The recordings of a British concert pianist who found fame in the last years of her life have been exposed as hoaxes - by iTunes.

Joyce Hatto, who died in June 2006, has become a cause célèbre with fans of classical piano. A series of recordings appeared to show her masterful command of a wide range of composers including Liszt, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Dukas and more.

Last week, a critic at the Gramophone magazine got a surprise when he put a Hatto recording of Liszt’s 12 Transcendental Studies into his computer. The iTunes player identified the disc as being recorded by another pianist, Lászlo Simon. The critic dug out the Simon album and found it sounded exactly the same as the Hatto one.

iTunes had identified a hoax. The Gramophone critic tried another Hatto disc, this time of Hatto playing Rachmaninov, and again iTunes identified it as belonging to someone else.

Examinations of the waveforms of Hatto recordings confirmed what iTunes had suggested. Many are direct copies of other pianist’s work, while some are tweaked versions where a recording has simply been slowed down.

Hatto’s husband, who produced and released the music, says he cannot explain the similarities.

via New Scientist Technology Blog

According to the New York Times, guitarist Ry Cooder used an unusual approach to mastering his latest album: he used an iTunes preset.

Last year, as Mr. Cooder worked on My Name Is Buddy, an oddball folk and blues concept album about a red cat that travels through a mythic American landscape, he ran into familiar problems. When he subjected the recording to his usual test — playback in his Toyota, on the factory-installed stereo — the result wasn’t to his liking.

“It started to sound processed,” he said. “We were losing the feeling of the thing, and this is not music that can withstand this.”

Then Mr. Cooder noticed something else: When he burned a copy of the album using Apple’s iTunes software, it sounded fine. He didn’t know why until one of his younger engineers told him that the default settings on iTunes apply a “sound enhancer.” Mr. Cooder liked its effect on his studio recordings so well that he used it to master his album. “We didn’t do anything else to it,” he said.

Mr. Cooder is most likely the first well-known musician to master his album using iTunes, but other producers have also noticed its effect.

“When we made the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record, they would listen to it on the iTunes presets and say it sounded pretty good,” said Dave Fridmann, a producer who has worked with that band. “It beefs things up and brightens them and you can definitely tell the difference.”

eMusic recently announced that they’ve reached a milestone, having sold 100 million songs as unencrypted (DRM-free) MP3s.

Tech bloggers are freaking out about the news:

• Digital Music News asks “So, uh, Mr. Major Label executive guy; How many million DRM free tracks does eMusic have to sell before you join the party? No, really.. how many?”
• Techdirt says that DRM-free music is the way to go, and that the major music labels are pretending that the jury is still out.
• MacWorld says that the labels are mulling life without DRM.
• WebProNews warns that they are going to keep slamming on Apple’s “rotten to the core” DRM in response to the “ever-growing consumer backlash revolving around Digital Rights Management.”

These guys need a reality check. Like it or not, sales of non-DRM’d music are trivial in the context of music industry sales, they are insignificant compared to the sales of DRM’d tracks at iTunes, and they don’t offer artists a serious new option for making money.

Continue reading ‘Why Bloggers Don’t Run Record Companies’

Qloud (pronounced “cloud”) today launched a public beta of its search service and iTunes plug-in.

Qloud uses media player plug-ins to provide the listener data that powers Qloud’s search. In the Qloud service, users can then search through this information, and can do so in multiple ways:

• music preference (how much it is played, how highly it is rated):
• demographics (what the age, gender, location of the listeners is); and
• category (how the music is tagged).

For example, one could search for the most played tracks with the tag “workout.” But users can also go further by seeking, for example, tracks most tagged ‘workout’ and ‘hiphop’ by women in New York aged 20-30.

“Qloud will do for music discovery what Google has done for web discovery,” claims Toby Murdock, co-founder of Qloud. “Users prefer the control and immediate gratification that the search experience provides. Qloud now offers that for music, and our unique approach makes the search results accurate and satisfying to music lovers around the world.”

Continue reading ‘Qloud Launches Music Search Engine; Integrates With iTunes’

Apple today had a special event to introduce iTunes 7 and updated versions of its iPod line.

The introductions failed to wow, though. Here’s what you need to know.

• iPod shuffles got smaller
• iPod nanos got smaller
• iPods got bigger hard drives and let you play Pac-Man
• iTunes now lets you download Disney movies

The coolest introduction of the day was the iTV, which isn’t shipping and is only tangentially related to music and audio.

Podcasting News has the gory details.