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Because OF COURSE a millimeter-thick grill has the same volume as an entire headphone socket. WHO WRITES THIS SHIT?

http://www.firstpr.com.au/rwi/...

this is it. This is the ORIGINAL Trackman Marble.

The original Logitech Trackman Marble was a thumb trackball which predates that mouse by so much it didn't even have the super-smooth, metallic-painted design. You have no idea what you're on about, perhaps because you're twelve. The device you linked to came years later, after they had discontinued the original marble and replaced it with the Logitech Trackman Wheel T-BB18. I went through about three of the original Marbles back when I was into a whole lotta FPS gaming, they would just die. The Trackman Wheel, on the other hand, just the microswitches die most of the time. It's a relatively easy job to replace them. I got the last replacements out of a T-BB18 that did just become unresponsive, though.

The "Marble" name made a whole lot more sense with the original device, because the ball was smaller. But don't take my word for it, educate yourself on logitech thumb-operated trackballs and then you can scroll down past the device I'm using now and see the original Trackman Marble. Hooray internet.

The cities are crowded but there is still a lot of open land in between. There are still small towns and villages all over the place. Look at a population map of the place up close.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Japan_Population_density_map.svg

http://www.firstpr.com.au/jncrisis/Japan-population-density-833x846.png

This was all predicted a very long time ago - about 1997 if I recall.
A relatively infamous electronic music guru in Australia wrote a very far-seeing article about it here.. (well worth a read)
http://www.firstpr.com.au/musicmar/

If the dinosaurs in the Music Biz didnt see the Bypass coming and evolve, its far too late to start making a fuss about it now, the plans have been on display for at least 10 years.

50+year old dinosaurs do make a lot of noise when they die, although they could take some lessons from the photographic film industry.

Digital Camera's annihlated a 100+ year old industry, and they didnt do anywhere near as much whining about it.. maybe they werent as heavy coke consumers as the record industry guys are ?

It appears to be pre-midi, but able to control a synthesizer by direct connection to the keyboard matrix.

In the Digibarn article, it appears to be controlling a Casio MT10.

Some people did some amazing hacking interfacing computers with those early Casios.
It was the first really cheap digital keyboard. This guy reverse engineered the upD931 in a Casio M-10 back in '84.
He was able to program voices and play it on the fly from his 4MHz CPM box! :

http://www.firstpr.com.au/rwi/casio-keyboards/Casi o-931-2006-06-17.txt

Hope the fellow in Australia doesn't mind a mild Slashdotting, but I found this very thorough HOWTO on a possible setup for you. It consists of RedHat9, Postfix for SMTP, Maildrop (not procmail) for delivery, and Courier-IMAP for the server.

Can't attest to its accuracy (haven't followed it), but it might be a good guide.

I just hope to god it never breaks, because the new design they have for it sucks.

Actually, the compression ratio for SHN is much better. As much as 74% compression can be achieved on techno and pop. I would call 55% typical for live shows from etree.org.

FLAC has similiar compression rates. FLAC's strengths lie in its ability to compress 24bit audio and built-in checksums.

There is, in fact, lossless audio compression, and there are quite a few programs to do it, including the open source FLAC.

This page has a nice overview of lossless audio compression.

192khz sampling and compression do not fit together.

(Of course, he did incorrectly suggest that lossless compression requires having the entire stream at once, which is patently incorrect. Obviously he's never heard of gzip or bzip2 -- both of which are lossless and compress streams block by block -- but aren't that great at compressing audio streams. There's more on various lossless audio-specific compression programs here.)

Note that even lossy compression is not always bad. mp3s and Oggs at 128Kbit/s may not be CD quality, but they're pretty good -- and yet it's compressed by a 12:1 factor! Increasing the bit rates will reduce your compression factor, but will increase the quality.

Jpeg files are lossy, yet with higher quality factors the quality is so high that you can't even tell the difference with your own eyes.

An audiophile may not be at all happy with 128Kbit/s mp3 files, but as you increase the bit rate, there's likely to be a place where he can't tell the difference between the lossy compression and the original. (Of course, depending on how strongly he hates lossy compression schemes, he may never actually admit it.)

At that point, what matters is the compression ratio compared to what you could get with a lossless compresser.

You wouldn't want to use a lossy compression scheme for compressing the studio masters (you should always do your mixing and such with no compression or lossless compression), but if the quality is good enough, it may be perfectly ok for the final distribution of the music, even for the audiophiles. 128 Kbit/s mp3s don't cut it, but that doesn't mean that `mp3 sucks!'.

But most importanatly, at which kbps does the codecs become equal? MP3s do sound a lot better at 192kbps, and surely will beat ogg at 64kps.

I'm not so sure of that -- Vorbis.com used to have one techno song in particular available for download encoded at about 45kps that sounded absolutely amazing -- to my ears, on par with a 112kps MP3. Unfortunetely they seem to have taken it down, so I'm having trouble backing up my assertion; I'll post a reply to this if I find a copy on my desktop machine (I'm presently on my laptop). In any event, I suspect that your evaluation of ogg at 192kbs would be different were it based on a different variety of music, a newer encoder release, or were it not for some technical fault (such as the transcoding of music previously stored as MP3s -- a big nono!)... I'd appreciate hearing how and when you came to the determination.

Oh, and in answer to your question... if you only want it to sound like the original, it depends on how good your ears (and speakers) are; for many, 192kps encoding with either MP3 or Ogg is good enough. If you want truly lossless audio encoding, see the review here.

They should get together with the Sliiiiiiiiiiiiinky guy. Although there might be issues with reception..."HEY MAN! Quit shaking it!"

I disagreee. I laughed out loud to this one.
I bet they leave that little girl in her helmet at all times so she doesn't hurt herself.

Why is the girl in this picture wearing a helmet?

I think I'll stick to regular sized slinkies so I don't have to remember to wear a helmet. The number of slinky related deaths each year is growing. Please remember that playing safe is playing smart.

Earthcore NYE 2000 was a weeklong techno-marathon ... the sliiiiiiinky was there on a hill very similar to the one in the "space cadets" photos. It moved so gracefully on the elastic strings it's suspended by. A slight movement on one end creates a lovely fluid ripple along the length of the whole object. People creating ripples on both ends make waves that gently join each other. Very peaceful to look at.

Both Earthcore and the Sliiiiiiinky are not to be missed if one's in the Melbourne area!

-Christian

p.s. Robin Whittle ... creator of this sliiiinky, is also the creator of the world-famous Roland TB-303 Devilfish mod: http://www.firstpr.com.au/rwi/dfish/

p.p.s. A great picture from that party ... it was the DJ booth.

Earthcore NYE 2000 was a weeklong techno-marathon ... the sliiiiiiinky was there on a hill very similar to the one in the "space cadets" photos. It moved so gracefully on the elastic strings it's suspended by. A slight movement on one end creates a lovely fluid ripple along the length of the whole object. People creating ripples on both ends make waves that gently join each other. Very peaceful to look at.

Both Earthcore and the Sliiiiiiinky are not to be missed if one's in the Melbourne area!

-Christian

p.s. Robin Whittle ... creator of this sliiiinky, is also the creator of the world-famous Roland TB-303 Devilfish mod: http://www.firstpr.com.au/rwi/dfish/

p.p.s. A great picture from that party ... it was the DJ booth.

I went over ALL the pictures and by FAR this is the best one

:)

There are over a dozen lossless audio compression packages available. They all sound the same. I'll just note that FLAC is open source (GPL & LGPL), patent free, and has WinAmp and XMMS plugins available.

Doug Moen.

Why aren't more people starting to use lossless compression instead? My guess is that lossless is going to get a boost from this...

Firstly- moderate MacHack's post up!

Secondly, one must realize that computer art does not equal traditional art (just ask anyone in D.U.M.B.O. (p.s.- if anyone went to the Open Studios this weekend- wasn't it dope?!!))

I'll give you an easy example- Electronic music, and specifically, keyboards. No matter how much they try to make it sound like a piano, it's usually crappy. However in a half-failed attempt to sound like a bass guitar, a musical instrument was created that defied all previous conceptions of how one can make music. And by pushing this machine to the edge with a human controlling it in real time, Art was born.

I am speaking of the Roland TB-303. Plenty can be found on the web, including sound samples so I won't rehash it here.
The beauty of machine art is that a machine is designed for a small subset of situations and purposes. But what happens when you throw it into a completely knew scenario that it isn't quite ready for? Under the control of deft hands, You Get Art. Really GOOD art.


Mekkab Out.

First off, 128 kbit/s encoding is good enough for a lot of applications. I just think that it's not good enough for music that you want to own. I don't claim that 128 kbit/s encoded music is easy to distinguish from the original. It isn't. But it is possible to distinguish the two. See this paper for results of professional listening tests. MP3 at 128 kbit/s consistently scored at the "perceptible differences" level.

Of course, I realize that professional listening tests is quite different from you listening to music in your home. If you think the differences don't matter, then fine. But please at least experience the differences firsthand before judging whether they matter or not. I have personally done several A/B listening tests with music that I actually listen to, and I've decided that the difference does matter to me.

So go out, find some music that you're intimately familiar with, encode it at various bitrates, and do A/B listening tests. Hear out the differences and see if they matter to you. If not, then feel free to go out and say that the differences don't matter. But please don't say the differences don't matter because you can't hear them, because that's just admitting your ears aren't good enough to back up your opinion.

Finally, Robin Whittle's comparison of mp3, aac, and vqf discusses all the issues with digital audio and compression, and hits all the correct answers. It's a must read if you care at all about your digital or compressed music.