Piracy is Green

Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University, in a study sponsored by Microsoft and Intel have concluded that downloading MP3s from the internet has a considerably reduced carbon footprint over traditional approaches of music distribution.  They considered purchasing CDs from stores, ordering music CDs online, after which they are delivered to homes, downloading files before burning them on CDs and just using the downloaded files and playing them on computers and PMPs without burning them on CDs.  The cost of packaging, transportation, commutation, and energy taken up to listen to the music were all factored in.  While the study does not explicitly state that downloading illegal MP3s is more environmentally friendly than purchasing CDs from a retail outlet, it is a pretty safe assumption to make.

There are some other interesting conclusions of the study though.  If you start feeling guilty about purchasing music from retail outlets because of the harm it causes to mother nature, you can compensate by walking to the retail store instead of driving.  This puts the footprints of downloads and purchases at par.  The original research paper can be downloaded at http://snipurl.com/qtsji

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Seperate Music and Vocal Voice from a Song

Yup, Yes.., you can do it yourself! You don’t need to have a recording studio since the Audacity freeware does the job. Using this freeware, you can remove the vocal piece from the centre of the stereo panorama. You can download the program from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.

REMOVING THE VOICE TRACK: On executing the software, load the desired audio file in Audacity. Open the context menu in the editor on the left by clicking the arrow next to the file name. Separate both channels with ‘Split stereo sound track’. Then select the right track by clicking on a free space in the gray region and open ‘Effect | Invert’. Now click the menu arrow for each track one after the other and select the ‘Mono’ command. This deletes the parts of the track that are at the exact center. This often reduces the vocal part of the track considerably. Unfortunately, even other parts of the track are lost, especially those from the bass. However, you can try to balance this out with ‘Effect| Equalizer’. If the voice is not heard exactly in the middle of stereo panorama, you can try and increase the level in the weaker channel with ‘Effect | Amplification’ before converting the stereo files into mono files.

OPTIMIZING THE FADE-OUT: The ‘Voicetrap’ plug-in is very useful and can be found on www.cloneensemble.com/vt_main.htm Look for ‘Download’ on the website and click on the ‘VST (Windows)’ link. Unzip the archive and copy the contents in the ‘Plug-ins’ folder in the Audacity program directory. Prerequisite for the use of Voicetrap in Audacity is the ‘VST-Enabler’ auxiliary program. Download this tool from http://audacityteam.org/vst/ and install it. When you start the program next, the Audacity menu will contain the ‘VoicetrapV20′ effect. The freeware version of the plug-in achieves good results with its default settings. The registered shareware variant for 25 dollars offers more ptions for detailed configuration. The advantage of Voicetrap is that there is comparatively less interference than the sound of the music piece and stereo signals and the depths are preserved.

NOTE: How well one succeeds in fading out the vocal piece depends largely on the selected music piece. Invariably, even expensive programs cannot completely remove voices without any loss of sound. Erasures on live recordings can be difficult.

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