Three choices. Just because.

First, Tolkien-inspired:

They smoke the good stuff in Finland:

And of course Prop 8 the Musical:

Yeah I know I'm a bit behind, these are all dated. I'm catching up on Youtube.

It's sad to hear that Richard Wright has passed on. It's is the end of an era in music, since he was integral to the classic sound of Pink Floyd. I was often astonished by the list of musical instruments he played on various tracks, although he was never accoladed as much as other members of the band. He had a strong hand in some of my favourite songs, most notably "Us and Them", which ranks in the upper echelons for me.

Much of his musical work was extended, that is to say significantly longer than the 3 minute mark considered acceptable for radio airplay. "Interstellar Overdrive" ran nearly 10 minutes. "Careful with that Axe, Eugene" and "One of the These Days" are both over 5 minutes. "Us and Them" is close to 8 minutes, although a 4 minute single was released. You get the idea. To anyone that thinks Pink Floyd had an easy string of hits, realize they often did it outside of the mainstream, but still managed to encompass it.

He was a leader in textured modern music, influential in the same subtle ways he blended ethereal ambiance into songs. We have many more choices in these areas now, there are various entire genres filled by bands like Sigur Rós, Massive Attack, NiN, Les Claypool, etc.. I have no doubt Richard Wright influenced many of these in direct and perhaps more importantly indirect ways, after all he was skilled at layered backgrounds that somehow retained simplicity.

I'm a fan, what can I say? It's a shame we won't be hearing more from him.

There's been a bit of a gap between my previous Audiosurf challenge and this one. What can I say, I've been busy with a lot of things and playing other games to boot. This one is a doozy though I say, because we're gonna kick it old school with the Rat Pack.

• Dean Martin - Mambo Italiano
• Sammy Davis Jr. - Eee-O Eleven
• Frank Sinatra - Swinging on a Star

I'm nuts about Dean Martin, it was hard to pick a tune for him, so I went with one of his biggest hits. For Sammy, it's the signature Ocean's Eleven song and for Frank, well I must admit I cheated because Swinging on a Star was one of Bing's standards, but ol' Blue Eyes does it well.

This will probably be my last Audiosurf challenge for awhile, savour it. =)

After more than a decade with Winamp, I'm considering *gasp* switching.

I started with Winamp v1.2 and actually registered v1.73 back when it was shareware. I've been a loyal and happy customer, but the bloat, lack of real progress and disorganization of dead plugins has finally gotten to me. Granted, I still think it's miles above Windows Media Player or iTunes, but there's no mistaking it: Winamp has been coasting on fumes for awhile now.

I've taken Foobar2000 for a test drive. It feels fresh and clean, with hints at complexity underneath. A few important features are winning me over, stuff I could get from Winamp through plugins or customized settings, but are available in Foobar2000 by default:

• Gapless Playback - Dark Side of the Moon blends nicely now between tracks.
• ReplayGain - Volume normalizing that doesn't lose quality, plus it can ramp volume based upon albums rather than tracks, which is important (see gapless playback above). It's not perfect, but it's the best solution I've found. Quiet moments are quiet, loud parts are loud, it's so much better than the brute-force compression plugins that limit range. Foobar2000 has ReplayGain batch controls which makes it painless to setup.
• Shuffle by Album - I'm an album nut, I like to listen to an album at a time rather than just one tune, but I also like some random elements so randomly shuffling albums is appreciated. I didn't want to resort to some heavy-duty "media-library" (ala iTunes, ick) to do this.

There are other notable features, but these were the ones that compelled me to try Foobar2000 and I'm appreciating them so far.

One thing I'll miss with Winamp is its beautiful skinning abilities and straightforward basic control interface. I'm not a fan of the 'jukebox' ordered playlist interfaces that are popular these days, but it's not super important because most of the time the music player sits in my taskbar tray and I control it via the multimedia keys on my keyboard.

Here's to hoping Foobar2000 has a long run. =)

Because I just had to post it.

Since the fiasco over Creative's unethical treatment of a third-party programmer, I've been on the lookout for suitable replacements to the X-Fi audio cards for myself and my group of gaming friends. We're not looking to dump the cards we have, but we've all bought new PCs lately so there has been opportunity to make new choices.

My must-have criteria:

• Good signal-to-noise ratio. - Specs aside, I listen for this. Crank the volume, I don't want to hear background static.
• Hardware channels and/or effects. - Software audio takes more CPU horsepower than most people think. It's not night/day like graphics hardware, but saved cycles still equate to better framerates. Also, software audio often gets a low priority resulting in crackling audio, which I don't want to hear, ever.
• Upmixing to 5.1 - Hardware upmixing is strongly preferred. Most games have surround settings anyway, but I do tend to run Winamp whilst playing games and upmixing without taxing my system is a big plus.

I'd have thought these features would be important to most gamers and audiophiles, but oddly the status-quo = crappy software sound via onboard outputs. I can count the manufacturers of suitable audio cards on just one hand. Below are the choices I've found:

• Creative X-Fi - Any model of the cards with the actual X-Fi chipset are honestly fantastic cards that meet all three of my criteria bang-on. Be careful though, Creative does a nasty switcheroo with the lowend cards and labels X-Fi onto budget cards that actually contain Audigy chipsets (So avoid the "Xtreme Audio" and stick with the "Xtreme Gamer" or better).
• Auzentech X-Fi Prelude - X-Fi in the name and you guessed it, Auzentech is using Creative's chipset, the software appears to be the same too. This is essentially a premium version though, with gold-plated connectors and the quality many expect from Auzentech. Unless I'm mistaken, it's also a fully 24bit version of the X-Fi, which definitely puts it above Creative's. I'm curious to directly compare this card with the X-Fi Xtreme Gamer that I own, but it does also come with a bigger pricetag.
• ASUS Xonar - At first the Xonar looked like a contender to the X-Fi. The Xonar cards have great signal-to-noise specs, plus the benefit of Linux drivers on the near horizon (who knows how long Creative will take on that). ... But... it turns out the Xonar uses a C-Media chipset that is software driven, which is hugely disappointing, especially considering the premium price on these cards. Such a shame, since the light-up connectors are hella cool and I love ASUS.

I sure hope Creative comes to their senses and simply opens up their drivers, for the sake of any OS aside from XP. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, the X-Fi cards are the only quality choice. No matter what evil Creative's legal and driver departments get themselves into, they are essentially the only company that's still supporting the gamer market with real hardware audio.

If you really want to support the competition, I'd say go with Auzentech and get the same (or better) quality while giving a few less coins to Creative.

I just couldn't resist this: Boycott crappy onboard sound.

Ahh these are starting to catch on, we've got our little circle jerk of competitors hammering away at these tunes via Audiosurf.

Since The Real McKenzies were so popular amongst our group for the previous challenge, I'm gonna throw in another one of theirs from that same album.

• The Real McKenzies - 10,000 Shots
• The Used - The Bird and the Worm
• Smokie - Who the Fuck is Alice?

Have you ever been a non-fan of a group and then suddenly they release a song that just grabs you anyway. I have to grudgedly admit I love The Bird and the Worm from The Used, I can't stop humming it and the lyrical imagery gets me too.

"Who the Fuck is Alice?" was one of those accidental remixes that brought life back to a long forgotten tune (read the related Wikipedia article), in this case from glam rockers Smokie whom I usually mistake for Slade. Either way, it's an amusing ditty.

I'll toss up the scoreboards later this week, meanwhile go ahead and strain your fingers beating my scores on these. =)