Coronavirus Has Hit Sports

There’s so many things to think about coronavirus. But the fact that it has finally hit mainstream international sports means that it won’t be going away. Initially one of the reactions was to play without fans in the sports arenas. But then athletes are now getting infected. Initially, just footballers (unsurprisingly) in Italy got infected. But today, it has finally hit NBA basketball right into the core, with a player infected, soon after making not so smart jokes (in retrospect) about the virus. Expect economies to crash.

Anyways, here’s a map showing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. What’s interesting is the fact that despite the ease of international travel, the spread of the virus is not fully homogenous. Countries other than China with the highest number of infections (in descending order) are Italy, Iran, and South Korea. What fascinates me is: why? Only South Korea is truly next door. Does it have something to do with the climate? Genetic predisposition? To me the international public health control measures feel late (it’s always a balance); if it’s as easily infectious as it seems to be, I expected much more countries to have been affected already. And Malaysia, with its stream of mainland Chinese tourists, is lucky to not have as many cases. And no deaths. Let’s not jinx this.

What’s also (darkly) humorous is the fact that the Diamond Princess cruise ship is considered as a “country”.

My Side Distractions (Therapy) Regarding Music

With today’s high speed Internet, how people play music has shifted towards streaming. But I’m old school and love “owning my music”.

Many years ago I subscribed to iTunes Match, that matches what you have in your library and allows you both streaming and downloading access to either songs identified in the database, or uploaded songs if otherwise for a fee (RM 100). The service has worked relatively well, matching at least half of the songs in my database (a lot of game soundtracks are not on iTunes). I have quite a collection of songs, at the beginning almost exclusively collected by compiling songs from other friends’ computers during my university days. The rest are through cough, torrents, cough. Frankly, I can't afford to buy all of the music I want to own. A few months back I’ve found a way that would allow me to have new songs and get old songs that were previously uploaded but not matched “iTunes matched”.

The key to this is YouTube and having a program that could extract the media files from the YouTube videos being streamed. In the past, it's possible to download the media being played on YouTube by going through the web developer tools. This is no longer the case at present (or maybe I’m too lazy to Google it). What I use now is an app called iTube Studio, which allows me to extract any media on YouTube as either a video file, a music file, or subtitle file, of course for a price (using this only for music hunting is not the sole reason I bought this app). Another alternative to YouTube are some sites still available to download MP3s directly from (despite DMCA takedowns); I won’t publicly name the one I use.

When downloading/extracting these songs, it’s important to compare the YouTube video with what is in the iTunes Store database to ensure that the music file in both are as similar as possible. Don’t use the music videos as they are usually not the same as the album version of the song. Looking for lyric videos, presence of the same album cover-thumbnail, details like “original”/“remastered”, duration of the files, etc all will help. Once extracted and imported into iTunes, I then try to add them to the library and see if they get matched. If none of the YouTube videos work, then I go for the alternative MP3 sites.

Additionally, some of the songs in iTunes do get matched but actually have the wrong names of the tracks, artists, etc. That’s where Siri comes in, as Apple a while ago bought the company behind the Shazam app. Just use the command “Shazam this” and you’ll get the required information.

It is quite some work in sorting things out, but at the end of the day, if I decide to cut ties with iTunes Match, I can decide to download all unmatched and matched music (as DRM free 256 kps AAC) then call it a day.

Some might cry that it’s stealing, considering that it’s only RM 100 versus purchasing each song/album I want. But one, this is actually per year rather than a single payment. And two, you’re wrong if any streaming solution pays artists a lot (and Spotify’s among the worst).

Regarding Getting the Masters Copy

It’s been soooo long since I last updated this blog, and that disappoints me. I wonder if it’s worth keeping it online as it takes money, money I need. But I’ve already paid for another year…So yeah.

Anyways, I’d like to take a moment and address reader feedback (yay). So this reader from India asked if he can get a PDF compilation of my notes. I asked him to download the JPEG from the site instead, and there’s a few reasons for this.

1. My modern handwritten notes are scanned at very high resolution, higher than what a human retina can process: 600 dpi. Kinda like music masters. Thus the filesizes are huge for the relatively small content. My full stash of notes currently sits at…5 GB

2. The JPEG’s have been processed to 220 dpi on the site, and it is JPEG’s that this site uses to render the images and not PDF pages. This is the around the same value as the DPI of a Retina MacBook. It’s smaller than the DPI’s of say the top smartphones, but I think this is a good compromise. I have actually been trying to downsize the scans to 460 (ala top smartphones), but PDFPen broke what was a working feature related to this, and I’ve given up since. Maybe in the future I’ll just scan at 460 dpi.

Now if someone wants to pay me for my stuff, that’s a different issue altogether! This site is more in the red than a non-profit!