I've never had anyone argue with me when I note that I dislike the taste of alcohol. What kind of ass would need an involved story to accept that someone doesn't want a specific food or drink?
I replied to a comment which indicated that a database-driven site probably doesn't have much DB-dependent code, and which suggested solving underwhelming database performance by adding an additional compatibility layer. Somehow, I presumed that the bar for humor wasn't set all that high.
I refuse to acknowledge kibbibits as a real word.:) In any event, "320kbps maximum bitrate VBR"; the "maximum" is presumably implicit when a bitrate is near "VBR".
Ok, so if you split up one contiguous work into multiple tracks for some inexplicable reason, some junky encoders might make some noise that you can pick up. That seems mostly irrelevant in the common case, but I suppose is valid for some people in very specific situations. How to fix that?
- Encode as a single track
- Don't listen to music which requires gapless playback
- Use lame to encode - like I do - which does gapless encoding by default.
That third (and clearly the best) option notes that lame has a --nogap option which, when given all the tracks at once, will shift the track boundaries by a few bits as necessary to put the audio delimiters precisely on frame boundaries and get rid of the glitches. It also adds tags to all tracks to indicate where the track actually ends (in the common case of non-contiguous tracks), rather than letting the player just guess at what that junk is. It even mentions that
LAME-encoded MP3 can be gapless with players that support the LAME Mp3 info tag.
on the wikipedia page linked.
So, with a decent player that knows about the lame tags, your glitches go away. Enjoy all the disk space I just saved you, and the freedom to play your music most anywhere.;)
No, I still tight that ability. We already discussed that the decoded output of the mp3 is not discernibly different from the original. Decoding to a CD is the same as decoding to anything else - whether it goes directly to a digital sound card or if it's temporarily written to a CD before that data is passed through essentially unmodified to a digital sound card.
Never mind that anything I'm listening to a CD on which can't play MP3s is generally going to be a low-quality reproduction device like a car or a portable boom box, so any minor artifacts wouldn't matter.
I don't know enough about kiddie porn to know if most "consumers" are using a small set of existing data, or if it's more new one-off stuff. If there's really a small core set that lots of people have, well, I guess the database would be useful. If it doesn't work that way, I'd question the usefulness of such a database. I guess it'd be a quick way to catch a few people.
I don't back the encoded files up because I have the originals on CD (same with all the DVDs I have ripped for my media systems to use). I do back up my database (both the.cddb directory that the ripper updates and the MySQL database created by the app). But I'm not sure how this database might actually map to the files. It can't use checksums, since the id3 tags will differ and therefore the files will differ. It can't use the id3 tags, since that's the data we're talking about backing up. I'm genuinely curious how you're managing your mp3 files in a way that separates storage of the metadata from the actual encoded music. With the.cddb folder, hopefully most of them will rip more closely to correctly next time, but I know some of the custom stuff (album art, "various artists" compilation albums, etc) won't be stored in cddb-friendly files that any ripper I know of will handle...
I know! OMG I was about to just go nuts a moment ago, replying to a couple of comments. Click in box, magic scroll text box off screen. Scroll back down, click in box, magic scroll off screen. Grrr.
I thought it was a new thing because, again somewhat ironically, I read and reply to comments way less than I used to.:) And I've browsed with my threshold set to 1 (or, sometimes, 2) for years now, so maybe I don't notice the frequency because of the combination of those two things (read less, set threshold high)...
Agreed - the "throw away anything you haven't used recently" rule is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but would lead to a society where we don't learn anything from our history, and thus continually repeat... Oh, wait.
Yes - it took me several weeks to re-rip my several-hundred-CD collection when a drive failed last time (on RAID now to prevent that). I guess people who think this is easy have like 25 CDs and they're all single-disk sets from major artists with 100% accurate id3 info.
Which is why I use 320Kbps VBR mp3. Not only is it proven multiple times to be not distinguishable from the CD in double-blind tests, it also saves a lot of space over FLAC and actually works in pretty much any audio player anywhere that plays anything more than just straight CDs. Compatibility is more important to me than a purely theoretical difference in sound quality. I would be happy to read a reference which objectively compares FLAC to lame mp3 with the psychoacoustic optimizations turned on and the quality cranked up in VBR mode, though.:)
What people can actually distinguish better and which is harder for any compression (or sampling, eve) to deal with is stereo separation. These arguments regularly overlook it, but the human ear can distinguish incredibly minute differences in timing between the left and right ear. The sampling frequency has to be very high to capture the sub-millisecond differences that even a shitty ear can distinguish. Frequency range is easy; stereo separation is hard.
"Overrated" does work. And seriously - in an article about someone deploying seafaring weaponized lasers, how do a few people *not* make a reference to one of the most memorable scenes from a pretty popular movie? I'll bet there's be a lot less griping if someone designed a cyborg suit / implant / whatever and people started making reference to Jean-Luke saying "I am Locutus" and a bazillion "resistance is futile" notes, even though that's *at least* as tired.
The difference with trolling, at the risk of feeding an ironic troll, is that trolls are intentionally trying to drive the topic off in the weeds or get a negative reaction in as much volume as possible. The above shark/frikkin' laser reference is pretty clearly just someone making a joke that they probably legitimately felt was funny. Lots of people just aren't as funny as they think they are, but they're not intentionally being dicks. More than likely, they just didn't read all the other comments - which is a separate problem in and of itself. A "duplicate comment" mod would perhaps be worthwhile, but that would require much more work on the part of people with mod points - and I can guarantee that I don't work that hard when I get them.:)
Speaking of curiosity, do you really think that you're the only person who has ever had a bad experience with Verizon? I directly work (on the same team) with two others who are passionate about their hate for Verizon. I could not care less about harassing you; I legitimately hate Verizon and was sharing that I also hate Verizon. Sure, I didn't disown my mother, but I've made the threat. And I don't have a dog. But the other parts are all true (hint - I hate Sony and Microsoft, but less than Verizon). My experience with Verizon cost me personally $1700, in fact. How much did they screw you? Less, I'll bet, but maybe not. They didn't know that I was in charge of IT at my employer at the time, and within a couple of months we had amazingly found a better deal on our leased lines; the T1s at the office and the ISDN carriers at the remote workers' locations; everything was switched away from Verizon. So I did get the money back and more; it just didn't go back into my pocket.
In any event, you may want to go talk to Copernicus about what everything revolves around.;)
You can't just say "well, they asked me for money and I gave it to them?" Really? So I have to stop saying that the cashier at the grocer is coercing me to give them money in exchange for goods and/or services?
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Flash was released for 64-bit Linux yesterday.
No, it's because "virtualization" is way too hard to spell.
I've never had anyone argue with me when I note that I dislike the taste of alcohol. What kind of ass would need an involved story to accept that someone doesn't want a specific food or drink?
I replied to a comment which indicated that a database-driven site probably doesn't have much DB-dependent code, and which suggested solving underwhelming database performance by adding an additional compatibility layer. Somehow, I presumed that the bar for humor wasn't set all that high.
Yeah, Oracle. Who owns MySQL again?
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/mysql/index.html
Well, I have used Synaptic maybe 3 times since I started using Ubuntu over 5 years ago, so I'm pretty sure it's been optional for a while.
Yeah, I hate when everything I want to use isn't installed by default. Having to run one command to install the stuff I want is unacceptable.
Honestly, I'd rather find that you're right and that way less new stuff is created. :)
I refuse to acknowledge kibbibits as a real word. :) In any event, "320kbps maximum bitrate VBR"; the "maximum" is presumably implicit when a bitrate is near "VBR".
Ok, so if you split up one contiguous work into multiple tracks for some inexplicable reason, some junky encoders might make some noise that you can pick up. That seems mostly irrelevant in the common case, but I suppose is valid for some people in very specific situations. How to fix that?
- Encode as a single track
- Don't listen to music which requires gapless playback
- Use lame to encode - like I do - which does gapless encoding by default.
That third (and clearly the best) option notes that lame has a --nogap option which, when given all the tracks at once, will shift the track boundaries by a few bits as necessary to put the audio delimiters precisely on frame boundaries and get rid of the glitches. It also adds tags to all tracks to indicate where the track actually ends (in the common case of non-contiguous tracks), rather than letting the player just guess at what that junk is. It even mentions that
on the wikipedia page linked.
So, with a decent player that knows about the lame tags, your glitches go away. Enjoy all the disk space I just saved you, and the freedom to play your music most anywhere. ;)
No, I still tight that ability. We already discussed that the decoded output of the mp3 is not discernibly different from the original. Decoding to a CD is the same as decoding to anything else - whether it goes directly to a digital sound card or if it's temporarily written to a CD before that data is passed through essentially unmodified to a digital sound card.
Never mind that anything I'm listening to a CD on which can't play MP3s is generally going to be a low-quality reproduction device like a car or a portable boom box, so any minor artifacts wouldn't matter.
A lot of people on the Internet are, in fact, dicks. I just hate Verizon.
I don't know enough about kiddie porn to know if most "consumers" are using a small set of existing data, or if it's more new one-off stuff. If there's really a small core set that lots of people have, well, I guess the database would be useful. If it doesn't work that way, I'd question the usefulness of such a database. I guess it'd be a quick way to catch a few people.
I don't back the encoded files up because I have the originals on CD (same with all the DVDs I have ripped for my media systems to use). I do back up my database (both the .cddb directory that the ripper updates and the MySQL database created by the app). But I'm not sure how this database might actually map to the files. It can't use checksums, since the id3 tags will differ and therefore the files will differ. It can't use the id3 tags, since that's the data we're talking about backing up. I'm genuinely curious how you're managing your mp3 files in a way that separates storage of the metadata from the actual encoded music. With the .cddb folder, hopefully most of them will rip more closely to correctly next time, but I know some of the custom stuff (album art, "various artists" compilation albums, etc) won't be stored in cddb-friendly files that any ripper I know of will handle...
I know! OMG I was about to just go nuts a moment ago, replying to a couple of comments. Click in box, magic scroll text box off screen. Scroll back down, click in box, magic scroll off screen. Grrr.
I thought it was a new thing because, again somewhat ironically, I read and reply to comments way less than I used to. :) And I've browsed with my threshold set to 1 (or, sometimes, 2) for years now, so maybe I don't notice the frequency because of the combination of those two things (read less, set threshold high)...
Agreed - the "throw away anything you haven't used recently" rule is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but would lead to a society where we don't learn anything from our history, and thus continually repeat... Oh, wait.
Yes - it took me several weeks to re-rip my several-hundred-CD collection when a drive failed last time (on RAID now to prevent that). I guess people who think this is easy have like 25 CDs and they're all single-disk sets from major artists with 100% accurate id3 info.
This is probably the best comment I've read on Slashdot this week.
Which is why I use 320Kbps VBR mp3. Not only is it proven multiple times to be not distinguishable from the CD in double-blind tests, it also saves a lot of space over FLAC and actually works in pretty much any audio player anywhere that plays anything more than just straight CDs. Compatibility is more important to me than a purely theoretical difference in sound quality. I would be happy to read a reference which objectively compares FLAC to lame mp3 with the psychoacoustic optimizations turned on and the quality cranked up in VBR mode, though. :)
What people can actually distinguish better and which is harder for any compression (or sampling, eve) to deal with is stereo separation. These arguments regularly overlook it, but the human ear can distinguish incredibly minute differences in timing between the left and right ear. The sampling frequency has to be very high to capture the sub-millisecond differences that even a shitty ear can distinguish. Frequency range is easy; stereo separation is hard.
What? So someone has a database of every kiddie porn file ever created? How in the hell did they create / do they maintain *that*?
"Overrated" does work. And seriously - in an article about someone deploying seafaring weaponized lasers, how do a few people *not* make a reference to one of the most memorable scenes from a pretty popular movie? I'll bet there's be a lot less griping if someone designed a cyborg suit / implant / whatever and people started making reference to Jean-Luke saying "I am Locutus" and a bazillion "resistance is futile" notes, even though that's *at least* as tired.
The difference with trolling, at the risk of feeding an ironic troll, is that trolls are intentionally trying to drive the topic off in the weeds or get a negative reaction in as much volume as possible. The above shark/frikkin' laser reference is pretty clearly just someone making a joke that they probably legitimately felt was funny. Lots of people just aren't as funny as they think they are, but they're not intentionally being dicks. More than likely, they just didn't read all the other comments - which is a separate problem in and of itself. A "duplicate comment" mod would perhaps be worthwhile, but that would require much more work on the part of people with mod points - and I can guarantee that I don't work that hard when I get them. :)
Speaking of curiosity, do you really think that you're the only person who has ever had a bad experience with Verizon? I directly work (on the same team) with two others who are passionate about their hate for Verizon. I could not care less about harassing you; I legitimately hate Verizon and was sharing that I also hate Verizon. Sure, I didn't disown my mother, but I've made the threat. And I don't have a dog. But the other parts are all true (hint - I hate Sony and Microsoft, but less than Verizon). My experience with Verizon cost me personally $1700, in fact. How much did they screw you? Less, I'll bet, but maybe not. They didn't know that I was in charge of IT at my employer at the time, and within a couple of months we had amazingly found a better deal on our leased lines; the T1s at the office and the ISDN carriers at the remote workers' locations; everything was switched away from Verizon. So I did get the money back and more; it just didn't go back into my pocket.
In any event, you may want to go talk to Copernicus about what everything revolves around. ;)
You can't just say "well, they asked me for money and I gave it to them?" Really? So I have to stop saying that the cashier at the grocer is coercing me to give them money in exchange for goods and/or services?
Now come on, there's like 6 keys - and it's not like you can just look at the locks in Wal Mart and buy them all for about $15. Oh, wait...
Ill try to photochop up a pitcher of that happening.