A few months, quite a few months ago, [Tony], occupant of the next-door cell in the asylum, very kindly gave me an old [Zeiss] [Ikon 521] camera dating from the early '50s. It was knocked about a bit, but the bellows looked perfect and the shutter and lens appeared to work fine. After a lot of humming and haring, I got [Cameratiks] in Edinburgh to service and recalibrate it for me. The cost of the job, though far too low by any reasonable valuation of such skilled and time-consuming work, was about equal to the cost of a second-hand camera in A-1 condition on Ebay, but I thought, heck, even an A-1 50-year-old camera's going to need a damn good clean and service.

After an even longer delay (because of children), I've got around to putting a roll of HP5 thought it to see what comes out. I am more than impressed by the results!

Now, the above picture is lit from the side, which gives the uncoated lens plenty of excuse to flare like a 70's pop-star, but in fact this turns out to be not too much of a problem. The fastest shutter speed, 1/200th, is. Although the resulting f/22 on a slightly overcast Scottish summer day did make for a reasonable depth of field, even on the medium format frame, you'd better put a slower film in if you're going to the med.

The usual advantages and disadvantages of medium format apply. Minuscule depth of field at any reasonable aperture, but you have so much film area to play with you can crop away to your hearts content. A 6cmx6cm neg is roughly the same as 150MPx in digital terms if you work it out. Photographing Freya on the move would otherwise be impossible, but here's a tight crop of about 20% of the negative:

I was so pleasantly surprised, I put together a video about it. What I didn't mention was that the stock ID11 I'd used was mixed up over 2 years ago, and according to the data sheet it's only supposed to last 6 months! So much for sell-by dates. Moral of the story would seem to be "keep your stock solution in plastic Pepsi bottles, and not those expensive zoom things!"

...like a bandit. Here he is grabbing his diploma on his last day at Dalry Nursery School. The getaway driver was Mrs Breen, his special needs assistant.

Last weekend was the [Anatomy of Listening] conference at Glasgow, and I think it went really well. We had two recitals: one from the Edinburgh Quartet, one from the pianist Martin Jones. Martin (pictured above) played some outrageously virtuoso pieces, and was kind enough to play some Chopin (and other works) into Jenny's magic musical machine. In the picture, you can see him showing off the florescent makeup applied to the fingers so that Jen's computer system can follow his hands. At the speed he was playing on Sunday last, it would have had a job!

You can see the snapshots of the speakers [here]
I particularly like the shot of [Martin in the whisky bar]

I wanted Jenni to play at the piano to demonstrate some of the points in her talk, but she declined on the basis that there were too many musicians of international standing around and there was "no way" she was going to play with them in the room. But the unlocked Steinway-D of Glasgow University Concert Hall was too much of a pull, and as soon as the audience started to file out, she was playing duets!

So, here's the problem. Currently, I own quite a lot of recorded media. At a rough count (worked out by measuring shelf length), it comes CDs: 700; LPs: 250; DVDs: 180 and LaserDiscs: 180 (really!). Amazing how it all mounts up.

The situation is getting out of hand for four reasons: firstly, shelf-space; secondly, indexing and browsing; thirdly, portability; finally, longevity.

Shelf space isn't really too much of an issue for us. Every so often, I have to buy or modify a piece of furniture, but that's about it. The secret to success is ordering. For music, I've gone for alphabetical by Composer, plus a shelf for "stuff which isn't classical". When I was a postgraduate student, I started making a text file with all of my recorded media in it, so at least I could find something just using the search function of a text editor. This gets you out of a scrape when you're looking for Enigma Variations under E for Elgar, but can't find it because it's on the B-side of Young Persons' Guide to the Orchestra (B for Britten). This evolved into a script called [RLDB] (record library database) to display the results of queries and to add new artefacts. It was written in [Qt] and [Python] on my Linux box using [PostgreSQL] as the back end (no point in messing about!), and thus works on the Mac too, at least, after I'd persuaded the Apple to consent to building the Python Qt bindings. ([Full Size])

With the appropriate command line options, it'll work (read-only) as a web CGI program so you can query the database from your mobile 'phone: ([Full Size])

By portability, I don't just mean in the Software sense. Apart from the absolute impossibility of transporting a selection like that around, for example to keep oneself amused on those wet summer holidays in the highlands, even playing some items in different parts of the house presents challenges. Have you ever tried carrying a Laserdisc player around?

As to the issue of longevity, when I was a school boy, I would exchange cassette copies of material I owned with friends, and if I heard something I liked, I'd go out and buy it. Hear that, record companies? Swapping bootleg tapes increases sales. You should be paying people to do it, not suing them! This only works if you have good product, of course; the best way to avoid copyright "theft" (whatever that means — "infringement", I think) is not to sell a load of old . At the time, the only "hi-fi" I had was a cassette recorder. A Pioneer CTF6060, if memory serves. I could only find a picture of the similar 4040 on the web...

LPs were better, obviously, but you couldn't carry them around, lend them to your friends so easily, etc. I sold the Pioneer and bought a NAD machine which had Dolby-C when that came out. This was a mistake. When we moved to Scotland, I was going through all my old stuff and considered what to do with my cassette player and its collection. Guess what? The commercial cassettes had faded away to almost literally nothing, whereas the 30-year-old bootleg copies, while not perfect, weren't at all bad! In the words of Feynman, "What have you seen? what have you learned?" (have you worked out why I don't like record companies yet? ) The Dolby-C ones didn't last too well either: the NR had done a sterling effort of reducing not only the noise, but most the signal above about 500Hz as well.

I'm not falling for that one again. Once the collection is safely and securely stored on hard disk, it can be stored encrypted and backed-up much more easily. And it'll fit easily in a suitcase (now), briefcase (soon) or key ring (sometime). So I won't ever have to pay for the privilege of buying LPs of cassettes I already own, and again for CDs.

Status quo

One of the overriding requirements for the new incarnation of my media collection is that use can be made of the RLDB database. It only covers audio recordings and music video ones, but nonetheless there are currently 4094 entries in it from Carl Fredrich Abel to Domenico Zipoli and I don't want to type that lot in again!

RLDB's database stucture has stood the test of time. Here it is:

               List of relations
 Schema |      Name       |   Type   |  Owner   
--------+-----------------+----------+----------
 public | artist          | table    | postgres
 public | artist_id_seq   | sequence | postgres
 public | composer        | table    | postgres
 public | composer_id_seq | sequence | postgres
 public | location        | table    | postgres
 public | location_id_seq | sequence | postgres
 public | work            | table    | postgres
 public | work_artist     | table    | postgres
 public | work_id_seq     | sequence | postgres
(9 rows)

Now, the good thing is that the idea of an artefact (piece of plastic) is separated from the idea of a musical work. The work and artefact (or, as I called them at the time, "location") tables are stored like this (triggers omitted for brevity, but basically columns with names ending _id are foreign keys of the appropriate relation):

                           Table "public.work"
   Column    |  Type   |                    Modifiers                    
-------------+---------+-------------------------------------------------
 id          | integer | not null default nextval('"work_id_seq"'::text)
 title       | text    | not null
 opus        | text    | default ''::text
 composer_id | integer | not null
 director_id | integer | 
 ensemble_id | integer | 
 location_id | integer | 
 medium      | text    | default ''::text
 comments    | text    | default ''::text
 key         | text    | default ''::text
 date        | text    | default ''::text
Indexes:
    "work_pkey" primary key, btree (id)

                          Table "public.location"
   Column   |  Type   |                      Modifiers                      
------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------
 id         | integer | not null default nextval('"location_id_seq"'::text)
 l_composer | text    | default ''::text
 l_title    | text    | default ''::text
Indexes:
    "location_pkey" primary key, btree (id)

There is some confusion; the medium is stored in the work relation and not with locations for example. This, if I remember, was a dirty hack to avoid having to deal with multi-CD sets in the location table, whose job is really only to say "go to the shelf and look under 'Fournier'", not really to suggest which actual disk contains the work.

Ripping yarns

An external 1.5TB hard disk drive cost me £120. That should keep me busy for a bit, and allow for a reasonable amount of room. Audio CDs are being stored as [flac] (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files. No need to choose a bit rate, and no arguments as to whether my codec is better than your codec: what goes in is what comes out. Plus, my mp3 player can play them, so I can copy files straight to it if I don't want to carry the whole collection around.

Video is a bit more tricky, but fortunately, I don't have as many DVDs. The best thing to do for more serious material is simply to dump the ISO image of the DVD straight to the hard drive. This preserves all of the navigational information, and can be played directly with [mplayer's] dvdnav:// URL, or after mounting. with [Ogle]. Some disks, principally ones with T.V. series (I've just done this to my "Beiderbecke" DVDs with James Bolam, for example) are transcoded to MPEG4 but at an generous 2.5Mbps. This roughly halves the file size, and the look identical to the original to me. I don't need subtitles and scene-by-scene navigation, so I'm prepared to compromise.

At home, I've got an antique machine which was saved from the scrap heap after a research project came to an end. In its day, it was a top-draw piece of kit: dual 1.2GHz AMD processors, 2GB RAM, twin 34GB SCSI-ultra disks. About the same as a run-of-the-mill desktop machine now, but with a built-in room heater. Fortunately, it comes with a very nice screen, and all of the software I need can be open and running on the desktop at the same time. ([Full Size])

In the top left is quite an important part of the work. Every CD ripped is logged including its bar code and path relative to the external drive's mount point. For example, Beethoven's Violin Concerto ends up in a directory called Thomas Zehetmair, Frans Bruggen & Orchestra of the 18th Century - Beethoven : Violin Concerto & Two Romances. This is because the lack of coherent metadata available for classical material means that ripped CDs are usually given rather eccentric directory names. The external drive has been formatted with a Linux ext3 filesystem, apart from anything else to permit files larger than 4GB, with names containing pretty much any character, and I don't trust Apple's offerings after the laptop experience (what's this "Fix Permissions" thing all about?)

Next Step?

So now what? There are a few collection managers around which might be able to make a decent fist of this: [tellico] is the KDE one. The thing about these sort of programs is that the very rarely cater for classical music collections — tellico's music collection doesn't even have a "composer" field for example — and while they are fully configurable, one wonders if it isn't an extra layer of dependencies which could be handled by a simple script, like RLDB, and a decent database, like PostgreSQL.

The next step must be a bit of masterful introspection. Exactly how do I "read" my collection? Presenting it as boxes on shelves is rather irksome. I expect somebody has done some research on this, but I'm powerfully swayed by the idea that what I really need is to code up some basic functionality and to add what I need as I need it.

It's the open-source way.

It isn't every day that one of your advisees comes to see you saying they won't be around for a few weeks, because they are in the final of the Orange Unsigned Acts competition in London, and they might miss a few things. Of course, failing to hand in coursework or missing tests without a med cert might result in Credit Withheld, and naturally I can't sanction that sort of thing. But I'm proud to say that I told the advisee in question, Tommy Reilly, that he'd be mad not to go; if he'd decided to give up, there would always been that nagging doubt.

(Photo by Julia Nicolle)

As almost everybody now knows, Tommy won the competition, is working on his first album, and has his first top 20 hit. If this hasn't yet come to your attention, you can read all about it on the [BBC News site] where Tommy is compared with Dylan, or the [programme's web page]

Tommy has suspended his studies for now to pursue his high-flying career. There is a limit on the amount of time you can take to complete a B.Eng.. However if Brian May can [hand in his Ph.D. thesis 36 years late] I will certainly petition the University to let Tommy back in if he wants to return to complete at a later date.

Congratulations, Tommy Reilly, and best luck with your future career (whatever it is).