Our delightful radio show has had plenty of play (wink wink) in the past couple years since we started. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of plays via our podcasts and streams from our website. The most exciting community, however, to see our music thrive in, is definitely that of soundcloud.com/vital-radio.

Soundcloud brings even more love with the analytic data that comes with the dashboard. It’s telling us great things, thanks to all of the listeners like you who play, download and comment on our shows that we post on soundcloud.

Here’s a handy dandy run-through of our stats (stat-hungry people pay attention!)…

Note: Please understand the stats span only from March 2010 to November 2011. We’ve been on Soundcloud for longer, but stats are likely reset upon request, and/or upon renewal of accounts.

So we’d like to invite our friends everywhere else to dive into the show! our USA and Canadian friends are already addicted, and we want more of you to do the same! There’s no such thing as too much music for when you’re driving, running, working out, loving, dancing, drinking, coding, typing, building, or anything! Our show airs in several formats as you can see on the right side of this post.

Get a listen to our sets at they appear in the soundcloud player on our main home page, or directly at the soundcloud page at http://soundcloud.com/vital-radio , where you can comment and favourite the stuff you hear and then we can bring you even more amazing tunes and mixes.

Once gain, a huge THANK YOU from all 4 of us at Vital Radio to all of you for tuning into the show for a regular balanced diet of fresh electronic music.

The Juno Awards

While we all know there’s a love/hate relationship with electro style house music, considering its run-time in the electronic dance music scene, there’s always a few select tunes that deserve recognition. In this case it’s even more so deserve because it reminds us that Canadians can do EDM just as well as the rest of the world.

As part of the Canadian scene ourselves, I’d like to extend a huge congrats to Deadmau5, on behalf of Vital Radio, for his “Juno dance record of the year” award for the ever so catchy and definitely bass-delicious “Sofi Needs a Ladder.” Well done, sir.

Now, if you’ve somehow been under a sound-proof rock of some sort, and haven’t heard it yet… here’s the youtube video that has (at time of this post) ~ 2,250,000 views.

So, this post was inspired by a twitter update made by our very own @DavidAkermanis talking about Jamiroquai being decent music for the commute to work.

If you ride the subway, you can easily relate to this slick track, “Jamiroquai – Deeper Underground“..

And guess what, it has an interesting electro-house remix by ‘Metro Station‘ too!..

For those of you looking for a more deep-house (yes, deep house to go deep underground, indeed) experience, I proudly report I had this one on vinyl (but seem to have lost it, shame on me) and it’s quite a fancy remix…

Fitting music in the subway if you’re rockin’ some big headphones? YES!

I’m pretty sure all of these are available on Beatport and/or iTunes.

I’m glad I shared this with you.

- Aren

Here’s a quick find I noticed while browsing the new games on Steam recently. Bionic Commando, the old arcade side-scrolling shooter by Capcom, has been upgraded to look great on newer systems, such as your PC. What was so striking about this you ask? The very catchy electro track used in the launch trailer!

The game is $9.99 on Steam, so I couldn’t resist the chance to fend off some more baddies, and even if the in-game soundtrack isn’t all electro-style, I’ll just drop Winamp into the background with one of Mahan Javadi’s fancy electro vital radio episodes, and I’ve got a win for some explosive gaming!

My objective with this series is to help you become a more avid, efficient, savvy, knowledgeable, and generally better-than-before music listener. If ever the content gets too technical and you’re uncertain of what I mean with something, go ahead and leave questions in the comments area and I’ll try to reply ASAP. If you’d like me to make an entire episode about a certain topic you’ve been wondering about, either email me via aren [at] vitalevents [dot] net, or send the request via twitter @arendej, or @vitalradio with the #Amusictips tag.

So this week we will delve into music library organizing, which as I’ve seen from how some of my friends sort their digital libraries of music, is a tough thing to do in the middle  of owning a mass library of songs. The first thing to do is answer a few questions for yourself and avoid problem-starting scenarios…

Ask yourself: Do I have the hard-drive space for all my music?
Perhaps an external hard-drive is a good idea for you? I’ll get into backup plans in a another episode. If your computer is slow, and after reading this you look at your library that consists of 118GB of music and your computer has only a 120GB hard-drive, there’s a problem there, as windows-based computers need typically 2GB or more of hard-drive space for stuff more complicated than worth explaining here, but you get my point.. if you can do the math.. and I trust you can.

Ask yourself: Are all my songs sorted into library folders?
This can be a big issue. Having one massive folder called “Music Library” is good, but only if you use it properly. Most people are likely to rely on their iTunes Library. I will bet on it, that your iTunes-managed library has many duplicate files and many unknown items, according to Apple’s failure of a music organizer (IMHO).

Wanna check for and eliminate duplicates? “Duplicate Cleaner” is a lifesaver and megabyte save, free program that finds duplicate files and lets you decide what to do with the duplicates found. Running this within your music library folder(s) will help alot of headache in some of the later steps of cleaning and organizing your digital music library.

Download it here: http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/duplicate-cleaner/downloaddcmenu

You wouldn’t keep your expensive suits or shirts in the same drawer as your underwear, would you?
It’s really best practice to sort music into folder and subfolders. Sure they’re all clean, but they just don’t belong all mashed together. One of the more common structures for sorting music would look like this:

[ Music Library (folder) > Artist (folder) > Album (folder) > Artist – Track name .mp3 (files) ]

This way, you can have almost any outside program such as iTunes or MediaMonkey (which is great, by the way) and deal with adding and sorting out music files amongst that folder structure. Things will even be easier to find within a Finder or Explorer window.

Tag Information
Nearly all media players and media programs and nearly any other application in and around your music relies on “tag” information. This “tag” is an embedded amount of text and sometimes images that indicate the details of one particular music file. Tags span across mp3s and FLAC files alike. There’s a program I use ever so always to keep my library of songs properly, consistently, and thoroughly tagged. Grab a copy of “Tagscanner”.. found here: http://www.xdlab.ru/en/

There may come a time when you will need to set aside a few days to scan through your music and properly tag things and this app helps immensely by allowing you to tag by file name, external sources (freedb, cddb, etc) or my surrounding folder structure. See how everything comes full circle?

The course of action to take involves a few time-consuming tasks. It’s well worth doing if you:

a) enjoy keeping your music tidy, or
b) have OCD, or
c) have time to spend loving you computer music library.

1) Clean up duplicate/stray mp3 files. Do this from explorer/finder. iTunes will lie to you, trust me. Doing this from explorer/finder will physically change/move/delete the actual music files. Clean up the crap before sorting, or you’ll be left with nothing but improperly marked, un-sorted, digital defecation.. so to speak. Move files to one central location and sort them however you like.

2) Tag your music. Do this with or without a program. Doing it with the help of a program will help you finish this before the era when music is implanted into our brains. (iBrain anyone?)

3) Convert. While it’s more of an option, and less curtailed for the audiophiles out there, it is a good idea and easily acceptable to down-convert your higher-quality music files to a more common “bitrate” or “kbps.” For consistency sake, it is also beneficial to convert to a common format, such as everything into “something.mp3” rather than “something.ogg”. Whichever format you decide on, is up to you. For reference and example sake, I’ll go into this under “mp3” due to the commonality of the codec. I keep most of my music at 160kbps, stereo, 44.1khz. I find it’s the best trade-off of quality for size. It avoids the tinny sound of 128kbps, without the heavier size of 192kbps. Most media players can handle any codec and any bitrate therein, but standardizing to one within your library is equivocal to having matching dishware, or matching socks. Now I say DOWN-convert because you should only convert music DOWN to a bitrate lesser than before. Doing the opposite would be as technically un-savvy as trying to pull your bottom lip over your head. You may want to, but it’s not meant to, and the result is wrong in many ways.

At this point you, the reader, knows just enough to start attacking that digital-noise-mess of a library you have. Go now and turn it into something concise and searchable, refined and clean, lean and mean.

_____
That’s all for episode 2! There’s no telling when the next one will be, but I’ve already got a number of topics to cover, so check back often, or follow @arendej and/or @vitalradio on twitter to know when these episodes go up!

Author Background: Aren writes voluntarily as part of the Vital Radio team. He is CleverSound Studio’s lead engineer and founder. Under his name, he produces and spins electronic music.

Welcome to the first episode of Music Tech Tips with Aren!

My objective with the series is to help you become a more avid, efficient, savvy, knowledgeable, and generally better-than-before music listener.  If ever the content gets too technical and you’re uncertain of what I mean with something, go ahead and leave questions in the comments area and I’ll try to reply ASAP.  If you’d like me to make an entire episode about a certain topic you’ve been wondering about, either email me via aren [at] vitalevents [dot] net, or send the request via twitter @arendej, or @vitalradio with the #Amusictips tag.

This first episode is a set of pointers to try and enlighten you with the better things surrounding the technology you use to hear your favourite music (such as every episode of vital radio).

If you enjoy the quality of the music from your portable player (iPod, Blackberry, Zune, etc), here are some suggestions for “better” music listening experiences:

• do your best to replace the stock headphones/earbuds that came with your music player. They were very cheap to produce and would sound just that way. Earbuds are also the easiest way to deafen oneself before that age of 40, and worsen the matter beyond that. I’ll write a headphones only episode at a later time, but for now, just aim for a new pair of earbuds or headphones that sound good TO YOU, and FEEL GOOD to wear.
• There is an EQ or Equalizer in almost all portable players these days. If you don’t know how to access it, dig up the manual that you perhaps neglected to read and figure out how to access it. Fiddle with the settings until the music sounds good.
• Your best reference material is your most prized, most listened-to, most well-known album or track or set. Throw it on and find the best EQ setting. Keep in mind that just because the music is house or dance, doesn’t mean the EQ preset can’t be the “rock” setting to help it sound better to YOUR taste.
• There’s a plethora of portable players out there to keep all tastes satiated. If you’re not a fan of the iPod, there’s plenty of other choices that WILL work with both PC and Mac and even Linux!. Just take the time to do your homework and research the player before dropping any  amount of money on a device that will contain and play your beloved tunes. Consider that your music library only feels safe, until you put it ALL on one device and have it fail, with no backup. If that were the case, I would say you’d be “screwed” for lack of a more technical term.
• Regarding backups: always have an extra internal or an extra external hard drive on your computer that stores your music library. Use it to store your music. Store the entire library in it, AS WELL AS on your original computer’s hard drive (unless you don’t have the space)
• Keep it organized! A future episode will have me going over some more effective ways to organize your library…. and NO, iTunes does a less-than-ideal job of “organizing” music, in my opinion.

That’s all for episode 1! There’s no telling when the next one will be, but I’ve already got a number of topics to cover, so check back often, or follow @arendej and/or @vitalradio on twitter to know when these episodes go up!

Author Background: Aren writes voluntarily as part of the Vital Radio team. He is CleverSound Studio‘s lead engineer and founder. Under his name, he produces and spins electronic music.

Where do you best enjoy hearing your loud music? Big nightclubs? Lounges? Concert halls for bands?

They all have a few particular things associated with them that might scare, hurt, confuse, amuse, entice, or defer you. I’d like to share some of these facts with you:

Large nightclubs usually pump out about 3 to 5 watts per person, based on the number of people they’d like to accommodate in the room. If the in-house audio-tech is a good one, he/she will scale the volume of the system to the size of the crowd over the course of the night. If he’/she isn’t so good, they just leave it at a somewhat nominal, but over-necessary volume level.

These large nightclub sound systems can hit decibel readings of 140dB .. equivalent to a jet engine standing 2 meters away from you (this would cause deafness within 30-45 minutes of exposure!)

Your ears ringing after being at a nightclub is caused by a poorly tuned system. This is NOT the DJ’s fault. Most lounges and small-sized nightclubs try to compensate for their size by pumping their sound systems louder by up to 6 or 7 watts per person. This is not only wasteful, but makes people deaf much faster than they ought to be.

If the venue has paid for a really decent sound system, it will in essence delay how fast the bass and treble come out of the speakers to make it sound better. This could be a delay between .1 milliseconds and 1 second depending on the room and speakers.

The disco ball is easily the ONLY lit item necessary in a good venue (non-substantiated, but I don’t care)

Some more interesting facts:

• The lazers at the venues that have them for light shows, CAN blind a person VERY easily.
• You can cook an egg on an amplifier that has been running in “bridged mode” for 6+ hours.
• You can cook an egg on an amplifier that has been fed poor-quality music (by technical measures)
• There is no sex in the champagne room (Thank you Chris Rock)
• Coat check staff can and sometimes do try on your jackets in shady nightclubs
• It is said that most girls that go to nightclubs with their friends are ALWAYS sharking
• It is said that most guys that go to nightclubs with their friends KNOW that the girls are sharking
• Bouncers can always be paid off. Every person has a price
• There are few and possibly no number of DJs that enjoy taking requests, unless they are wedding, top40, hip-hop, or radio DJs. We are not your personified iPod.

Live from the Vital & Liquid Stairs Boatcruise 2009

Tracklist:
1. The Lonely Island – I’m On A Boat (Kue’s Tugboat Fix)
2. Dj Jean – The Launch (2009 ID Remix) vs. Benny Benassi – Satisfaction vs. Rakim – Pump Up The Volume
3. The Drill – The Drill vs Cube Guys – Elektro
4. Ida Corr – I Want You (Jason Gault Remix) vs Tocadisco – Nobody (Likes The Records That I Play)
5. Mylo – Drop The Pressure vs Ann Lee – Ring My Bell
6. Deadmau5 feat. Rob Swire – Ghosts N Stuff (Mix Munkies extended) vs 666 – D.E.V.I.L
7. Paul van Dyk – For an Angel (Spencer and Hill Remix) vs Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
8. Michael Mind – Baker Street (Vocal Club MiX) vs Fatboy Slim – Star 69 vs Kid Cudi – I’m In Miami Trick
9. ID – ID vs Ludacris – Gossip Folks
10. Deadmau5 feat. Melleefresh – Hey Baby (Original Mix)
11. Klaas Meets Haddaway – What is Love (2009 Remix)
12. Neils Van Gogh – Dreamer (Bodybangers Remix) vs Joachim Garraud – The Sound Of Disco vs Kelis – Milkshake
13. C and C Music Factory – Make You Sweat 2009 (Blaze Electro Remix)

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Widely regarded as one of the originators of the Dutch trance sound, Rank 1 have been rocking dancefloors since 1997.

“L.E.D There Be Light”, was chosen as the Trance Energy 2009 Anthem, as well as the background song to the 2009 Electric Daisy Carnival commercial. Their latest track, “Symfo,” is the Sunrise Festival Theme 2009.

Now, Rank 1 is here to rock the Vital Radio airwaves.

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Recorded Live on the Vital & Liquid Stairs Boatcruise 2009

[tracklist not available]

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