Taxi!

Taxi! is a 1932 American Pre-Code film starring James Cagney and Loretta Young. The movie was directed by Roy Del Ruth.

The film includes two famous Cagney dialogues, one of which features Cagney conducting a conversation with a passenger in Yiddish, and the other when Cagney is speaking to his brother's killer through a locked closet, "Come out and take it, you dirty yellow-bellied rat, or I'll give it to you through the door!." The provenance of this sequence led to Cagney being famously misquoted as saying, "You dirty rat, you killed my brother."

Also, Taxi! marks the first occasion when Cagney dances on screen, as Matt and Sue enter a Peabody contest at a nightclub. To play his competitor in a ballroom dance contest, Cagney recommended his pal, fellow tough-guy-dancer George Raft, who was uncredited in the film. In a lengthy and memorable sequence, he scene culminates with Raft and his partner winning the dance contest against Cagney and Young, after which Cagney slugs Raft and knocks him down. As in The Public Enemy (1931), several scenes in Taxi! involved the use of live machine-gun bullets. After a few of the bullets narrowly missed Cagney's head, he outlawed the practice in his future films.

Taxicab

A taxicab, also known as a taxi or a cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice. This differs from other modes of public transport where the pick-up and drop-off locations are determined by the service provider, not by the passenger, although demand responsive transport and share taxis provide a hybrid bus/taxi mode.

There are four distinct forms of taxicab, which can be identified by slightly differing terms in different countries:

Taxi (Bryan Ferry album)

Taxi is the eighth solo studio album by Bryan Ferry, the former lead vocalist for Roxy Music. The album was released on Virgin Records in April 1993, over five years after the release of his previous album Bête Noire. This was Ferry's third solo album since the second demise of Roxy Music in 1983, ten years earlier. The album was a commercial and critical success, peaking at No. 2 in the U.K., it was certified Gold by the BPI.

The first single, "I Put A Spell On You" was the album's only top 20 hit in the U.K., peaking at No. 18. The second single, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" narrowly missed the U.K. top 20, peaking at No. 23. The third and final single, "Girl Of My Best Friend" peaked at 57.

Production and recording

When Ferry was asked about the album, he said "Since I started work on the Taxi album, everything has gone great for me. The last two years have been terrific, but I had three or four miserable years. Doing the Taxi album was the start of getting things right. Just getting something done quickly and efficiently was very gratifying. Finishing something I liked and getting back into singing again, getting away from my own writing temporarily was a good thing."

Musepack

Musepack or MPC is an open source lossy audio codec, specifically optimized for transparent compression of stereo audio at bitrates of 160–180 (manual set allows bitrates up to 320) kbit/s. It was formerly known as MPEGplus, MPEG+ or MP+.

Development of MPC was initiated in 1997 by Andree Buschmann and later assumed by Frank Klemm, and as of 2011 is maintained by the Musepack Development Team (MDT) with assistance from Buschmann and Klemm. Encoders and decoders are available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and plugins for several third-party media players available from the Musepack website, licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or BSD licenses, and an extensive list of programs supporting the format.

Technical details

Musepack was developed using the MP2 codec as a starting point, but many features have since been added, including:

PowerPC 5000

The PowerPC 5000 family is a series of Power Architecture microprocessors from Freescale (previously Motorola) and STMicroelectronics designed for automotive and industrial microcontroller and system on a chip (SoC) use. The MPC5000 family consists of two lines (51xx/52xx and 55xx/56xx) that really don't share a common heritage.

Processors

MPC51xx

Music Production Center

Akai MPCs (originally MIDI Production Center, now Music Production Controller) are a popular series of electronic musical instruments originally designed by Roger Linn and produced by the Japanese company Akai from 1988 onward. Intended to function as a powerful kind of drum machine, the MPCs drew on design ideas from machines such as the Sequential Circuits Inc. Studio 440 and the Linn's own Linn 9000, combining a powerful MIDI sequencer with the ability to sample one's own sounds. A major influence to Roger Linn's design was his love of rubber pads and how they could be pushed, prodded, and banged; this can be seen clearly in his designs especially from the MPC-60 onwards. Linn also had a passion for squares: thus, no round pads on the MPC Series. Later models feature increasingly powerful sampling, storage, interfacing and sound manipulation facilities, which broaden the use of instrument beyond just drum and rhythm tracks.

History

The original MPC60 was a first result of alliance between Roger Linn and Akai to design products similar to those of Linn Electronics. He developed the functional design, including the panel layout and software/hardware specifications. He then created the software with a team of engineers. The hardware electronics were designed by English engineer David Cockerell and his team. Cockerell was a founding member of the synthesizer firm EMS (co-creator of their famous VCS 3 along with Peter Zinovieff), and then worked for effects manufacturers Electro-Harmonix.