or their actual name. This way It is easy to browse all the releases that a single artist entity has released without having to create a playlist. In the grid view the ‘Artist’ sorting method uses the Album Artist so it is even easier. If you would like to browse a specific Artist Alias it is merely a matter of either typing it in the search box or using the browser window to get to it. Also, for anyone using last.fm, the iTunes scrobbler uses the ‘Artist’ field and not the ‘Album Artist’ field for scrobbling – so you are safe when changing this field.

Album
- This is where the name of the release/album/record/DJ set or whatever it is goes.
- If the record is not an album but merely a release from some ‘underground’ label, I will write here the catalog number (for example, if it is a release from ‘Tech Itch Recordings’ i will write ‘TI 039′ – or if it does have a name it goes by ‘TI 027 – Biotactics’ this way it is easy to browse the releases of record label that releases pretty much only 12″ singles. This will not bother the last.fm scrobbler since such releases are typically not recognized by it anyways. (note: I will definitely not do this for catalog numbers like ’5050467319714′ – these are meant to have the actual album name used)

Year/Track Number
- Self explanatory. For vinyl releases obviously you will have to translate A1, A2, B1, etc to sequential numbers.

Disc Number
- If the release is a full album or LP (something that is at least 15-20ish minutes long) then I will always fill this field out.
- If the release is a 12″ single or a 45 or an incomplete album I will leave this blank. This makes it easy for browsing, simply create a smart playlist with the criteria that the ‘Disc Number’ is not blank and you have a list of full releases. You now have the guarantee that if you click play on one of the albums that you will have at least 20 minutes of listening – not just a single song or an incomplete album.

BPM
- To fill this tag I run ‘Mix Meister BPM Analyzer’ every now and then. easy peasy. Create playlists or use for DJing, self explanatory.

Grouping
- Here I will put a sub-style of the genre. I generally use the ‘Style’ field on discogs.com for this, unless I have my own type I want to add (such as country of origin). Make sure to separate them with spaces or however you wish.  Now it is easy to set up a smart playlist with criteria ‘Grouping’ contains say….. ‘Ambient’ & ‘Rock’ & ‘Germany’ – lol – now you have a playlist of German Ambient Rock you can listen to if you have anything that matches those critera. Usually as I come across new styles I will create a smart playlist for it so I can browse styles easily (I use a folder structure for this ‘Genres > Electronic > Trance > Psy-Trance’). Easy peasy.

Composer
- This field is obviously meant for classical music – and so it will be used in such a manner… at least for classical music.
- If all of your music is not classical you might find another use for this: Record Labels. Back to our example earlier, ‘Tech Itch Recordings’ – simply type that into the Composer field and viola – you have all of the records released under Tech Itch Recordings available in the grid view by clicking Composers > Tech Itch Recordings! Since it doesn’t matter generally under what label classical music is released, but by whom it is composed, it is no problem. Now you have a list of Classical Composers and Labels that group similar music. Awesome. (and if you actually used this field to store the names of the band members who made the record… just insert it into the comment field if it matters so much to you… search box will still find it)

Comments
- I have no particular use for this field… if a song comes with this filled out I will just leave it be

Genre
-  Here comes the broad genre name. If your music is say – trance – I would put ‘Electronic’ here and ‘Trance’ into the grouping field. I generally go by what discogs.com says on this field.

Album Artwork
- Here I obviously place the artwork of the album. I regularly do a ‘*.jpg’ search on my music folder and delete any excess files. I make sure that all the MP3 file have the artwork embedded onto the file.

—-

I use the automatically organize my iTunes folder option to organize my files neatly. Now everything is neatly stored in my iTunes folder > Music > Album Artist > Album > Track. Great. Now it is easy to copy the whole folder in between PCs and backup drives to keep my music backed up. Also this is useful for DJing.

You may say…. why go through all this work? My take on it is like this: When you get a new album or release it doesn’t take more than 30 seconds to go on discogs, look up the info, and fill it out for the whole album. You could start playing the first song and only for a few seconds are you filling out the information – then you are done. It really doesn’t take that much effort. The benefits are amazing. You can now browse your music in so many ways, you can find all Hardcore tracks, or specifically Hardcore Trance. So many options for sorting music, it is amazing. If you already have a very large library my suggestion is this: Do it gradually. You don’t need to do this all at once. When you click play on an album and it is not filled out, if you have time just look it up real quick and do it. Over time you will have filled out all your music. The music that never ends up being organized is perhaps shitty music – you can think about deleting those.

If one day you have some free time to devote to exploring your music library and organizing it – create a smart playlist with the criteria that any of the above fields are not filled out – now you have a list of all songs that have not been organized. Go through this, re-discover old music, look it up, fill out the info. Easy. Also, this way you will gain a better understanding of the different styles of music and how they interrelate. In the end, I believe it is only a positive thing to do if you love music, a great learning experience.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, now you know how weird I am lol.

PS - I am also programming my own Database Software at the moment, it will also be capable of organizing music. It is a work in progress though, will take a while to complete. What makes it special is that (when not used for music) it can be used with a simple HTTP or FTP server without any bulky SQL server while using very low bandwidth.

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Everyone knows this word. At least they think they do. People use it to refer to music scenes, the darknet, crime, networks of covert people, and much more. There are many levels of the underground and most people on this planet earth will never even be aware of the true deep underworld.

There are a select few of people who are the real knowledge holders in this world. These are people outside the box. For example, do you really believe that http websites, google, and P2P are all there is to the internet? There is, in fact, an invisible internet that is not accessible by conventional means – and even that is not the deep down.

To be underground simply means that you’re down
for the struggle, get ‘em up, that’s UNDERGROUND
You could be a classy lady or a whore
But if you protest the war, for sure, you UNDERGROUND
If the government can’t see you, or deceive you
You love your people, believe you UNDERGROUND
If you refuse to play the game, you go against the grain
You ridin the train, you UNDERGROUND – get it!

The quarrel between mainstream music and underground music is completely ridiculous. Granted, mainstream music can be commercialized – but there are some gems … and many so called “underground” artists suck. Good music is just plainly good music. End of story. So… underground is something else then. Underground is unknown. Why is certain music well known? Because large record companies can easily advertise and hype up their artists. So the underground is really just the music that doesn’t get that type of exposure. Or is it? Many DJs don’t like sharing their music openly because they need to keep their own style, something that separates them from the rest. So there is an underground circle. They get their music through certain sources that they like to keep hidden. Perhaps it is about being an “insider,” being part of something, or maybe it is just about staying competitive. There are artists that release music under many different aliases and labels. It is not hard to imagine that these true musical geniuses make so much music, they probably keep much of it in private circles, the public only gets the best fruits of their work. Today it does not cost much money to run a private recording environment, the need for large record companies is over.

Don’t be fooled, most major governments are probably not what they seem. Yes, you hear about the presented debates and issues, but do you hear about the real good stuff? What is the CIA for? It stands for Central Intelligence Agency. In other words their purpose is to deal with the underworld we like to call Intelligence. Information. Everything starts with information. Wars, politics, civilization… everything. How did civilization evolve? Information. People started to learn how to farm, build shelter, etc. They passed down this knowledge using information. Today there is so much information in the world, everything is based on information. The more information there is, the faster more information is generated.

Many many years ago humans started passing on information on how to encrypt information using ciphers and symbols. Now it was easy to pass on information while keeping it occult. Today cryptography has gone very far. So what we end up with here is an underground community of insiders on information. There are many reasons for keeping information secret from embarrassment to the danger of powerful knowledge getting into the wrong hands to politics/power to avoiding oppression. It is obvious that all major organizations would take part in this underworld. Governments need to keep things secret, insurgencies need to keep things secret, stock traders need to keep things secret, corporations need to keep things secret, criminals need to keep things secret, everyone needs to keep information secret to have an edge. After all, we are all part of the human race. Now we start to get a larger and more detailed picture of the underground.

Some people like to call the collective of this a conspiracy theory. Perhaps. In reality though these are many different separate “conspiracies” competing. In theory all groups of people with a purpose are a conspiracy. You could call any government a “conspiracy” to govern or any corporation a “conspiracy” to push products. There have certainly also been some very malicious conspiracies throughout history, and some very friendly. It is clear now that all humans part-taking in the human race are conspirators and are somehow trying to better their own condition in the world relative to others or just plainly for the thrill. To see the underground one must have a level of understanding for this. So in the underground we really have people competing with each other as well as collaborating. It is more like different underground “scenes” competing with each other.

Of course you shouldn’t really listen to anything I say, what do I know? Information can easily be pulled out of thin air – it costs nothing.

My writing is not intended to be fact or fiction, merely a thought experiment – infer what you will.

]]> http://crucialflow.com/2011/07/140/feed/ 0 http://crucialflow.com/2011/07/spiders/ http://crucialflow.com/2011/07/spiders/#comments Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:57:10 +0000 Michael-R http://crucialflow.com/?p=130

Continue reading »]]> The life of a spider. It is a king in its own reality. Set up a net, catch unsuspecting prey, devour. The kingdom of the average spider in the world is probably the range of a few trees in the middle of some jungle forest. Some of them live along the fringes of humanity, a very few live right with humanity or other large mammals. When they do get in contact they are probably like “what the f*****!!,” who knows. But are they fools for “thinking” that these beings (humans) don’t exist (or rather not knowing)? Are humans fools for thinking they know all the major life forms on earth? Some humans on earth claim to have seen some sort of UFO or “aliens,” just as some spiders claim to have seen giant humans. For some spiders this is of course normal. It is plausible that some humans are very aware of whatever greater beings there may be, but perhaps they are not known to them as “aliens” but maybe as something more familiar such as spirits/ghosts or as an artifact of collective consciousness (a zero point field of quantum mechanics?).

An area the size of a normal garden is unimaginably large for a tiny spider. It cannot even fathom that planet earth exists, much less the whole universe. Us humans can squash it like it was nothing, this spider won’t even know what hit it. This minuscule garden that is so unimaginably huge for the spider is  nothing to us. It’s inhabitants insignificant to the rest of the world. One of these gardens could be wiped from existence and the impact would be minimal, it would get re-populated. What makes us think we have an understanding of the universe? Perhaps we have an understanding of the physical universe. We can predict precisely how a rocket will launch from earth and orbit another planet. Yet we do not understand the fundamental force behind what makes that happen: Gravity. We do understand its shadow, its effects on us.

To think that we are the most advanced conscious beings in the universe may be naive. Such beings are by definition more advanced than us and therefore we may not even detect their existence, they could be floating around us right now, invisible, maybe in the astral, the zero point field. Perhaps they don’t leave shadows in our 3 dimenstional world (4 with time). Our low 3 dimensional world and us humans that inhabit it could be as insignificant to these beings as a tiny spider is insignificant to us. The universe is fractal – zoom in and you get more of the same picture – zoom out and you still get more of the same picture. We can clearly see that the scale goes in at least one direction - down from us. Who says it doesn’t go the other way as well? Perhaps this is what UFO people, shamans, and mystics all know. Perhaps … in an infinite universe everything is both plausible and feasible. Maybe it is not infinite in time or space, maybe it is infinite in other dimensions.

Lol I started writing about a spider that I was watching when I was chilling outside and now look what I ended up writing….

Continue reading »]]> This intriguing new studio is soon opening up in Pittsboro, NC. Behind this studio is not only an interesting aesthetic and mathematical design, but also a new concept for the recording process called Co-Production. This new process will involve not only the artists, producers, and engineers that work on a project but the listeners as well. The idea is that the recording of a piece of music should be the recording of a performance by an artist to an audience, which can be listened to by a larger audience later on.

Pictured is the state of the art API Vision console in the main control room.

The facilities consist of two buildings, the main building and the annex. In the main building there is a large live room with excellent acoustics, flat to 25 Hz, and the analog control room with the API console. The annex contains a  5.1 room for working on the post-production of films and can be used as a separate digital mixing room for the analog main control room.

Check out the construction blog for up to date pictures on the building process and the home page for Manifold Recording to find out more about the concepts behind the studio. Interesting article about the mathematics behind the live room ceiling.

Continue reading »]]> Thought I would write  this out in a post because I’ve had to explain this to people too many times.

In professional audio there are two types of cable – balanced and unbalanced.

Balanced 1/4" Patch Cables

Yes, there is a difference! An unbalanced cable is very simple: One channel is transmitted using a ground connection and a signal connection. A balanced cable works by differential signaling. There are three different connections for one audio channel: Ground (Shield), Positive Polarity (hot), Inverted Polarity (cold). The concept is exactly the same as UTP/STP Ethernet cables for you network professionals out there. The two inverted signals are carried over a twisted pair of cabling and electromagnetic interference is canceled out for a clean signal. Now, why is this useful? In professional audio we are usually dealing with many low voltage signals being transmitted from their sources through our signal chain, past wall warts and other cables. Using balanced cables ensures that the signals are not affected by EM interference. XLR cables are balanced. Always.

This is where the confusion comes in: Balanced cables vs stereo cables. Balanced 1/4″ cables are TRS (tip ring sleeve), same as stereo TRS cables. There is no physical difference between these cables, their use is very different though. A mono balanced TRS cable carries ONE channel of balanced audio while a stereo unbalanced TRS cable carries TWO channels of unbalanced audio. When using TRS cables make sure that both the input and the output are either mono/balanced or stereo – DO NOT mix these. If you plug a stereo source straight into your balanced 1/4″ input on your mixer the signal will cancel itself out and you are left with the difference of the left and right channels – not a good sound. If you have a stereo signal that needs to be patched into the mixer via 1/4″ cabling buy a splitter that splits the stereo cable into the left and right channel. Plug the left and the right into separate mixer channels. Most balanced inputs will accept an unbalanced TS mono cable, so your guitar can be plugged straight into your balanced mixer input. Check your manuals for specifics on situations regarding your gear.

PS: 1/4" I/O on professional sound cards is usually balanced, so none of those are stereo - they each carry one channel!!

Hope that I cleared things up for the confused people out there, I hate seeing people mess this up.

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This is an album that SkyBlew and I worked on together.

1 You Never Heard An Intro Like This (Prod. Ready Rock)
2 No Im Not Crazy! (Feat. Kdotmills) (Prod. by Zagga)
3 Gotta Be Different (Feat. Rapper Jowin) (Prod. By Jowin)
4 Still Around (Feat. Kdotmills) (Prod. by Zagga)
5 Hello Tomorrow (Prod. Edstaa)
6 They Told Me Dont Take That Road
7 Life Is Like A Dream (INTER-lude)
8 Y’all Wack Rappers Let Me Down (Prod. By Just Wright)
9 Beware Of The Blew Spitta!
10 Don’t It Feel Like It’s Joy (Interlude)
11 Blew Soul Melody (Prod. Zagga)
12 Thanks I Appreciate It, Like Really
13 Color My World (Prod. by L.O. Key Kidz)
14 Slow Dance On The Stars (Remix)
15 Going Nuts for Dunuts (Live Radio Freestyle)

Download & Listen here