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It has some bad artifacts:
http://www.airwindows.com/encoders/oggvorbis/ including pre-echo.

A quick look on google turned up this analysis of prestine vinyl dynamic range.

The summary: vinyl can be expected to have a dynamic range of around 80dB to 90dB new, which is clearly worse than CD's 96dB. At frequencies above 1kHz, the dynamic range may be greater than 100dB, so perhaps some songs will play better on vinyl than CD (to begin with, anyway), but as a role, CD is better.

I read and loved the Spaceship Sizes article on Slashdot, not least because I have my own SF/fantasy writing, some of which contains spaceships as well. I found myself wishing for tips on stuff like Ringworld or some of the old E. E. 'Doc' Smith spaceships, as my 'big' ship is a water tanker the size of a planetoid. At the same time, I looked at some of the designs (*cough* B5!) that just didn't make it for me- for instance, an atmospheric craft that could not possibly fly. It seemed damn pathetic, considering I have two small atmospheric craft in my Aquarius novella, and I made both of them as models in the flightsim 'X-Plane', a blade element modeler that is a real-no-fooling aero design tool. I had a amphibious sub with the capacity to fly (very fast) in air, and a biplane specifically designed to be a toy aircraft for people who were unskilled pilots. And I _built_ them to get a sense of what they were like- really, I should stick pictures of them in the relevant chapters of the book, because they are absolutely part of the backstory there. To me, this sort of thing makes the story stronger, having a setting that is realistic and not wildly contrived.

Egalatarian information means someone like me can do that sort of thing. In the 60s, 70s, even 80s, there was NO way a private individual could freely play with spaceship models in a blade element modeler to come up with a ship design that would actually work. (given that you have indestructible materials and potentially infinite thrust available...) Now, anyone can.

If mainstream art won't make the effort to be good, it will simply wind up the bottle of Budweiser at a microbrew-tasting contest: beneath contempt, not even part of people's world anymore. That's the way things are heading, so probably the thing to watch for is more connectivity- how do people find stuff they want in the absence of a controlled distribution channel?

Or to put it a more colorful way: which of the UNsigned, UNpublished science fiction and fanfiction authors have the coolest spaceships? :D

I'm going to bet on ME! even though I haven't really begun to world-build in earnest, but I would be delighted to learn that someone else out there is even better. At any rate, both of us will be better than TV schlock at the rate things are deteriorating.

I read and loved the Spaceship Sizes article on Slashdot, not least because I have my own SF/fantasy writing, some of which contains spaceships as well. I found myself wishing for tips on stuff like Ringworld or some of the old E. E. 'Doc' Smith spaceships, as my 'big' ship is a water tanker the size of a planetoid. At the same time, I looked at some of the designs (*cough* B5!) that just didn't make it for me- for instance, an atmospheric craft that could not possibly fly. It seemed damn pathetic, considering I have two small atmospheric craft in my Aquarius novella, and I made both of them as models in the flightsim 'X-Plane', a blade element modeler that is a real-no-fooling aero design tool. I had a amphibious sub with the capacity to fly (very fast) in air, and a biplane specifically designed to be a toy aircraft for people who were unskilled pilots. And I _built_ them to get a sense of what they were like- really, I should stick pictures of them in the relevant chapters of the book, because they are absolutely part of the backstory there. To me, this sort of thing makes the story stronger, having a setting that is realistic and not wildly contrived.

Egalatarian information means someone like me can do that sort of thing. In the 60s, 70s, even 80s, there was NO way a private individual could freely play with spaceship models in a blade element modeler to come up with a ship design that would actually work. (given that you have indestructible materials and potentially infinite thrust available...) Now, anyone can.

If mainstream art won't make the effort to be good, it will simply wind up the bottle of Budweiser at a microbrew-tasting contest: beneath contempt, not even part of people's world anymore. That's the way things are heading, so probably the thing to watch for is more connectivity- how do people find stuff they want in the absence of a controlled distribution channel?

Or to put it a more colorful way: which of the UNsigned, UNpublished science fiction and fanfiction authors have the coolest spaceships? :D

I'm going to bet on ME! even though I haven't really begun to world-build in earnest, but I would be delighted to learn that someone else out there is even better. At any rate, both of us will be better than TV schlock at the rate things are deteriorating.

I read and loved the Spaceship Sizes article on Slashdot, not least because I have my own SF/fantasy writing, some of which contains spaceships as well. I found myself wishing for tips on stuff like Ringworld or some of the old E. E. 'Doc' Smith spaceships, as my 'big' ship is a water tanker the size of a planetoid. At the same time, I looked at some of the designs (*cough* B5!) that just didn't make it for me- for instance, an atmospheric craft that could not possibly fly. It seemed damn pathetic, considering I have two small atmospheric craft in my Aquarius novella, and I made both of them as models in the flightsim 'X-Plane', a blade element modeler that is a real-no-fooling aero design tool. I had a amphibious sub with the capacity to fly (very fast) in air, and a biplane specifically designed to be a toy aircraft for people who were unskilled pilots. And I _built_ them to get a sense of what they were like- really, I should stick pictures of them in the relevant chapters of the book, because they are absolutely part of the backstory there. To me, this sort of thing makes the story stronger, having a setting that is realistic and not wildly contrived.

Egalatarian information means someone like me can do that sort of thing. In the 60s, 70s, even 80s, there was NO way a private individual could freely play with spaceship models in a blade element modeler to come up with a ship design that would actually work. (given that you have indestructible materials and potentially infinite thrust available...) Now, anyone can.

If mainstream art won't make the effort to be good, it will simply wind up the bottle of Budweiser at a microbrew-tasting contest: beneath contempt, not even part of people's world anymore. That's the way things are heading, so probably the thing to watch for is more connectivity- how do people find stuff they want in the absence of a controlled distribution channel?

Or to put it a more colorful way: which of the UNsigned, UNpublished science fiction and fanfiction authors have the coolest spaceships? :D

I'm going to bet on ME! even though I haven't really begun to world-build in earnest, but I would be delighted to learn that someone else out there is even better. At any rate, both of us will be better than TV schlock at the rate things are deteriorating.

All the records that have been bestsellers for years, the ones that keep on selling not just years, but decades after their initial release, have one thing in common which clearly separates them from mainstream popular music.

They're not hypercompressed. They've got room for the rhythm to breathe rather than squashing the sound so much it feels "flat" and hard on the ear.

Have a look for yourself:

Dynamics of Hit Records

I'm hoping to get up and running on MacOSX in January, and undertake the fairly major task of porting the software and revising it to the new environment. If I can do that, the resulting still-GPLed software will be more easily ported to Linux.

One of the Linux DAW projects (I forget which) once asked me to teach them about dithering and why it mattered. I can only say that if the tendency of Linux audio software to be consumer-level 16-bit stuff bugs you, I can't do anything about that directly but I will say this again- I'm always ready to drop everything and help out a Linux audio project with this stuff. I know what the professional studios and mastering houses require, in terms of resolution handling, and what kind of internal bussing and processing are required. For instance, Pro Tools suffers badly simply because all internal processing involves repeated truncation to 24 bit linear, and the 2-buss requires submixes that themselves involve more truncation. You wouldn't be able to hear any of it as just one stage (maybe sense it vaguely) but it's cumulative.

I can say that and expound about how TPDF decorrelates additional moments of distortion but I haven't got a clue how to code GTK interfaces or anything like that :) it's all a matter of what you devote time to doing, I guess. But I wanted to take a moment to say again that if anyone wishes to add dither and noise shaping to their Linux audio project, I'd love to help teach this stuff...

I'm a sound engineer, I _code_ audio DSP and wordlength reduction, I _analyse_ various mp3 codecs in novel ways and I have studied Ogg Vorbis and concluded that it offers the best of all mp3 encoder approaches, all at once. It has all the transient liveliness of Fraunhofer and all the tonal purity of Blade, and I've no doubt it's been improved still further since I looked.

I don't know who you are, but you're certainly no sound engineer (or audio DSP coder), and I... strongly disagree with your claim.

Honestly, it's as bad as talking about 'stair-steps' on PCM digital. You're making the same type of error, and roughly the same severity.

Don't you understand that DSD concentrates error increasingly into the high frequencies? Maybe this will help: my own work including some PCM noise shapers with similar error distribution characteristics to DSD.

Now, given that- being able to radically suppress noise and error at very low frequencies, like 20 or 100 hz, has a profound effect because error is either a matter of incorrect amplitude, or spurious harmonics. You can hear LOTS of harmonics of 100 hz before they go out of the range of human hearing.

Let's say for the sake of argument that DSD has 10% harmonic distortion at 16K. It doesn't, but let's pretend that it does. Are you seriously arguing that spurious information at 32K is going to completely ruin the music for you? Are you a dog, or a bat? If you're arguing about even stronger spurious information at 100K or 200K, are you a tweeter manufacturer? Except that if you were, you'd be happy- *blow* woops, build up some more tweeters for the DSD users! kaching!

Sorry man- you couldn't be wronger. Or more anonymous, but then I can understand not wanting to be associated with opinions that are just loony :)

Ye gods! Why? How? Where?

I'm 34 and I don't think I know _anybody_ my age with '$100,000 stashed away'. Hell, I'm not at all sure it's a good thing to have that kind of money 'stashed away'. I make stuff- I have made a bunch of CDs (at ampcast.com, above), I make guitar DI boxes, I even make costume tails. That in spite of the fact that I live on a little more than $5000 a year- it's about budgeting, handling money responsibly, doing without and working hard on things (depression-era values?)

Money doesn't come from the money fairy, people- though I can understand 'Fortune' magazine not understanding this. It's exchange value for goods and services- it's to do things with, not to 'stash away'. From my perspective, as someone who tries to do and build things rather than 'stash away', these mythical people with '$100,000 stashed away' (a HUNDRED thou? not even ten thou, a freaking hundred?) are the PROBLEM.

Where does that money go? Typically not gold, or bank notes in a mattress. No, that money was expected to go straight to Enron- woops, I mean WorldCom- woops, I mean Microsoft. Do we see the problem?

These people are crazy. I can't even feel inferior to their expectations because they seem to have no clue that what they expect is what will RUIN this country. For how many years have people 'stashed away' in this way, and see where it's got us? The answer is not to make it safe to stash away investment in Wall Street and multinational corporations again.

Get out there and do stuff. Build, create, do- within your means, but I'm talking ALL your means, no 'stashing away'. If you get hit by a truck next week you'll have been happier to have been engaged with a real life- you'll be building abilities that are better than any corporate-wall-street-speculation-policy as insurance for your future- and the money you spend in pursuing your plans and interests is money that CIRCULATES, rather than getting 'stashed away'.

Honestly, what IS this shit? I think some people still believe in the money fairy, and it isn't Slashdotters or Gen Xers, it's Fortune Magazine. You'd think one Enron, one dotcom implosion, would've taught them.

It's not just a matter of deciding how you want to expose. When you can use it, this technique produces OUTRAGEOUS richness and color saturation. You can also do stuff like vary lighting- average some pics with sharp pinpoint lighting to hit highlights, and some with a big light diffuser to give warmth. Average them all together and you have lighting that can't quite exist in nature :)

That picture was taken with a WEBCAM- in about 12 distinct images that were averaged. Got the idea from Helmut Dersch, who wrote the software I used to do it. It's part of 'Panorama Tools' :)

Ummm - hate to burst your bubble, but totally blown out highlights do not make an images "totally pro-looking".

There are other issues (like the background) but I won't get into those...

"We're all in favor of RIAA's LEGAL efforts to deter music copying, BUT they have stated intent to trespass on our users' computer systems and hack them. We don't feel they have any right to commit this crime, so we're blocking whatever avenues we can identify as potential hacking attempts."

Just spin it as, "RIAA want to hack and trespass, we can't allow that". Who could get in trouble for wanting to protect their users against hacking and trespass?

Ironically, I have used RIAA's website to good effect in the past. If you're doing statistical analysis of popular music, their gold/platinum database is useful. Full of junk and bad data, but still, it's on the internet available to all. But- it's not worth letting the RIAA crack your machine. Call it collateral damage :)

Let's drop your 'collaborate' example for a bit and go with a real-world one.

Main Dithers (spectrograms at 16 bit)

I have the most high performance digital audio noise shaping algorithm in the world GPLed. (I refer to 'Ten Nines', which hits -160db noise floor from a simple 44/16 encoding)

I wrote it- all of it. I 'pay for the research' the first time, it's my IP, it's my right to do that with it.

I also have the right to dual-license it.

If anyone proprietary, like Microsoft (I'd rather see Apple with it, though) wants to have this tech and have the GPL NOT apply to them- they can damned well pay me for it. Nobody else is doing IIR noise shaping, period. The distribution of the spectrogram is unmistakable and can't be faked.

Nothing is stopping these proprietary people from going directly to me for this stuff- and nothing stops me from also putting my stuff out GPL. I just cannot put out the additional code that such a proprietary company might write. That would be implicit in an agreement to dual-license a proprietary version.

Funny how your touting of market forces doesn't seem to include them paying YOU anything. If you want to make something open to many people, and you want to be able to let Microsoft close it off, why on earth wouldn't you want to charge them for the privilege? Isn't that perfectly in spirit with what they'll be wanting to do? Sauce for the goose, man.

And if we're talking about large group projects, I see no reason why a Microsoft should ever be allowed to take those proprietary- and still, if the whole group agrees to, they can dual-license it.

Human beings need to create. If you leave them alone, they will create cool stuff.

You were saying?

A James Brown record is a tangible asset- it has USE besides just sitting there being an artwork. You can shake your butt to it, get up offa that thing and move. It has FUNCTION besides just being the record of someone having 'arted'.

If you could clone anything and everything freely at no cost, a James Brown record would be MORE useful than a pyramid- because you can't dance to a pyramid. What good is it? What do you DO with it?

If you were writing a novel and, while you were entitled to recognition as the true author of it, anyone could copy the words of it and read it whenever they wanted, what use is the publisher? That is what publishers are FOR, and if they are not necessary, what is the point? If you never show your novel to anyone and it remains uncopied, have you gained anything? If you show it to everyone and half the world ends up reading it and begging you for more, have you lost anything?

The question to ask is this: given the eventual total failure of distribution control, what will happen next? What is left, and who has the power when distribution controllers finally lose it?

My money is not on creators and artists- I'm betting on promoters. We'll see... because distribution control WILL die in the long run.

It's a matter of technology. Imagine how much water leaks out of a pinhole in a water glass. Now imagine how much water leaks out of a pinhole at the bottom of Boulder Dam... we're heading towards 'how much water leaks out of a pinhole under the pressure of a contained million megaton atomic explosion', or beyond. Given the increases in technology and information distribution, the speed and bandwidth and storage, distribution control can't possibly survive...

How many full-length feature films will you be able to store on _discardable_ media (not 100$ hard drive analogs but 2$ CDR analogs)... in 2020? How many full-length feature films will you be able to download per minute?

No, I don't.

I believe that programmers like you and the software industry at large need to be competed with, or you get lazy and sit on your butts, spending all day figuring out copy protect schemes rather than writing better code.

I believe that even when competed with and forced to really work, you're not better than free software coders- you're just making more money at it, which is your privilege.

And I believe that if it's gotta be one or the other, maybe the world would be a better place if you DID find a new line of work, and never coded again (except, of course, when YOU had something YOU wanted done)- as opposed to if the world of software development was just guys like you, guarding their turf jealously.

So- sure! Go find a new line of work, just in case. Unfortunately for you, there are people who are just as good as you are, coding for ideological reasons rather than for money. If this does you in... oops.

:)

Yeah. Go to www.ampcast.com/chrisj and go nuts, I have a LOT of samples up. What I do at this point is I put all but one track up on each album "officially", and have no gripe if anyone fills in by putting up the missing tracks later. Gotta get the CDs out first tho, or there's nothing to rip from. I also have weirder stuff, and some pop/rock type music that's fairly old though I need to be coming out with some new songs-with-actual-words-in. Lastly, my mastering software (Mac, but GPLed anyhow) is at www.airwindows.com/dithering.

Try not to be too freaked out by the variety of music on my ampcast pages :) I like a LOT of different stuff. I've done brutal instrumental rock, sorta sedated trancey retro stuff, demented lowfi electronic goofiness, touching melodic pop, stagnant atonal droney ambience, seriously challenging polymetric electronica, stomping country-rock and the best freaking Noise (in the hardcore uncompromising sense) out there :D however, there is no living human who likes ALL that stuff but me, so be warned. God knows what I'll do next. Easy listening, maybe. Oh, I forgot the fretless guitar Frippertronics soundscapes, silly ME. ;)

Cheers. I think you can stream stuff if Ampcast bugs you about registering. They only want to keep people from cheating as THEY, not you, pay me a royalty on downloads. I hope to bring them in some money with my CDs when I get them all up there- we have to start doing actual business and selling CDs if they're going to continue the royalty-paying. Oh, and you can 'rate' stuff if you make a myAmp account: there's charts of a sort, pretty decent really, you can rate stuff up or down and it affects the chart.

But also- there just seems to be something not right with asking directly for support like that, money crunch or no. I mean, support over and above what they produce... even though they do certainly work hard...

As it happens, I DO have a money crunch, and I too have been working my butt off. If you go to ampcast and poke around, you'll find loads of newly remastered stuff all of which is going to have proper CDs available. I understand you can stream stuff just at random- if you register w. the site (I know, but hear me out) you can download it all free and I get a nickel for each DL without you having to pay for it, and if you _rate_ the tunes I can appear on the 'charts' they have- I ask for bad ratings too if that's your honest opinion, it's all feedback and there's somebody to like everything.

Plus (and this is where the money crunch comes from) I've been placing orders for electronic parts. I'm the guy who puts out the GPLed mastering app Mastering Tools (which I use on all my stuff for Ampcast), and I've been building stompboxes and mixers and stuff for over a decade- and I'm onto a design that promises to be a _really_ slick mini-guitar DI that comes in three gain levels. Just a teeny box with two jacks on it, and you control volume from the guitar- the Anti-Line-6-POD- so I'm rationing food because buying 10 project enclosures, 50 .1 polypropylene capacitors, 100 battery clips etc was of course WAY more important. (any true geek would understand this without having to be told ;) )

So yeah- I'm in a money crunch too. But here's the difference: _I_ saved enough money that I can buy cat food, some boring human food, etc. I paid all my bills at the beginning of the month and I completely paid a debt that had to do with a retroactive rent hike.

So I'm not in a threatening money crunch- and I can afford to mouth off and make fun of my own foolish situation because I PLANNED IT and I'll get by even if everyone goes "God, not HIM again!" and scrolls on with an elegant shudder of geeky distaste ;)

But there's a deeper level which I'm not sure if I can express. For starters- I've worked to the brink of RSI on my GPLed Mastering Tools program- but THAT is not for sale. That's free. I've got 7 finished Red Book CDs next to me, which are going to Ampcast to be duplicated on demand, and THOSE are for sale. My business is making them so good, making the packaging and the art and everything so nice that it's _worth_ having a proper one instead of some cloned thing with magic-marker label. I'm trying to make these guitar stompboxes- THAT is tangible, and my efforts of designing them are 'sunk costs' like the coding on Mastering Tools- it's what I can produce that people CAN'T just clone effortlessly, or the ways in which I can at least reward someone's good will (like in buying a CD). I'm OK with people having that good will but nothing I've done or ever will do will entitle me to it, and I refuse to ask for it without also wising off and de-hard-selling it ;)

That said- it is not THAT unreasonable to encourage people to buy Mandrake dists. I'm Mac-based, and I bought the LinuxPPC dist, and kept it even though it didn't work on my main machine. Now I have another old Mac and this one will run it, so it's now installed on one of my machines. But if you asked me to donate money to LinuxPPC- well, I don't know. I'm not sure I like that as a motivation. I sure don't do my OSS work so I can ask for DONATIONS. I do it to make other stuff that I do, better. Then I share that part of the work.

Coincidentally, when I loaded this comment page, the first thing that I saw was a ThinkGeek ad. It's the one about tiny radio-controlled desktop tanks for $58.99 that can play laser tag with each other. I know, because I went STRAIGHT to ThinkGeek to look at them. And if I wasn't in a serious money crunch, that would be terribly compelling- an argument to give money to ThinkGeek because they'd come up with something to sell me that was SO COOL that I just couldn't resist it.

I don't know when or if I'll be on that level- to out-cool tiny robot tanks is quite an order, though my tiny two-jack guitar-amp effect box sounds some of the same notes (miniatureness, elegance, effectiveness, more miniatureness etc), but to me THAT is the area to emulate. That's where Mandrake should be heading... if it is even possible, with a Linux dist. It's just that 'toss a few bucks my way because _I_ am worthy' is a hell of a lot more nebulous than 'toss a few bucks my way and you can have one of THESE'... with the latter, it's a simple question of whether the thing is really cool or not, where with the former it gets into your evaluation of WHY the person is supposed to deserve support when there's a million people out there who deserve to pursue their work without money headaches...

I think you really should have taken 'Ethics' in college: yes, absolutely, I can say that if Microsoft (their name isn't really 'M$': M$ is a cartoon, Microsoft is real) offered me financial security for my work, I would turn them down. And yes, I have work worth taking over. I am developing dithering routines that push the state of the art, currently under the GPL. It is thinkable that Microsoft could want to take this over, buy the IP, and patent concepts like IIR noise shaping.

And I don't believe that they have all the money people say they have, but they do certainly have a lot more money than _I_ have.

But I also believe they are criminals by nature- they have threatened people (like Avie Tevanian) to try and suppress technologies that were better than what they had, they have acted like thugs and racketeers (the repeating theme of cutting off air supply- most recently with Washington lobbyists!) and they have intentionally lied to the highest courts in my country (the faked video deposition, not to mention half the arguments they make are at the least determined deception if not outright lying).

I am not a boot-stomping patriot type, but I am outright insulted at this last: I consider it treasonous and cannot help but consider that they are intentionally trying to destroy important parts of MY COUNTRY, such as it is, for their own gain. If Middle Eastern nationals tried to sabotage the processes of justice in this country we would declare war on them.

And you can't understand why I wouldn't take money from Microsoft? For my part, I cannot understand why you would. Are you that craven?

If you possess neither soul, guts nor morals, that's fine, but would you mind trying to remember that most people are more principles?

Now, let's have some of the nice randite posters moderate this down as flamebait- because, in fact, it is pretty scathing. I guess the "c'mon, you know you'd take their money if they were offering" was more insulting to me than I'd first realized.

www.airwindows.com

www.ampcast.com/chrisj

The deal is, the first is my web hosting and the second is my music. If you visit them, YOU do not pay- it's like a printed fanzine or something, I pay for the hosting.

I understand that bandwidth costs muchos, but I still dislike the idea of being charged solely for information- particularly if I'm not keeping it around. I pay for paper magazines- MacAddict, Cinefex- but those are kept. Someone had to print 'em up. Even then, they're heavily paid for by advertisers...

I just think some people are imagining a heavenly land where everyone on the Internet is paying them a penny because they're so wonderful, and this is wishful thinking... in order to charge people you gotta really be GIVING them something, and it's not enough to just have good information. There's tons of information, everywhere. What else ya got?

I've been using OMDs (internet Original Music Distributors) for some time now- was with mp3.com for a while until they got bought out by Vivendi and changed their contract in really negative ways, have stuff on BeSonic, and now I'm setting up shop on Ampcast.com.

I get FIVE CENTS per full download from Ampcast. (This is why they have you register- otherwise artists would cheat)

That is more than twenty times the royalty the RIAA is willing to pay...

Why, how? First, Ampcast really wants to be selling its CDs (a primary reason I like them so much is that they burn-to-order from genuine (rippable) Red Book CDs. The one I have for sale there is a Red Book, full 44.1/16 from high-resolution masters (done with my GPL mastering software Mastering Tools), I'm trying to negotiate a cooler tray-liner artwork but it's 'live' and buyable right now. If you buy one, I get a few bucks, and Ampcast gets a few bucks, and the RIAA gets absolutely fscking nada, zip, zilch, zero, thank you for playing. Secondly, Ampcast ain't a free OMD or trying to be one. It charges a fee like a hosting service, and that's where those five centses come from, plus from the CD sales. They're good that way- they have sense and have managed their budgeting intelligently so they have control of their business.

I'm still putting up other work and remastering my back catalog, but go check out 'Full Day', buy the CD (with a little bonus track not listed on the page) if you like it. And then ask yourself: is it fair that RIAA major label artists get a less than a twentieth of the download-royalty I'm getting from Ampcast? That _stinks_. The RIAA has _more_ money than Ampcast! They could well afford to do a HELL of a lot better than that. It's pathetic, outrageous, insulting. I'm not saying my music isn't as good- I put a lot of work into it- but TWENTY times as good? I think NOT... yet that's the discrepancy in pay.

By the way, if you don't like the idea of me getting paid off downloads, the streaming plays don't pay anything, you could check out those. Or, if there are people who've bought the CD, I write right on it "please copy this CD for your friends" and it's totally rippable, so you could look for the tracks on Gnutella or something- I hope people do share my music that way. If someone has a problem with dealing with Ampcast registration etc. and wouldn't buy my CD anyway, they should still be able to have mp3s of it... I don't need their nickel that badly that I should insist on putting them through a hassle...

The common factors are: these programs had some utility even without registering, and I was confident that they would not sink to complete paranoia. The cripple-qualities were predictable and not totally disruptive. And the price was less than $30 or so, with the benefits great- I used Kaleidoscope for years. I still use Amadeus's spectrum analysis constantly. (And Meshwork is just really elegant and functional and was quite cheap, though I've not made much use of it yet).

Right now I'm coding on my own major software product, Mastering Tools. I'd just recently shifted the program over to GUI knob-based operation, and listed it on VersionTracker (like Freshmeat for Mac people), getting thousands of downloads. It still had some kinks to work out, and that's what I'm doing- currently revising file reading so it's more professional, by ditching the 'pipe-like' approach I'd started with. I've also added a really slick graphical progress display that, I think, beats anything out there: shows RMS and peak levels over time, degree of 'flat-topping' (grunge, distortion), differences between L and R channels in color, and a continuing Benford Realness analysis as applied to audio data, which NOBODY does. I rewrote the normalization ('scan') code so it balances the channels to RMS levels instead of peak, making L/R balance idiotically simple. I've mostly got through the file rewrite, have to test it, may be listing the new version on VersionTracker before Monday...

No, it's not 'shareware'. It is Free software. As in 'GPLed'. Why? Because that is where my sympathies lie. I want to get tools like this in the hands of people like me. And GPLing (the major way to _keep_ people sharing their code, in the real world) is just damn useful. I'll tell you what, did you know where I got the idea for the file rewrite, when I previously didn't have a plan for the revision? I got it from the GPLed C source for LAME. That has AIFF reading code in it, and showed me the way.

I hope that my own code can do the same for somebody one day- whether I know it or not, whether I get paid off it or not. Right now, it's whoever wrote that LAME AIFF code who is helping me- without knowing it, they have helped to improve a radical Mac-based audio mastering application, and indirectly they can even help me earn money by their generosity.

How? Not by me selling their code. Mastering Tools is for a PURPOSE. Audio mastering is a very skilled craft, and just giving people the tools won't make them mastering engineers (I'll give them anyway but it won't help them so much :) ). You have to have very serious monitoring, you have to know what you're doing. The real pros can get paid hundreds of dollars an hour. I don't need anything like that much... I'm gearing up to be able to do really good mastering for the indie crowd. What the LAME code's done for me is helped streamline my mastering workflow- if stuff comes in that's a weird AIFF with lots of data chunks embedded in it, I don't have to convert it to a simpler AIFF with SoundHack anymore. That saves time, and time is money...

So, I guess the bottom line is... I am happy to pay for important shareware, but I don't want to emulate the shareware authors. I like programming better when it is communication. 'I did it this way' 'oh! That solves my problem'. That's what I want to stick to.

When I did that, I also tried some of his tests to see what kind of listener I was. I can barely hear background noise at all, but was able to pick out the original from 256K mp3 encoding 11 out of 14 times, which is proof to ABXers. This was Arny's 'articulation' test at 'probably impossible' level... I am a mastering engineer who writes DSP software and I was using my studio reference system. He tells me there was one other person once who was able to ace that test, and he's considering toning down the language and not calling it 'impossible' anymore if people can get it 11 out of 14 and so on- but to most people it is impossible. Again, that's 256K mp3, and not Xing either.

I'm sure I could tell Ogg Vorbis too, but you have to know what to listen for when the bit rate gets luxurious. There was no real tonal change to listen for, it's just that the 256K file was recognizably characterless, sort of like 'pod people' of audio. Hardly surprising as this is just what I work to avoid in full-resolution CD audio- that too can be rather bland and characterless if you're not careful!

(My own audio work is at www.airwindows.com/dithering/, GPLed, recently added some mid/side stereo features and a GUI Knob class that worked out quite well)

Apart from that, hear hear. Know what I care about? I care that my software is open. Photoshop is not 'my' software, I just bought some and use it. I do not have the power to make people like that share their work, even if doing so would help me and help society in general. I just have power over what I do, particularly over what I code up myself.

I'm mac based, so quite a lot of software I use and enjoy is freeware. Of this, very little is truly open source- the most significant OSS to me that I use is Mastering Tools, which was written BY me. That's not so wrong.

I'm of the 'with gravity that low, make a sailplane-like craft' school ;)

This is a _good_ article. It covers all the bases- has the guts to see that people on the spectrum are capable of things that stun and astonish NT humans- and isn't afraid to also confront the fact that this comes at a price- if we breed as if we were some superior race, we are FSCKED, producing children who... well, if we are 'overclocked' then our potential kids can be 'thermal meltdown', virtually incapable of functioning. A daunting thought... and we are the LEAST capable of humans, as far as dealing with heavy personal needs of others.

We've always been around. The whole stereotype of the Eccentric German Professor is pure autism. Albert Einstein dealt with this sort of thing- for instance, he couldn't remember his own phone number. "Why should I when I can write it down?" People say that what he could remember, most people couldn't even imagine- at the same time, the guy couldn't remember his own phone number! It's not simple eccentricity or wilful decision to flout the expectations of society. It's NOT just PR.

My favorite way of describing it is subroutines. Most people are more pre-emptive- those of us who are far out along the spectrum can hit amazing peaks of 'processing' but don't necessarily have the control over when it's happening. If that happens to me, I might go and get something and immediately not know what I was getting. At the same time, I also don't know what my mind is processing- it's in a subroutine, doing something that I don't know what it is. Solving some problem I might think of another day. In the immediate moment, I'm standing there looking like a fool. If it was just going to the fridge or whatever this would be less of a problem. I don't drive anymore- it took me too long to figure out that I dropped into subroutines even at the wheel- and five seconds between 'interrupts' isn't enough for driving. Fortunately I never hurt anybody- I'm not risking it any longer, license expired of old age and I'm not getting a new one.

What do I get to balance out these problems? Some stuff that's paid off a lot of the stress of getting this far. Some things that are subjective, some that are objective. Thankfully, self-awareness: we're as capable of self-awareness and wisdom as anybody, given the right information. I'm 33, so for most of my life the information I was given was 'you're just not trying to get along!' or some such crap. Better to know the truth with its curses AND blessings.

Nothing like a personal interest... anyhow, I think this is a really good article.

Marriage? Children? Not my problem- I ended up failing at being heterosexual, and discovering I could be gay just as easily, even be considered a hottie (most unexpected!). I've ended up mated with a guy, no desire to produce or raise children- if it wasn't for that I'd doubtless be a bachelor until I died. My 'line' will die with me.

...except: I release code under the GPL. I also share my ideas- have a serious hangup about withholding them, charging for them etc. This puts a real damper on my prospects of ever being rich- but my ideas DON'T have to die with me.

I wonder how many of the important Free Software people are autistic? Is it that a level of autism ironically helps people understand and see deeper social benefit precisely BECAUSE we don't have the whirl of normal social interaction to distract us from what we're really doing? For a Bill Gates, this turns him to the dark side and he responds by rejecting it- 'OK, all the toys must be mine!' and doesn't have normal social restraints to suggest to him that this is bad. For a Richard Stallman, this turns him towards dedicated, unyielding determination to maximize social benefit at all costs- at the expense of his day-to-day social contacts, and the patience of those around him. Either way it's more focus than most people ever see, and that's the secret of it... a lot of people seem ready to make all sorts of compromises in their lives, that an autistic person may not be able to make. Which is a weakness and a strength- look at what RMS has been able to do by being singleminded..

As such, it's perfectly valid and reasonable to say "this open source stuff isn't allowing me to compete in this capitalistic market!" The context would be something like SourceForge, since for industries less about software authoring, the "open source stuff" can still be a way to cut costs and own outright the means of data processing instead of renting it (say, from Microsoft.)

However, the problem comes when people don't even think to ask any of the other questions: foremost, I think, would be

Is this capitalistic market itself imposing power relationships on me that aren't to my interest?

THAT is the relevant question. Look at the big picture... look at the types of power relationships that exist among vendors, users, developers... it may be that Open Source never does make a sensible business model, but in a world where 'sensible business models' amount to serious power inequities between players and a Darwinian reduction of industries to only the most aggressive, restrictive players, is a business model really the thing to want? If that is the game (and with Microsoft being found repeatedly totally guilty of power abuses and wrist-slapped cautiously, I suggest it is), is it even proper to consider only how best to play that one particular game?

Microsoft knows what it's dealing with when it makes Open Source and the GPL in particular, public enemy number one. These are not effective economic weapons- they are effective specifically at breaking the hold a restrictive vendor exerts on its victims/developers/customers. If you can have ownership of your own software you can't be armtwisted- you are immune from power abuses.

This is in a context of business, again, and power abusers have the most effective business model IF most people are subject to their power. People using open source or developing it may never, ever have comparable economic power or competitive business models- but they can wield a 'spoiler' effect, allowing others to bail out of the proprietary sphere if it's getting too restrictive for them. This is what threatens Microsoft, not some notion that Red Hat will end up with a billion dollar war chest.

And it is right for this sort of thing to frighten power abusers- because it is in fact antithetical to their primary business model. If they were just selling service and quality and working hard it'd be another story- but the winning strategy has been to twist power relationships for all they're worth, and that is precisely what is threatened.

How does all this apply to VA and SourceForge?

Well- they have a choice, though it may be already made for them. They can go the one way- keeping open, and losing in the marketplace but enabling a wide spectrum of 'spoiler' projects that keep proprietary software in check. Otherwise each project will have to maintain its own web presence at its own expense, as I do (Mastering Tools). Or, they can roll the other direction, increasingly twisting power relationships to compete in the marketplace on the marketplace's own terms (even if those are set by hardcore libertarian ideology and best illustrated by Microsoft). If they do that, though, Free software itself is a threat to them, because it destabilises power relationships and makes it possible to avoid lock-in.

It sounds like they're doing the latter. Pity- I guess they felt they had to grow grow grow, to compete in the marketplace and maintain stock valuation. Unfortunately, for them to take this approach is antithetical to free software itself, so I would say they are fucked.

Besides, if you try to sell software I will just laugh at you and give your customers copies of my own original software for nothing. Go right ahead and spend money on marketing, if you're serious and not just some wanker talking big and not doing anything. Here's the source, go nuts... note the GPL at the top, and sell away my friend, just have your source ready to include...

I do dithering/wordlength reduction software under the GPL (it's not C code, mind you, but it is still GPLed) and the last version did fairly well, competing with some extremely formidable proprietary dithers from places like the POW-R Consortium and Apogee. That stuff pretty well held its own for the most part with the best that the proprietary world had to offer.

Over the last week, I've drastically overhauled my noise-shaping code, and am trying to get final work done on a new release of my software- and this time, I've blown everything proprietary out of the water completely (w.r.t quality of output- not workflow convenience- I don't do hardware, or realtime output). I've got one dither that's consistently -160 db noise floor from 0-2K. Another one hits -170 db at 1.8 and 3K, right where the ear is most sensitive. Another steadily drops to below -170 db at the lowest frequencies. Another uses unusual methods to produce soundstage depth (a comb-filter-like noise floor- never heard of anyone doing that one before).

This is _all_ GPLed. You can't use any of it in proprietary software without violating the public license it's released under.

This is also _all_ mine. It's not even written in C, much less based on GPLed code from others. (That's one reason why my file reading routines suck ;) ). It uses none of the 'many hands make light work' concept of open source- I do all the work and have not had any offers of help from anyone at all, except some mastering engineers who've given their thoughts on early versions of its audio performance, and they don't write code.

With that in mind, I have to say I'm delighted to see SleepyCat's take on all this: it confirms what I had suspected, and gives me hope for the future. You can make money on open source by indulging in people's desires to NOT play along and open their own source. You can charge them to NOT share (if they share, they get it for free. How much is your paranoia worth to you? ;) )

The only requirements are that YOU have to do the work- which stands to reason- that you have to not only do all the work but also outperform everybody else- and that there have to be enough others out there who want what you have to give, but won't themselves share. Basically, you're charging people for their own greed. If they were willing to give their work to the world as you do, they'd get your help for nothing. But if they want what you have, and won't do as you do- they must either do without, or come to terms with you. (or rip you off outright, but that's another story).

It's inspiring to see how these folks do it, and definitely something to emulate- makes me glad I've been using pure GPL all along, rather than something like LGPL. They're so right- you can't exert this kind of pressure UNLESS your 'free' licensing is hardcore 'libre' with no concessions to business. It's gotta scare the suits and the lawyers enough so they come to you and say 'maybe we can work something out' (*kaching!* good to do business with ya!).

Wonderful to see this. And again it's so simple that I marvel that nobody else has been suggesting it- I thought I had sort of invented this concept for myself out of necessity and it's reassuring to see that people have actually tried it and it works. You have to have a product so good that people _do_ want a piece of it- a libre license that scares the suits- and a willingness to release private versions under non-free parallel licenses to companies that want what you have, but won't share code themselves.

Maybe this _does_ lead to doing yourself out of a job, in the future when everybody is nice and shares ;) or maybe the 'bar' is very high, in that you really have to perform to get in such a position. If that's the case, then (a) explains why I haven't made money this way yet, and (b) if 20 db better noise floor than the top proprietary dither isn't enough, I'll keep working until it's 30 db ;) it looks like some entire concepts like indeterminate-order noise shaping are mine alone. I don't think you can even get error distributions anything like what I'm getting without it- so for a change, rather than indispensable technology being owned by a patent holder, indispensable technology is 'owned' by the sphere of GPLed free software. Any arguments that code or algorithms are property and not speech will only enhance the value of this 'ownership'. Or to put it another way: so software is not speech? So you can 'own' an algorithm, huh? Well, _this_ one you can't have unless you go libre with your own code, or pay! *kaching*

Hah!

I gotta get back to work- the main dithers have been hammered out, but I need to adapt some of the others, like Logic and Ambient, to the new error-feedback routines. They probably won't outperform the others in numbers, but they're geared to different needs: Logic turned out to be good at revealing depth cues accurately, and Ambient was particularly warm with very authoritative bass, and I gotta see if I can bring out those qualities more.

If there's anybody else out there capable of doing this type of thing in other fields, please, please, go for it with every bit of effort you can come up with! Maybe 'open source' as a way of not having to do as much of the work has an immediate appeal to people- but the only way we're gonna REALLY get Software Libre out there and impossible to avoid is if you do the work yourself, do it BETTER than anyone else can (pick your field carefully, and narrowly!) and then put your stuff out with a hardcore libre license and a willingness to charge for dual-licensing! It's gotta be 'This is mine- you either share, or you pay. My way or the highway'. That's the only way to win...

I'm one of the 'quirky engineers' (probably the most significant thing I've actually produced is this but there's lots of other stuff) and I have Asperger's Syndrome. It does _not_ mean you smell ;) but it does mean you cannot function on exactly the same level as a 'normal human', at least not indefinitely. I have ulcers, homelessness, and a brief period in a psychiatric ward to attest to that. These days I place more value on being me- and ironically this is what has made me capable of contributing to the world in any sense.

I could easily have been the guy in the article- useless (through stressing and being a fish out of water), beset by self-esteem problems, and soon fired. I've also been the 'guru', once I'd started dealing with life more on my terms- in that case, I got relied upon for so much that I burned out and _I_ chose to part ways with the company, rather than be fired.

The essay 'care and feeding of a hacker' is almost a textbook example of 'how to use a person with Asperger's effectively'. The most important things are: employ them in the field that they're already obsessed with, give them resources, stay out of the way, and have a marketing team to sell what they produce because they themselves cannot do marketing as well as more social creatures can. Do _not_ make your quirky Asperger's geek double as a sales weasel ;)

That useless guy in the article _might_ be hugely effective in the right context. Or not... but the article author's company clearly wasn't the right context, and I doubt they're a healthy environment for 'quirky geniuses'. You almost have to have a support network just for turning the quirky-output into products and selling them- without the quirky-geniuses, you may not have a product at all, but without the sales weasels, only Slashdot will ever hear about you...

If you're not using dithered 2-busses yet, run don't walk to check that stuff out- you really need to be covering that base to be pro-level. Even Pro Tools has had to bow to pressure and incorporate a dithered buss in their new mixer, and they have such a big name that they've stagnated horribly.

Talk to me if this sounds interesting- it's definitely about what _you_ think is important. You can suit yourselves, I'm just saying that I'm happy to consult with you for nothing and donate algorithms under the GPL- and consider that, although you guys are clearly much better coders than me, it's possible that there are people out there with a clearer idea of what constitutes a state of the art DAW system. Within the narrow confines of digital gain staging and wordlength reduction practices (and possibly compression and limiting, though I'm damned if I can figure how to implement a realtime lookahead limiter for you guys without sacrificing latency), I'd suggest that I'm the guy you should be talking to. Up to you...

If you're not using dithered 2-busses yet, run don't walk to check that stuff out- you really need to be covering that base to be pro-level. Even Pro Tools has had to bow to pressure and incorporate a dithered buss in their new mixer, and they have such a big name that they've stagnated horribly.

Talk to me if this sounds interesting- it's definitely about what _you_ think is important. You can suit yourselves, I'm just saying that I'm happy to consult with you for nothing and donate algorithms under the GPL- and consider that, although you guys are clearly much better coders than me, it's possible that there are people out there with a clearer idea of what constitutes a state of the art DAW system. Within the narrow confines of digital gain staging and wordlength reduction practices (and possibly compression and limiting, though I'm damned if I can figure how to implement a realtime lookahead limiter for you guys without sacrificing latency), I'd suggest that I'm the guy you should be talking to. Up to you...

I'm the guy who wrote up a 'sonogram encoder study' using a pathologically impossible waveform to encode, and then measuring how much different mp3 encoders fell apart, and in what ways. Like r3mix.net, I wound up supporting LAME, but with some explanations for what people find compelling about Blade and Fraunhofer, respectively.

You also should know that people have been pestering me to add Ogg comparisons for _ages_, even wanting to send me the files I couldn't encode myself on an OS 8.1 Mac.

Well, there have been some changes at Airwindows:

• new powermac to take on ADAT editing duties and run the quirky old transfer card I have
• OS 8.6
• Amadeus 2 v 3.2.3, which imports and exports Ogg- unsure quite what version- and Amadeus isn't free, but the deal is I _have_ bought it earlier and my registration number works on 3.2.3
• iTunes (more on this later)

Now, I need to emphasise that the process wasn't exactly the same as last time- I had to include some 'control' sonograms using the same mp3s that I used last time (Frau 128 and Blade 320, strong but idiosyncratic performers of known characteristics) for comparison. It's preliminary, and I don't want to immediately go into a complete shootout again because (a) it's such an undertaking and (b) I'm not at all sure I'm using a current Ogg version here. That said...

Here is the result of this early look at Ogg Vorbis, and I think I managed to sort of exactly what Ogg is relative to mp3. Quotes from the final report:

"Conclusion: Ogg Vorbis, at least the version I tested, is not wildly superior to mp3. Used at bit rates under 192K it tries much harder to encode real high-frequency data, but on some sounds such as a tone sweep its sophistication backfires, producing artifacts that show up plainly in the sonograms."
"However, used at higher bit rates it strikes a very clever balance, managing to pull together the best qualities of wildly different mp3 encoders into a single sonic presentation. Again, it behaves similarly to the very impressive BladeEnc in tonal purity, but instead of the miserable transient behavior of BladeEnc, it mimics the overstated transient behavior of Fraunhofer. This could easily be seen as best of both worlds."

Now, about iTunes? I have some observations that I'd love to learn more about. Basically, I picked up iTunes because there's a patch making it possible to install on system 8.6, and I did that- only to be startled by a distinct difference in sound quality which I have the background to interpret. Briefly, it sounds like iTunes dithers its mp3 output to 16 bit, instead of truncating it.

A bit of background: any decoder, either mp3 or Ogg or whatever, is effectively synthesising a waveform from limited information. It's adding harmonics together to produce a linear PCM representation that's piped to the sound output hardware.

I suspect everyone making mp3 players has been simply truncating the waveform to 16 bit on the assumption that it's low quality anyway and doesn't matter... until iTunes... which has startlingly better dimensionality and depth than any other player I've heard.

However- there's no patent on the general concept of dithering. Some of the fancier ditherers and noise shaping algorithms are proprietary, but I happen to know many that are actually GPLed...

...because I write them. And that means that although I am not a Linux C coder- since the code and the algorithms for quadratic and primitive root residue dithers and indeterminate-order noise shaping are in the GPL sphere, the Linux world can have those technologies freely- and the proprietary world can't. Which may mean that Linux players (mp3 or Ogg) can fairly easily boast strikingly better sound quality than proprietary ones...

It's exciting to see the pieces of a truly superior free audio technology come together...

I'm the guy who wrote up a 'sonogram encoder study' using a pathologically impossible waveform to encode, and then measuring how much different mp3 encoders fell apart, and in what ways. Like r3mix.net, I wound up supporting LAME, but with some explanations for what people find compelling about Blade and Fraunhofer, respectively.

You also should know that people have been pestering me to add Ogg comparisons for _ages_, even wanting to send me the files I couldn't encode myself on an OS 8.1 Mac.

Well, there have been some changes at Airwindows:

• new powermac to take on ADAT editing duties and run the quirky old transfer card I have
• OS 8.6
• Amadeus 2 v 3.2.3, which imports and exports Ogg- unsure quite what version- and Amadeus isn't free, but the deal is I _have_ bought it earlier and my registration number works on 3.2.3
• iTunes (more on this later)

Now, I need to emphasise that the process wasn't exactly the same as last time- I had to include some 'control' sonograms using the same mp3s that I used last time (Frau 128 and Blade 320, strong but idiosyncratic performers of known characteristics) for comparison. It's preliminary, and I don't want to immediately go into a complete shootout again because (a) it's such an undertaking and (b) I'm not at all sure I'm using a current Ogg version here. That said...

Here is the result of this early look at Ogg Vorbis, and I think I managed to sort of exactly what Ogg is relative to mp3. Quotes from the final report:

"Conclusion: Ogg Vorbis, at least the version I tested, is not wildly superior to mp3. Used at bit rates under 192K it tries much harder to encode real high-frequency data, but on some sounds such as a tone sweep its sophistication backfires, producing artifacts that show up plainly in the sonograms."
"However, used at higher bit rates it strikes a very clever balance, managing to pull together the best qualities of wildly different mp3 encoders into a single sonic presentation. Again, it behaves similarly to the very impressive BladeEnc in tonal purity, but instead of the miserable transient behavior of BladeEnc, it mimics the overstated transient behavior of Fraunhofer. This could easily be seen as best of both worlds."

Now, about iTunes? I have some observations that I'd love to learn more about. Basically, I picked up iTunes because there's a patch making it possible to install on system 8.6, and I did that- only to be startled by a distinct difference in sound quality which I have the background to interpret. Briefly, it sounds like iTunes dithers its mp3 output to 16 bit, instead of truncating it.

A bit of background: any decoder, either mp3 or Ogg or whatever, is effectively synthesising a waveform from limited information. It's adding harmonics together to produce a linear PCM representation that's piped to the sound output hardware.

I suspect everyone making mp3 players has been simply truncating the waveform to 16 bit on the assumption that it's low quality anyway and doesn't matter... until iTunes... which has startlingly better dimensionality and depth than any other player I've heard.

However- there's no patent on the general concept of dithering. Some of the fancier ditherers and noise shaping algorithms are proprietary, but I happen to know many that are actually GPLed...

...because I write them. And that means that although I am not a Linux C coder- since the code and the algorithms for quadratic and primitive root residue dithers and indeterminate-order noise shaping are in the GPL sphere, the Linux world can have those technologies freely- and the proprietary world can't. Which may mean that Linux players (mp3 or Ogg) can fairly easily boast strikingly better sound quality than proprietary ones...

It's exciting to see the pieces of a truly superior free audio technology come together...

What you're seeing in the mpeg videos behind that link is flyover scenes that generate a terrain grid with dynamic level of detail concentrated near the camera, overlaid onto an entirely synthetic and repeatable world which is derived from multiple pointer math on a large (16M) data file. That means FAST- it was only implemented in REALbasic and still runs reasonably fast, and is a natural for C.

I also spent some time producing universe distributions- one stumbling block that I ran into that I hadn't got around to solving was what I was keeping world space in, as the universe is very big and at the same time the actual planets would go down to roughly 1/8" level of detail using some approaches for data synthesis. In particular, one of the techniques for positioning stuff would go down to 1/8" level of detail with four pointer-like operations using no kind of higher math. The difficulty is that you don't get a list of objects- instead if you wanted to synthesise, say, blades of grass, you'd go over a ten mile view by scanning across your view grid and every eighth of an inch, would do the fairly quick lookup of whether there was a blade of grass or some similar object on that eighth-inch spot. On the bright side, it would at least be repeatable, being entirely procedural.

The thing about these projects, and I can see that many people have done them, is that you can get grandiose about them but the bottom line is: this is not a game. This is not inherently fun, or interesting. One thing I'd thought of for _my_ approach is to apply some Warcraft-like game (scaled to MMORG, of course ;) I think that's a rule for all people coding virtual worlds) and make use of the fact that you can have a world-sized area with (perpetual) resources laid out irregularly and down to an extraordinary level of detail. So you could be in a game, and have to dig for gold or iron or something, and go by people's reports of where that resource could be found- including "There's this planet out by Alpha Centauri that's loaded with it". I also had a procedural planet and location name generator that wasn't entirely horrible ;)

Like I said- you get into this sort of thing and totally forget that it's NOT FUN for anybody else, unless there's a plot. I'd suggest that the author of this more recent work, if he seriously expects to earn money off it, should treat it very much like selling an art object: 'here's a viewer through which you can explore millions of worlds much like Bryce, only with less interaction', and not be too haughty about the price, either. This isn't a set of libs that will be useful for anyone creating a game, period. For one thing, you can get the same thing cheaper from elsewhere- it's NOT a unique idea.

There is a place for 3D on the desktop- use of the illusion of depth produced by overlapping windows, only more so. I wrote up an idea piece on that, linked above, a while ago.

Interestingly enough, MacOSX has every single bit of technical underpinning necessary to do this, in its Display PDF layer. The window-minimizing animation literally takes a full window and not only shrinks it but distorts it oddly. It would be nothing to scale windows under OSX. I'm not sure if it'd be just as easy to fade them toward a background haze color, but it's certainly eye-opening to consider. Basically, almost a year ago I was envisioning this way of using a third dimension on xterms alone, because those are already resizable in many term programs. I thought it would be impossibly tough to do that with full-on GUI apps, but OSX already does more than that- it just does not currently furnish any method for zooming specific windows forward or back in space.

Makes me wonder if it'll be possible to come up with 'hacks' on OSX's Finder and add this behavior...

I do it in a slow-ish heavily GUI 'toy language' with its own memory management and elaborate, pre-made objects, because there's only so much I _can_ do, and I have goals. There are particular things I want the software to do. I choose a weird interface (very text oriented!) for the program, but within that interface if I need to shuffle the positions of the parameters for high frequency sidechain compression, I want to select pictures of the things and drag them to the new places and build the app and have it run, just like that.

If I decide that the delay lines, measured in feet or millisecond of delay, must have the control's background a shade of gray that relates to how 'far' the echo is, for quick visual appraisal of the state of the app, I want to type in a quick me.color = rgb(255-HowFar, 255-HowFar, 255-HowFar). Yes, to some extent this is OOP- but where do I find the place to type that code? In the environment I'm using, I look at the mocked-up app and doubleclick the box and a code browser pops up, open to the _wrong_ event of the _right_ control. It's not perfect, but it gets me there...

GUI isn't about making Super-Genius-Coding-Man more effective. SGCM is already effective, the closer to the raw words and letters and symbols of code the better. It's all in SGCM's head. GUI is about making _me_ effective.

And if you're SGCM, you are perfectly free to feel totally superior to me, but you know what? I can hardly code, but what I'm trying to do is push the boundaries of digital audio mastering and wordlength reduction, and this is very specialized stuff.

If you are SuperGeniusCodingMan, are you programming something original- or are you strutting because you can use raw C and hand-hacked makefiles to produce... an IRC client? >:)

What gives you the notion that writing software must be constrained to programmers?

At http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html you will find an elaborate program for high-end digital audio mastering from >16bit word lengths. It includes a number of very killer vertical-market type features like multiband sidechain compression. It does NOT have remotely professional file-reading and writing, because those are more 'real programmer' things, and I'm not a 'real programmer'. However, no 'real programmer' has shown any interest in writing such an app, and the market is so tiny that the few people building stuff for it tend to charge in the kilobucks- and the app I did is GPLed and just to have it costs nothing.

So it is not a question of 'so if you wanted said mastering software, how would get it if nobody will write it without money?'. Surprise! Nobody wrote it anyway. The 'market' did not lead to any such software existing, even though I needed it desperately.

And it is not a question of 'yeah, right, like a programmer is going to do hard work like that for free': clue jet coming in on runway six, a programmer didn't do that. I did. It's not done in the way you'd want to sell as shrinkwrapped greedware, but then the market's too small anyhow. The point is, this program _exists_ and grows and evolves based on just one person's ability to mostly sort of program. It's GPLed making it that much easier for the _next_ person who has a personal task to accomplish, to get a head start. And that's how it goes...

I really have little patience for programmers. Programmers are like the people who put the spyware boobytrap 'dial up and invalidate the registration number if the person's reinstalled the program too many times' code into an mp3 player app that I _bought_ and ended up demanding my money back on. There's a lot that you don't really need a programmer for- you need one for good games, for serious server apps, for the _computery_ stuff, but there's a million other things that can be done more crudely by just regular people with a bit of determination.

(I'm not _really_ against programmers- not like that- but I grow very sick and tired of the 'software can't be free, how will you survive without paying US?!?' refrain. Maybe you're not as indispensable as you think.)

http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html

...except that cdparanoia was completely defeating it first, and even before then, in the early days of digital audio, CEDAR Audio was developing declickers for audio restoration that would completely defeat it.

_ANY_ declicker worth a damn will defeat it. It is a pathologically easy case for a declicker, and declickers can correct thousands of errors per channel per _second_. And you know what? If you get coy with it and try to NOT make pathologically obvious clicks- the interpolation on CD players won't kick in! It is a complete loser technology in every way.

'Fadden' horribly overestimates the effectiveness of this technology...

I'd say bringing high-end wordlength reduction, bandlimited sidechain compression, harmonic enhancement, and azimuth chasing into the GPL sphere is a kind of innovative :D

http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/MasteringTools ProSource.txt

And here's the homepage: http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html

Cheers :)

I'd say bringing high-end wordlength reduction, bandlimited sidechain compression, harmonic enhancement, and azimuth chasing into the GPL sphere is a kind of innovative :D

http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/MasteringTools ProSource.txt

And here's the homepage: http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html

Cheers :)

I'd say bringing high-end wordlength reduction, bandlimited sidechain compression, harmonic enhancement, and azimuth chasing into the GPL sphere is a kind of innovative :D

http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/MasteringTools ProSource.txt

And here's the homepage: http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html

Cheers :)

If you get serious with dither and error-feedback noise shaping, you can get whatever quality you like, including a characteristic very reminiscent of SACD, all from 16 bit audio CD.

Most CDs out there DON'T have acceptable dithering and the new ones that do, are usually crap in other ways!

I've written dithering that will literally resolve signals -156db down from CD audio, as long as they are bassy frequencies- the noise level increases with frequency like in SACD. Charts and details at http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/TechDetails.ht ml, the software itself is at http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html.

This is not Linux software: it is Mac software written in an easier language than C. But it IS GPLed, and that's not an accident.

CD doesn't have to mean rotten quality, and this is an analog freak saying this. CD just has _historically_ meant crap quality, just as chrysalis describes. What's being described is truncation and bad word length maintenance, particularly if it involves cheap-ass DAWs or digital mixers.

You don't have to do that- though you're not likely to see anything but that from the major labels. They've been using cheaper and cheaper equipment for years, the latest trend is for everything to be all Pro Tools, and the poor mastering engineers are stuck trying to get a musical result out of that...

If you get serious with dither and error-feedback noise shaping, you can get whatever quality you like, including a characteristic very reminiscent of SACD, all from 16 bit audio CD.

Most CDs out there DON'T have acceptable dithering and the new ones that do, are usually crap in other ways!

I've written dithering that will literally resolve signals -156db down from CD audio, as long as they are bassy frequencies- the noise level increases with frequency like in SACD. Charts and details at http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/TechDetails.ht ml, the software itself is at http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html.

This is not Linux software: it is Mac software written in an easier language than C. But it IS GPLed, and that's not an accident.

CD doesn't have to mean rotten quality, and this is an analog freak saying this. CD just has _historically_ meant crap quality, just as chrysalis describes. What's being described is truncation and bad word length maintenance, particularly if it involves cheap-ass DAWs or digital mixers.

You don't have to do that- though you're not likely to see anything but that from the major labels. They've been using cheaper and cheaper equipment for years, the latest trend is for everything to be all Pro Tools, and the poor mastering engineers are stuck trying to get a musical result out of that...

Your explanation of his calculations is incorrect. I don't think his methods are particularly useful but if you're interested here they are:

Search for "Help!" at the RIAA website here. Get the following results (sorry about the formatting):

BEATLES, THE HELP! 09/02/65 CAPITOL Gold SINGLE GROUP Standard
BEATLES, THE HELP! 01/10/97 CAPITOL Multi Platinum 3.0 ALBUM GROUP Standard
BEATLES, THE HELP! 01/10/97 CAPITOL Platinum ALBUM GROUP Standard
BEATLES, THE HELP! 08/2365 CAPITOL Gold ALBUM GROUP Standard

Meanwhile, on the author's table here we find the corresponding line:

108 The Beatles, Help!

Evidently the calculations were simply:

2001 - 1965 = 36 (total years since release).

36 * 3.0 (number of "platinums") = 108 (his scoring for the album).

In my opinion a better quantity would simply be the number of platinums, since that is apparently roughly proportional to the number of albums sold. Of course that is really a measurement of how much money the band has made from record sales, and not such a great measurement of how popular they are or were.

The Grammar Nazi is right. The author of the piece has got some mildly interesting data which he then proceeds to completely obscure with some rather bewildering and irrelevant calculations. It is not even clear to me what he is trying to estimate.

A large banner reading ANALYSIS is really no substitute for a little common sense. Better still would be a few courses in statistics, microeconomics, or even marketing.

As for how to realistically change the situation? I don't know. I can only do little things. For instance, writing open source dithering software to try and get some of the proprietary tools of Big Media into the hands of individuals. I did that. I upgraded the cabling and provided technical advice for a Brattleboro micro-radio station while I lived in Brattleboro.

What I do is not much. I'm completely out of my depth regarding stuff like Clear Channel. All I _can_ do is what comes to hand- for instance, I have hopes that my work will lead to pro audio software for Linux. I'm not good enough of a programmer to write C programs for Linux, so the program I wrote is in REALbasic for MacOS. I GPLed it anyway, because what if someone can make use of the algorithms and translate them? It may end up benefitting nobody but me, but I _did_ have the option of going wholly proprietary with it- high-end dithers and wordlength reducers can fetch thousands of dollars just to use them, in proprietary-land- and I couldn't accept that.

I've put effort into understanding the music side of modern media as well- not 12 hours ago, I uploaded my Evergreens analysis, which starts with inspection of the entire history of platinum albums and goes on from there to extrapolate what recent trends mean for the future of this form of media. I think that counts as my thoughts on the matter. I'm of the opinion that 'Big Media' in the sense of the RIAA is heading for a nasty fall but I _don't_ know what will replace it, I only know that it will involve levels of differentiation vastly in excess of what is possible with the traditional radio/retail sales channel, which has been getting absurdly restricted in terms of total inventory. I don't know the form this will take, or whether the record labels will have a heavy stake in it. I do know that if the labels try to sell on the Internet they way they are selling through retail, they are fooling themselves and guaranteed to fail expensively.

Again, I'm sorry for misjudging you- reading Slashdot has caused me to be awfully sensitive to freemarket chauvinism, maybe too sensitive. Just because I see some attitudes as horribly damaging doesn't mean I need to see them in every little remark, and I apologize. I vented unjustifiably at you- my beef is with the numerous people out there who swear up and down that ideology-driven, totally heedless deregulation of everything is the wonder drug to make everything be marvellous and great, and obviously I think this is cult-like insanity with lots of evidence to harshly disprove these promised benefits, but THOSE PEOPLE are the ones running things now. Hence my occasional venom- and I'm sorry to have nailed you with it and disrespected you.

As for how to realistically change the situation? I don't know. I can only do little things. For instance, writing open source dithering software to try and get some of the proprietary tools of Big Media into the hands of individuals. I did that. I upgraded the cabling and provided technical advice for a Brattleboro micro-radio station while I lived in Brattleboro.

What I do is not much. I'm completely out of my depth regarding stuff like Clear Channel. All I _can_ do is what comes to hand- for instance, I have hopes that my work will lead to pro audio software for Linux. I'm not good enough of a programmer to write C programs for Linux, so the program I wrote is in REALbasic for MacOS. I GPLed it anyway, because what if someone can make use of the algorithms and translate them? It may end up benefitting nobody but me, but I _did_ have the option of going wholly proprietary with it- high-end dithers and wordlength reducers can fetch thousands of dollars just to use them, in proprietary-land- and I couldn't accept that.

I've put effort into understanding the music side of modern media as well- not 12 hours ago, I uploaded my Evergreens analysis, which starts with inspection of the entire history of platinum albums and goes on from there to extrapolate what recent trends mean for the future of this form of media. I think that counts as my thoughts on the matter. I'm of the opinion that 'Big Media' in the sense of the RIAA is heading for a nasty fall but I _don't_ know what will replace it, I only know that it will involve levels of differentiation vastly in excess of what is possible with the traditional radio/retail sales channel, which has been getting absurdly restricted in terms of total inventory. I don't know the form this will take, or whether the record labels will have a heavy stake in it. I do know that if the labels try to sell on the Internet they way they are selling through retail, they are fooling themselves and guaranteed to fail expensively.

Again, I'm sorry for misjudging you- reading Slashdot has caused me to be awfully sensitive to freemarket chauvinism, maybe too sensitive. Just because I see some attitudes as horribly damaging doesn't mean I need to see them in every little remark, and I apologize. I vented unjustifiably at you- my beef is with the numerous people out there who swear up and down that ideology-driven, totally heedless deregulation of everything is the wonder drug to make everything be marvellous and great, and obviously I think this is cult-like insanity with lots of evidence to harshly disprove these promised benefits, but THOSE PEOPLE are the ones running things now. Hence my occasional venom- and I'm sorry to have nailed you with it and disrespected you.

This is a _good_ article. Law and justice that doesn't have two sides is no law at all... this article goes a long way towards presenting a concept of digital property rights that is _local_.

There is a lot of money and power behind content creators, copyright holders etc. saying "we own this, it is OUR property, therefore we get to scan your computer, send back information to the mothership, and if you are a criminal we get to delete stolen goods off your hard drive, you pirate you! You miscreant!"

The thing is, _law_ sees this and comes back with "If you're saying that is property, wouldn't the person's hard disk be property too? As in 'not yours', as in 'you are a guest but they bought it and own it and live in it'?"

That's the beauty of law and justice- it balances, in time. The inevitable result of pushing for extensive 'property' law regarding copyright etc. is to also cast light on the subject of what kind of property a person's datasphere is.

I even wrote an essay on this in November 1998: it's at http://www.airwindows.com/fiction/essays/Hotel.htm l. When you operate a computer it is like you are moving your stuff around on virtual property: you put something somewhere. Does a company have a right to move it to somewhere else? To pile stuff next to it obscuring it? To paint it a different color, or dust it off? To remove, discard it, set it on fire, impound it as evidence?

The fact that all of this seems totally permissible only shows that law hasn't begun thinking about these issues yet.

You can't have it both ways- if I am forbidden even to portscan a company, then the company is forbidden to go over _my_ computer either. It's analogous. If we're tightening the protections for company-owned 'cyberspace' we're also laying a precedent for tighter protections on privately owned cyberspace.

In the future it may be ILLEGAL for Microsoft to shut off the mp3 encoding in its software and force people to migrate to WMA- or more plausibly, it may be ILLEGAL for them to take a WMA file that was once functional and render it nonfunctional arbitrarily if you don't cough up a license fee. It may also be illegal for them to place restrictions on OEM desktops- on the basis that they make the building materials, the OEM builds the house, the customer buys it and moves in. There is no compelling argument that they must be able to prohibit the OEM from decorating the 'house' as they see fit.

Very interesting stuff in this article, and grounds for hope :)