Art Gillespie

So I’m hunting around for local venues for my new live experimental lounge electronica act today, and I stumble upon The Red Room at Grill’s ‘Booking Manifesto’

There are so many full-of-win things about this manifesto that you should read the whole thing, but seeing as it’s on MySpace and my readers don’t like having their eyes gouged out by tiny sans-serif and the silhouettes of a thousand dancing mortgage brokers, here’s my favorite bit:

There are many fine venues that book great indie rock in town. This means that we don’t have to, and we generally don’t. I would define indie rock as saying that you probably have a very jacked-up MySpace with a huge splash screen with professionally rendered CSS frippery and a million slick-looking pics and videos all over it, and that your albums “drop” instead of get released, and you have a “street team in my market area” and that you are “rising” or “upcoming” and that you have a “strong buzz.” We already have a strong buzz, which comes from beer. We love you, but it’s not what we do here.

I want to play this venue. I do.

Last month, my band was going through the mixing process for their new album and we were all weighing in on different mix versions. I imagined there must be some application on OS X that would make this easy. I Googled. I called audio engineers. I even posted to twitter. When nothing turned up, I gave up and went back to my crappy Pro Tools/track solo methodology.

For a while, anyway. Then I decided to write the utility I would have been delighted to find.

The result is Audio Compare, a simple utility that lets you instantly switch between up to four different audio files while keeping them in sync. Once I’d built it and used it in the final stages of the new Redlands album, I found all sorts of uses for it: testing to see if I could hear the difference between 192- and 128-kbps mp3s and their AIFF original, comparing the iTunes mp3 encoder with LAME, etc.

I’m interested what others have to say about it and what features people would find useful in this kind of tool, so I’m posting this early version here for anyone to download. If this is the sort of thing that you’d find useful, give it a shot. If there’s a feature that would make it perfect for you, don’t hesitate to let me know. If you find a bug, PLEASE let me know. Hit me in the comments, on twitter or directly at agillesp at gmail dot com.

Download here: Audio Compare 0.1.0

There’s no manual (yet). Just drag audio files onto the pads, hit play (spacebar) to start and stop playback, and hit ‘A/B’ (a key) to toggle between loaded pads. You can hit ‘Hide’ (b key) to hide the filenames and the currently selected pad. This also randomly selects the currently playing pad. Finally the ‘<<’ button (left arrow key) will force all playing files back to zero.

UPDATE 06/10/09: Changed download link to latest version.