Kazaa CEO vs. Hilary Rosen

Carpoolio writes "TechTV is continuing its good coverage of the RIAA attack on file swappers, and now they've gone to Australia to interview Nikki Hemming, CEO of Sharman Networks (Kazaa). It's supposedly one of the only TV interviews she's ever done, and Hemming has some interesting things to say about Hilary Rosen and the RIAA, and the future of Kazaa, but without revealing too much. In TechTV's story (part of a three-part series), they've pitted the two against each other, using a recent interview they did with Rosen. Streaming video of the Rosen interview is included on the site."

Comments

Re:Kazaa should be shut down

[Polymath Crowbane]

To further chomp down...I recently visited my favorite used CD/DVD store and what did I find on the rack? "Faces of Death 4" in all its DVD splendor. I've seen this series in video rental stores for at least ten years. While it's a vile concept, IMHO (and something I've never wanted to see), it's not a new, Internet-only attack on America's youth. While such material perhaps should be banned, the fact is that, today, it is available via brick and mortar. Don't attack the medium for the message.

Re:Gotta love the FUD

[infornogr]

Yeah, but that's what you get when you buy a CD too, a much too loud abomination of what the artist recorded.

Couldn't agree more.
Information on the 'too loud' problem for the less-informed: http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/articles /8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E005DAF1C

Re:Nikki Hemming vs. Hilary Rosen

[illuvata]

you shouldn't take quotes out of context.
most of the songs downloaded on kazaa are poor quality mp3s, so the people get 'a crappy quality song', at least in comparison with whats on CDs

however, no matter how often a song is downloaded, its quality wont change, unlike copying from tapes, or other analog media

Re:Gotta love the FUD

[Dashing Leech]

That's part of it, but you've missed the most important part; there's only a fixed dynamic range. What you want is for the loudest part of the music to be below the top of the dynamic range. If not, it gets clipped which distorts the sound. If you increase the average volume when mastering, there's less room for the louder noises so there's more clipping (unless you decrease the actual range of volume which is what you were talking about).

For more detail, check out a previous story on Rush CDs, or go straight to the analysis. Check out the figures, they help explain clipping.

CDs are digital!

[stinkydog]

Cd's are 44,000 16bit samples a second giving 65,536 possible values (0-65,535). As sound is half positive and half negative the range is split in half. Increasing volume involves adding a positive number to the positive half and a negative number to the negative half. Peak limiting destroys information by cutting it off a the limit of the possible range (resulting in it being discarded). More samples are either 0 or 65,535. One positive side effect is that the MP3 rip will soud more like to origional (less info=less info discarded).

SD