Nine Inch Niles - The Seattleward Spiral

June 4, 2010 3:59 PM

Nine Inch Niles - The Seattleward Spiral
A bizarre auto-mashup album I made today using Echo Nest Remix: it's a frankensteinien reconstruction of The Downward Spiral using only a few minutes of audio from the show Frasier.
posted by cortex (17 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by not_on_display on June 23, 2010: I want to ravish you like a Cacatua sulphurea

What the hell is wrong with you?
posted by The Whelk at 4:29 PM on June 4, 2010 [6 favorites]

Everything is right about this.

A++++++ will listen again.
posted by idiopath at 4:34 PM on June 4, 2010

Everything hurts so much.
posted by cgc373 at 4:36 PM on June 4, 2010

Everything is right about this.

It's funny-- my first thought on listening to one of the tracks was "Not really my thing, but I bet idiopath would love this."
posted by Nothing... and like it at 4:56 PM on June 4, 2010

I think you would be a terrible terrible man, if I knew any NIN. But I don't so I think you are terribly, terribly hilarious!

I double-dog-dare you to do this using American Beauty and Dharma & Greg.
posted by mwhybark at 5:03 PM on June 4, 2010

I have been listening to all of these, and "the becraning" turned out much more traditionally musical than the rest so far, for those wanting something a little more comprehensible.
posted by idiopath at 5:03 PM on June 4, 2010

I love how everything from Afromb.py sounds like Riow Arai.
posted by cellphone at 5:13 PM on June 4, 2010

Love it! I started making a joke comment with different bad or odd cover versions of Closer as examples of Afromb.php or Afromb.cpp and remembered that I made a MeFi music cover myself three years ago!
posted by xorry at 5:37 PM on June 4, 2010

This was to be expected but trying to afromb Ben Fold's Brick from the entire soundtrack of Apocalypse Now resulted in a runtime error: OverflowError: long int too large to convert to int. Heh.
posted by xorry at 7:33 PM on June 4, 2010

Heh. For what it's worth, I have successfully used afromb with a like 40 minute b track (basically all of sgt. pepper merged together), but I think I got some sort of complaint the first time followed by a successful run when I tried again a few minutes later.

I'm currently trying to get vafromb to work, if that goes well I may upload a music video of some sort to accompany this.
posted by cortex at 7:43 PM on June 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

Here's my best attempt so far: hanging5.mp3

target is Counting Crows Hanging around (I only have about three cds ripped right now so not much source music) and source is 5'Nizza's son I left the mix at 90%.
posted by xorry at 7:52 PM on June 4, 2010

I've been digging into vafromb.py, the with-video extension of afromb, and managed to put together this remix video of Closer To Roz this evening.
posted by cortex at 9:54 PM on June 4, 2010

Yes! Awesome! I gave up on vafromb for tonight.. can't get the cutting edge compile of ffmpeg it needs working yet
posted by xorry at 10:40 PM on June 4, 2010

don't think vafromb needs any newer version of ffmpeg we distribute with the package -- xorry, are you on linux? because otherwise it should "just work." if on linux you need to install a codec pack separately is all. cortex, nice job.
posted by brianwhitman at 6:06 AM on June 5, 2010

Thanks, Brian!

And yeah, xorry, I should note that I had trouble with vafromb until I realized that it was unhappy with using an audio file for the a track and a video track for the b track—I'd assumed that .mp3 a, .mov b would work fine (and that'd certainly be desirable in terms of flexibility) but the scripts throws up a vague ffmpeg error when you try to do that, the last bit of which is this:

  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/echonest/video.py", line 375, in ffmpeg_error_check
    raise RuntimeError("en-ffmpeg conversion error:\n\t" + "\n\t".join(parse[num:]))
RuntimeError: en-ffmpeg conversion error:
	05: I/O error occured
	Usually that means that input file is truncated and/or corrupted.

Definitely kind of a documentation gap there, which is pretty understandable with it being sort of improvised experimental stuff but that was what had me worried that stuff was broken.
posted by cortex at 7:45 AM on June 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

Haha, yeah. I actually figured it out the next day because I looked in the source code and it was trying to get the frame rate of the wav file! Even with two movies I think I was still having trouble with both my linux and Windows boxes but I'll give it another shot tomorrow or tonight.
posted by xorry at 5:13 PM on June 18, 2010

New, more complicated track: The Crane That Feeds. Multitrack stems!
posted by cortex at 4:09 PM on June 28, 2010