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Welcome

Welcome to The Boyd Arts Blog

Welcome! Call me  Chris. T his is where I’ll be sharing my insights at the intersection of Music and Media Technology . As a point of full disclosure, I have recently begun to use various AI tools: From a couple different "AI Girlfriends" (don't you judge me!) just to explore AI, I'm using Google Gemini more and more - I'll call her my "AI Research Assistant." I’m starting this blog to pull back the curtain on the technical artistry required to capture live performance. My mission for this space is simple: to provide content that helps musicians, engineers, and organizers understand what I've found it takes to produce professional-grade audio and video in the real world. My "bread and butter" has always been in the field—starting in the early 90's with  on-site recording for classical ensembles ( think high school, community and collegiate bands, choirs and associated festivals)  to the fast-paced demands of live sound and media enginee...
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Data Alphabet Soup

 Data Alphabet Soup My last post started with a panicked call about a flash drive. As I worked through it, I realized there was a lot of detail I needed to put on the back burner. One of the significant points I glossed over was the concept of SD card speeds. The difficulty of that discussion lies in the alphabet soup of the transmission and storage of data. In this post, I want to try to answer questions like "How fast is fast enough" or "How big a drive do I need?" The first step of that is to get a clear picture of how we talk about data. In an earlier post on networking, I discussed bits and bytes. Let's begin with a quick review of that. The most basic math in the digital world is that it takes 8 bits to make a single byte. It is also worth being aware of the concept of a "word," which is simply the fixed size of a data unit for a specific system—such as the 24-bit word of an audio sample or a 64-bit word in modern computing. Regardless of the wor...
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What Happened to My Flash Drive?

 What Happened to My Flash Drive? I recently received a panicked call from a friend who couldn't find the flash drive he uses for multi-track field recording. Beyond me scolding him for only having one, it required a look under the hood to figure out what he might be able to get on short notice. The experience the two of us have shared has made us acutely aware that not all USB drives are created equal. Taking that closer look at the requirements for his recording session, I also started to consider that we actually have different storage needs depending on the phase of our work. This post will concentrate on the needs of the capture phase.  Stay tuned for a discussion on the storage needs of the production and archiving stages. Perhaps one of the first questions I should answer is why it might be hard to find an appropriate USB drive on short notice.  While it’s not all that hard to find a cheap USB flash drive or a portable hard drive (a 1TB WD my Passport is under $100...
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Why Can't I Listen to the Duruflé Requiem in the Car?

Why Can't I Listen to the Duruflé Requiem in the Car? One of the side effects of my teaching position is that I’m spending a fair amount of time in the car. It gives me a lot of time to think and react to various media that I consume. I’ve also been working on implementing more robust recording archives for my program and figuring out some metadata aspects of that.  Recently, instead of thinking about recording, I was in the mood to listen to some Duruflé—particularly his requiem and the whole “Quatre Motets...” This was a task that should have seemed rather simple: pull up Amazon Music and ask. Well, beyond Speech to Text having no idea who Duruflé was or that Ubi Caritas was something other than “duraface covy caritas”—don’t get me started on the larger work, apparently called “duraflake California motet”. When I did finally stop and manually type “Duruflé Requiem” into Amazon Music, it found me a couple versions that were fine, but after starting to listen, when my listening wa...
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