Playing a vinyl album requires taking it out of its cover, placing it carefully on the turn table, maybe dusting it off with a special long brush and lifting the arm up to the vinyl(or use some automatic system you rich person you). Then you might sit there with the open jacket covers that are almost as large as a 24 inch monitor and liste to it front to back.
That process does give the experience some gravity, as opposed to flipping a piece of shiny plastic in to an open tray of a CD/DVD/Blueray player, or a drive in a PC for ripping.
Then there's the unfortunate tendency to limit the dynamic range of what are mixes with much higher fidelity than those thirty years ago to such a degree that the tracks are often so noisy and distorted that people complain about fatigue setting in. Vinyl records have to be mastered to within the limits of the medium, which does not permit such harsh treatment of the material as is possible on CDs.
The vinyl as a medium is vastly inferior in quite a few ways, but the material does tend to be mastered differently for it, which is often much more pleasant.
Thankfully we're starting to see some trends in the opposite direction in which digital recordings are mastered without the harsh treatments. HDTracks.com for example sells some of those tracks, like a remaster of Green Day's American Idiot album that has actual drum transients, instead of clipped dog shit.
As a professional recording, editing and mixing engineer, all I can say is NO THANK YOU.
For those who place a premium on scratchy, error-prone, expensive, one-time and short recordings this might be neat. There are lots of reasons we started using tape in the late 40s and early 50s in the music recording industry, and loads of reasons we're recording digitally now.
Quality, speed, cost. A direct-to-disc recording system ain't it on any of those fronts.
I'm a trained mixer with many thousands of hours of listening experience. Here's my record of telling apart 320 kbps MP3 files from the original CD audio, which is what losslessly compressed audio is as well :
Once, in a specific enviornment.
The material was high dynamic range mix of orchestral and eletronic music. Well mastered IMHO and pleasant to listen to over longer periods of time. I listened to it in an accoustically well-treated room that housed the working gear of a composer and music mixer. The speaker system was a set of professional monitoring speakers, namely two Dynaudio BM15A full range speakers. These are the kinds of speakers the folks use to make the material all you audiophiles listen to.
I didn't expect to be able to tell a difference but I did. It wasn't very subtle but in this excellent listening environment with an excellent reproduction system, it could be heard by trained ears. I seriously doubt I could say the same for material with the dynamic range of a sine wave, as is the case so often today.
For most material, I'd only trust a proper ABX test, but I do not see the point in doing so. It's just one batch of material I listened to and it's pointless to argue when so much music is beyond screwed in terms of distortion and dynamic range.
Also, it's a fact that most rooms people listen to music in are anything from ok to bathroom-terrible. The accoustics are by far the biggest influence you'll ever encounter in a listening environment. Even in a good environment or with very good headphones does it take training to even detect those differences when comparing the original audio to a 320 kbps MP3 encode of it.
Really, there's nothing to gain from this but "I feel better using Flac".
The second I buy a new game it's worthless ? Fuck that.
Also, no more lending and borrowing between friends ? Fuck that.
Folks who depend on used games to play anything at all can stay with last generation consoles ? Fuck that.
How many sales of consoles and ultimately games, online service subscriptions and advertisement would that cost them ? What do you think Microsoft ? Fuck that ?
Ah, it's probably just a "we can do it too" thing they came up with to get any patent disputes out the way early on, should Sony start crying about its patent. Nobody in their right mind will do that to the sale of physical media.
At some point we will have to deal with selling digital assets called games, just like we do right now with hats in TF2.
We sound mixers have been waiting for something like this to happen forever. At last there is a reasonably well made standard of measuring loudness, and it's based on plenty of testing and tuning. That's the ITU-R BS.1770 standard.
In a sense, it's like Replaygain for all those audio players like Foobar2000, and Sound Check for ITunes.
It's loudness normalization. In fact, the Replaygain scanner in Foobar2000 now uses the EBU R128 recommendation which is based on ITU-R BS.1770 standard.
For more information check out this introduction to loudness normalization by Florian Camerer, chairman of the PLOUD group of the EBU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuEtQqC-Sqo
And yeah, I'm a professional re-recording mixer and sound editor. I love this stuff, since it rewards good sound and punishes crappy, overcompressed stuff.
I edit and mix sound for a living and have done so for 20 years. My hearing slowly degrades and I try to keep it well protected so it doesn't go any faster than it needs to. Apart from that my training and experience is the only thing different from anyone less experienced listener. I've had my share of blunders like a few night at clubs without ear protection. For the last 20 years I've had less than twenty such nights, but it was enough to do some damage, so I've got a drip here and there in my testing curve.
A few years back a friend of mine had a bunch of teenagers in his studio where he records bands. He played them a few test tones. A quarter of them couldn't hear above 15kHz, some even 14kHz. I need to crank up 17kHz very high so I can still hear it, but these kids could hear less than I can now.
Some of them started crying. Some wouldn't believe it. All of them were quite shocked.
If you don't protect your hearing, you'll be a cripple twenty to fourty years earlier than you need to. A pack of one-time use foam protection knobs or whatever they're called where you live is less than a latte at your favorite coffee shop. You just need to handle this in a smart way, read up about it and take comon sense precautions. Or be crippled.
This is a big slap in the face of existing PC communitys of CoD2 and CoDM.
They're banking on us spending money up front to then have them give us maybe something similar to what we want. Ok, fair enough, but trusting someone with their money that haven't been open enough with their goals so far is a little icky.
JaredOfEuropa, I play BF2 as well as a casual gamer, but I frequent the same servers most of the time for important reasons. One of those are the maps and gamestyles, the other is the crowd I meet there.
In no way can CoD MW2 compete with its lousy punk-ass system that puts the private servers in to home-users with their crappy upload pipes, thereby constraining player numbers dramatically and breaking performance big time.
This is the bad aspect of console gaming they're pushing, and they are definitely barking up the wrong community tree with this.
IMHO they need to let people do what they want to do. Their matchmaking is all fine and dandy, but let people do dedicated servers as WELL, even if they need to register and checksum-verify all their files when each starts or something.
I can't believe they're this dumb. Some games that depend on server infrastructure provided by the publisher/developer have a long multiplayer life these days, ON CONSOLES!! I'll wait a few more days but if IW doesn't come up with a better answer or a promise to deliver dedicated servers AS WELL, then I and a couple of people I know will cancel their preorders and just forget about this game.
Getting technical here. The L2 does not clip the material. Most mastering folks don't even use that plugin beyond its inbuilt dither. Most limiting is done with outboard analog gear. Some AD(Analog to Digital) converters still sound good when you overdrive their converters, so that's used too.
I find most of todays music unlistenable above the loudness level of a relaxed conversation. I skipped the last two Prince albums, of whom I have been a fan for almost 20 years, because they sound ugly and distorted. You can turn up his older albums and enjoy. You cannot do the same with todays material. Same goes for most other records.
I will be very interested to see how this pans out.
The new production even contains chip-music instruments. The other way round it would seem obvious indeed, but will anyone place value in a chip tune by an internationally unknown musician, just because it sounds so different and has no vocals ?
So when folks here ask themselves : "The chip tune is so different to the Furtado track, so why should the Finnish guy complain?" , ask yourself if you'd be saying the same thing about someone making money off a highly recognizable music of an Elton John or Green Day song. Fame means nothing in copyright law.
As one of the developers of TC and TC:Elite, I can only say that many of us made this game because we did not like certain aspects of Counterstrike. While I do play an occasional match of CS:Source(it looks good and sounds alright), my favorite games are True Combat and True Combat Elite, because in those games it is a challenge to get the better of your opponent.
Crosshairs no longer tickle my fancy. It completly destroys the immersion for me, which is why I'm a fan of COD2 as well, though not for multiplayer.
The 0.49 release on Friday September 29th will introduce some classic CTF, as well as refine a lot of game mechanics, like aiming, moving and free climbing(on boxes and other stuff within a certain height).
Oh and btw. It looks damn good as well. Check out the teaser video if you don't believe it.
You're right about advertisement and most CD releases.
Movies are another matter however. The sound folks face several problems there. First there's the money/time issue. Give us(yeah I'm one of them) more time and we'll give you a more refined mix. Next there's the director, who isn't always the best influence unfortunatly. Some folks realy work WITH their re-recording mixers, some only let them work FOR them. In many cases it is the director who demands a louder mix or scene, usualy not the re-recording mixer.
I'd like to point out that most of the Sound-Oscar winning films tend to have balanced mixes that only become loud when they need to be, while avoiding hurting you. Lord Of The Rings : Return of The King is one such mix. The Incredibles is another. All smooth with little to no hurt in them.
Then there's the theater folk, who apparently do not keep to standards. There is something to be said about protecting your customers from bad sound. There is also the issue of playing the material as the re-recording mixers and the director intended you to hear it.
Mixing is an art and thus we'll never get a safe and comfy situation. Market pressures usualy apply to advertising(ads are limited to a 'loudness level' of 83 dB SPL A-weighted btw) and pop music, but not to movies. Those are artistic descisions, so vote with your wallet. If your buddy told you that film hurt him, don't watch it. Write about it in blogs and newspapers. Speak out.
I like to mix stuff so as not to hurt the audience, but to please it(and myself).
GTA is certainly comical in its violence from my POV.
Two things about Manhunt concern me. Two things I am not shure about yet.
First is the gameplay. Level Design, gameplay mechanics and carefully crafted challenge curves are so hard to get right. Sneaking around is neat and all,but what else can our character do. In Thief2 I cherished being able to shoot an arrow in to a wooden beam or ceiling and climb up in to a shadow to hide from my enemies. I don't want to discover all the gameplay possibilities of a game in one day. That's why I liked DeusEx, Thief1&2 and GTA3&/VC so much.
Second is, how mundane is the violence going to be when you're treated to a film viewers kind of perspective of the killings ? How much will this point the finger at us, saying "you want this! Now you're getting it! Do you like it?!". You can always throw some blame to the bad guy of the game, but actualy it's you.
I just wonder how well it's going to work in the game.
If it works well in the game, it serves a purpose. If it does that, it's fine by me.
I saw a realistic depiction of war violence in former Yugoslavia(a Soldier movie with Denis Quaid) last night. That stuff was disturbing. I doubt anything they come up in Manhunt will reach beyond horror or thriller movies. It's nowhere near anything realistic, and to be frank, I don't fucking want anything that realistic.
I heard they're gonna have plastic bags as weapons in Manhunt. That's one that makes me queasy. Let's hope it's a good game above everything else.
The first time I blasted a grunt with a shotgun scared the hell out of me. *BOOOOM!* Splat!
Dark goddam corners, some horned demos... well that was ok.
Then the damn Cyberdemon. I'd never been so afraid playing a computer/video game. It was great ! Now I enjoy frightening games like Undying. I cherished Resident Evil 2(my first and last of that series).
You can say that Doom desensitized me a bit, which I consider a good thing. I react with much more control and calm to serious situations now. At least in games:).
That game blew action right in my face. I love games like Zelda 3, Dungeon Master, Nemesis-style sidescroller shoot'em ups and jump&runs, but this sure was the biggest surprise. We all love ID for it(and I pronounce that eye-dee!).
Next on my list are Mario64 and Halflife. Thief sparked me too.
I work on post of a daily soap, and we have lots of music coming off of CDs.
Two and half years ago we were still transferring stuff via digital outputs in to our workstation(custom rig-not a PC or Mac), before we moved to Protools. Since then we've been ripping out music to HD, which a great time saver.
For a year now we've had the occasional copy protected CD. Some are ripped just fine, others let the damn machine crash.
By now almost every new CD is protected. We are starting to lose time over this and our time is damn expensive. At some point in time, when we have to tranfer too many tracks with 1xspeed again the post crew will put forward a proposal to ignore copy-protected(rather prohibited) CDs. Legally these things aren't even CDs and I'm very curious to know what'll happen, should our production company contact the Label people with the request for unprotected material.
I don't suppose they'll drop stuff from copy protected CDs, but I shure wish they would. These bloody things are getting on my nerves and at some point I'd just like to drop material that comes on non-standard, i.e. faulty media.
A different business model is shure to creep up, should ads realy get the stake.
So what would the face of culture look like ?
We'd be swapping content ? Would it be freely available ? Would we have to pay for everything, because some Orwellian boneheads got their way ?
It isn't unlikely that P2P would be big and that product placement would take off in popular shows. Live streams via the net is another possibility, with analogue recordings to digital VCRs at the very least.
So I'd say the playing field will just move elsewhere and so will the ads. Watch shows when you want, how you want, as often as you want, but see lots of product placement. Perhaps TVs will be only up for rent:).
Tony
German Goverment handing out GNU Privacy Projekt
on
Can GnuPG Deliver?
·
· Score: 1
There is a good frontend for Windows and Linux and the German government was handing out packages of this project, featured at
http://www.gnupp.org
at the CEBIT with discussion and help from officials on how to use and why.
Hey, when's the last time any government did that ? They're actualy paying people to develop this and it's all GPL'ed.
do the charcters on the American version of DBZ swear ?
They shure do in the German dub. A shame I never saw those nude episodes. I only joined the fray a year ago. On German TV Son-Goku has just given up in the fight again Cell.
One funny moment in Metal Gear Solid 2 on that note(the game just got released here), is Raiden covering his crotch at all time:). Talk about vulnurable ? It was funny, that's all.
Try http://www.custom-consoles.com/ .
They build a bunch of neat cases that surround your entire PC. ZIPs up noise nicely I hear. Audio mastering engineers use their cases.
On the other hand, building your own case isn't easy. A basic understanding in accoustics and materials is required, not to forget some carpenting skills for actual construction.
Or go ask some accoustics guys that build sound studios. Noise is not allowed to leave such places in Germany (25 dB SPL limit - that's a sleepers breathing noise).
Tony
The Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse. The drivers work beatifully on the MacOS, but it's a 3-button mouse all the way anyhow.
And with a new 2.4 kernel, USB mice are supported. Instant happiness!
Tony
I watched Akira at a cinema 1990, a german dub. Since germans dub everything it was good and I watched it another two times. I liked the american dub a little more, but it was very inaccurate on lib movement, sometimes missing out parts of characters completly.
I will be thrilled to see this classic transferred to DVD(anamorphic please!), that hopefully does this cinemascope film justice.
And most of all, lets hope they make it a region-free DVD.
Here in Germany you are allowed to copy music and video for personal use(from rented stuff for example), for friends or for family.
MP3's are handled the same way, though the music industry won't ever tell you this here. They just call all copying piracy as usual.
It is however illegal to publicaly offer and distribute them. It is not illegal to download them however. I reckon the same applies to Divx stuff, but I'm not too shure about that. If you rent a DVD, you'r ok to copy the thing, but I don't know about circumvention of copyprotection.
Check in to planetquake.com/sda
I remember the run well. Nightmare mode and lots and lots of rocket boosts.
Yeah, here:
0:32 Robert Axelsson in Nightmare mode.
http://www.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?sda/nightmare/ e1m8_032.zip
Tony
(Qdq audio head)
Slashdot Mirror
Playing a vinyl album requires taking it out of its cover, placing it carefully on the turn table, maybe dusting it off with a special long brush and lifting the arm up to the vinyl(or use some automatic system you rich person you). Then you might sit there with the open jacket covers that are almost as large as a 24 inch monitor and liste to it front to back.
That process does give the experience some gravity, as opposed to flipping a piece of shiny plastic in to an open tray of a CD/DVD/Blueray player, or a drive in a PC for ripping.
Then there's the unfortunate tendency to limit the dynamic range of what are mixes with much higher fidelity than those thirty years ago to such a degree that the tracks are often so noisy and distorted that people complain about fatigue setting in. Vinyl records have to be mastered to within the limits of the medium, which does not permit such harsh treatment of the material as is possible on CDs.
The vinyl as a medium is vastly inferior in quite a few ways, but the material does tend to be mastered differently for it, which is often much more pleasant.
Thankfully we're starting to see some trends in the opposite direction in which digital recordings are mastered without the harsh treatments. HDTracks.com for example sells some of those tracks, like a remaster of Green Day's American Idiot album that has actual drum transients, instead of clipped dog shit.
As a professional recording, editing and mixing engineer, all I can say is NO THANK YOU.
For those who place a premium on scratchy, error-prone, expensive, one-time and short recordings this might be neat. There are lots of reasons we started using tape in the late 40s and early 50s in the music recording industry, and loads of reasons we're recording digitally now.
Quality, speed, cost. A direct-to-disc recording system ain't it on any of those fronts.
I'm a trained mixer with many thousands of hours of listening experience. Here's my record of telling apart 320 kbps MP3 files from the original CD audio, which is what losslessly compressed audio is as well :
Once, in a specific enviornment.
The material was high dynamic range mix of orchestral and eletronic music. Well mastered IMHO and pleasant to listen to over longer periods of time. I listened to it in an accoustically well-treated room that housed the working gear of a composer and music mixer. The speaker system was a set of professional monitoring speakers, namely two Dynaudio BM15A full range speakers. These are the kinds of speakers the folks use to make the material all you audiophiles listen to.
I didn't expect to be able to tell a difference but I did. It wasn't very subtle but in this excellent listening environment with an excellent reproduction system, it could be heard by trained ears. I seriously doubt I could say the same for material with the dynamic range of a sine wave, as is the case so often today.
For most material, I'd only trust a proper ABX test, but I do not see the point in doing so. It's just one batch of material I listened to and it's pointless to argue when so much music is beyond screwed in terms of distortion and dynamic range.
Also, it's a fact that most rooms people listen to music in are anything from ok to bathroom-terrible. The accoustics are by far the biggest influence you'll ever encounter in a listening environment. Even in a good environment or with very good headphones does it take training to even detect those differences when comparing the original audio to a 320 kbps MP3 encode of it.
Really, there's nothing to gain from this but "I feel better using Flac".
This is pretty much my thinking as well.
The second I buy a new game it's worthless ? Fuck that.
Also, no more lending and borrowing between friends ? Fuck that.
Folks who depend on used games to play anything at all can stay with last generation consoles ? Fuck that.
How many sales of consoles and ultimately games, online service subscriptions and advertisement would that cost them ? What do you think Microsoft ? Fuck that ?
Ah, it's probably just a "we can do it too" thing they came up with to get any patent disputes out the way early on, should Sony start crying about its patent. Nobody in their right mind will do that to the sale of physical media.
At some point we will have to deal with selling digital assets called games, just like we do right now with hats in TF2.
We sound mixers have been waiting for something like this to happen forever. At last there is a reasonably well made standard of measuring loudness, and it's based on plenty of testing and tuning. That's the ITU-R BS.1770 standard.
In a sense, it's like Replaygain for all those audio players like Foobar2000, and Sound Check for ITunes.
It's loudness normalization. In fact, the Replaygain scanner in Foobar2000 now uses the EBU R128 recommendation which is based on ITU-R BS.1770 standard.
For more information check out this introduction to loudness normalization by Florian Camerer, chairman of the PLOUD group of the EBU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuEtQqC-Sqo
And yeah, I'm a professional re-recording mixer and sound editor. I love this stuff, since it rewards good sound and punishes crappy, overcompressed stuff.
I edit and mix sound for a living and have done so for 20 years. My hearing slowly degrades and I try to keep it well protected so it doesn't go any faster than it needs to. Apart from that my training and experience is the only thing different from anyone less experienced listener. I've had my share of blunders like a few night at clubs without ear protection. For the last 20 years I've had less than twenty such nights, but it was enough to do some damage, so I've got a drip here and there in my testing curve.
A few years back a friend of mine had a bunch of teenagers in his studio where he records bands. He played them a few test tones. A quarter of them couldn't hear above 15kHz, some even 14kHz. I need to crank up 17kHz very high so I can still hear it, but these kids could hear less than I can now.
Some of them started crying. Some wouldn't believe it. All of them were quite shocked.
If you don't protect your hearing, you'll be a cripple twenty to fourty years earlier than you need to. A pack of one-time use foam protection knobs or whatever they're called where you live is less than a latte at your favorite coffee shop. You just need to handle this in a smart way, read up about it and take comon sense precautions. Or be crippled.
This is a big slap in the face of existing PC communitys of CoD2 and CoDM.
They're banking on us spending money up front to then have them give us maybe something similar to what we want. Ok, fair enough, but trusting someone with their money that haven't been open enough with their goals so far is a little icky.
JaredOfEuropa, I play BF2 as well as a casual gamer, but I frequent the same servers most of the time for important reasons. One of those are the maps and gamestyles, the other is the crowd I meet there.
In no way can CoD MW2 compete with its lousy punk-ass system that puts the private servers in to home-users with their crappy upload pipes, thereby constraining player numbers dramatically and breaking performance big time.
This is the bad aspect of console gaming they're pushing, and they are definitely barking up the wrong community tree with this.
IMHO they need to let people do what they want to do. Their matchmaking is all fine and dandy, but let people do dedicated servers as WELL, even if they need to register and checksum-verify all their files when each starts or something.
I can't believe they're this dumb. Some games that depend on server infrastructure provided by the publisher/developer have a long multiplayer life these days, ON CONSOLES!! I'll wait a few more days but if IW doesn't come up with a better answer or a promise to deliver dedicated servers AS WELL, then I and a couple of people I know will cancel their preorders and just forget about this game.
Oh lord. Not a lot of scene folks around, are there.
If you missed it, for video versions recorded at the party digitally(via HDMI I believe) in 2300, 4000 and 8000 kbps, all AVI XVid, go to :
http://scene.org/
and search for 'elevated' . Presto. Lots of mirrors. High speed. Have fun!
Getting technical here. The L2 does not clip the material. Most mastering folks don't even use that plugin beyond its inbuilt dither. Most limiting is done with outboard analog gear. Some AD(Analog to Digital) converters still sound good when you overdrive their converters, so that's used too.
I find most of todays music unlistenable above the loudness level of a relaxed conversation. I skipped the last two Prince albums, of whom I have been a fan for almost 20 years, because they sound ugly and distorted. You can turn up his older albums and enjoy. You cannot do the same with todays material. Same goes for most other records.
I will be very interested to see how this pans out.
The new production even contains chip-music instruments. The other way round it would seem obvious indeed, but will anyone place value in a chip tune by an internationally unknown musician, just because it sounds so different and has no vocals ?
So when folks here ask themselves : "The chip tune is so different to the Furtado track, so why should the Finnish guy complain?" , ask yourself if you'd be saying the same thing about someone making money off a highly recognizable music of an Elton John or Green Day song. Fame means nothing in copyright law.
As one of the developers of TC and TC:Elite, I can only say that many of us made this game because we did not like certain aspects of Counterstrike. While I do play an occasional match of CS:Source(it looks good and sounds alright), my favorite games are True Combat and True Combat Elite, because in those games it is a challenge to get the better of your opponent.
Crosshairs no longer tickle my fancy. It completly destroys the immersion for me, which is why I'm a fan of COD2 as well, though not for multiplayer.
The 0.49 release on Friday September 29th will introduce some classic CTF, as well as refine a lot of game mechanics, like aiming, moving and free climbing(on boxes and other stuff within a certain height).
Oh and btw. It looks damn good as well. Check out the teaser video if you don't believe it.
You're right about advertisement and most CD releases.
Movies are another matter however. The sound folks face several problems there. First there's the money/time issue. Give us(yeah I'm one of them) more time and we'll give you a more refined mix. Next there's the director, who isn't always the best influence unfortunatly. Some folks realy work WITH their re-recording mixers, some only let them work FOR them. In many cases it is the director who demands a louder mix or scene, usualy not the re-recording mixer.
I'd like to point out that most of the Sound-Oscar winning films tend to have balanced mixes that only become loud when they need to be, while avoiding hurting you. Lord Of The Rings : Return of The King is one such mix. The Incredibles is another. All smooth with little to no hurt in them.
Then there's the theater folk, who apparently do not keep to standards. There is something to be said about protecting your customers from bad sound. There is also the issue of playing the material as the re-recording mixers and the director intended you to hear it.
Mixing is an art and thus we'll never get a safe and comfy situation. Market pressures usualy apply to advertising(ads are limited to a 'loudness level' of 83 dB SPL A-weighted btw) and pop music, but not to movies. Those are artistic descisions, so vote with your wallet. If your buddy told you that film hurt him, don't watch it. Write about it in blogs and newspapers. Speak out.
I like to mix stuff so as not to hurt the audience, but to please it(and myself).
success of course.
GTA is certainly comical in its violence from my POV.
Two things about Manhunt concern me. Two things I am not shure about yet.
First is the gameplay. Level Design, gameplay mechanics and carefully crafted challenge curves are so hard to get right.
Sneaking around is neat and all,but what else can our character do. In Thief2 I cherished being able to shoot an arrow in to a wooden beam or ceiling and climb up in to a shadow to hide from my enemies.
I don't want to discover all the gameplay possibilities of a game in one day. That's why I liked DeusEx, Thief1&2 and GTA3&/VC so much.
Second is, how mundane is the violence going to be when you're treated to a film viewers kind of perspective of the killings ? How much will this point the finger at us, saying "you want this! Now you're getting it! Do you like it?!". You can always throw some blame to the bad guy of the game, but actualy it's you.
I just wonder how well it's going to work in the game.
If it works well in the game, it serves a purpose. If it does that, it's fine by me.
I saw a realistic depiction of war violence in former Yugoslavia(a Soldier movie with Denis Quaid) last night. That stuff was disturbing. I doubt anything they come up in Manhunt will reach beyond horror or thriller movies. It's nowhere near anything realistic, and to be frank, I don't fucking want anything that realistic.
I heard they're gonna have plastic bags as weapons in Manhunt. That's one that makes me queasy. Let's hope it's a good game above everything else.
This is most definitly the game for me too.
:).
The first time I blasted a grunt with a shotgun scared the hell out of me. *BOOOOM!* Splat!
Dark goddam corners, some horned demos... well that was ok.
Then the damn Cyberdemon. I'd never been so afraid playing a computer/video game. It was great !
Now I enjoy frightening games like Undying. I cherished Resident Evil 2(my first and last of that series).
You can say that Doom desensitized me a bit, which I consider a good thing. I react with much more control and calm to serious situations now. At least in games
That game blew action right in my face. I love games like Zelda 3, Dungeon Master, Nemesis-style sidescroller shoot'em ups and jump&runs, but this sure was the biggest surprise. We all love ID for it(and I pronounce that eye-dee!).
Next on my list are Mario64 and Halflife. Thief sparked me too.
I work on post of a daily soap, and we have lots of music coming off of CDs.
Two and half years ago we were still transferring stuff via digital outputs in to our workstation(custom rig-not a PC or Mac), before we moved to Protools. Since then we've been ripping out music to HD, which a great time saver.
For a year now we've had the occasional copy protected CD. Some are ripped just fine, others let the damn machine crash.
By now almost every new CD is protected. We are starting to lose time over this and our time is damn expensive. At some point in time, when we have to tranfer too many tracks with 1xspeed again the post crew will put forward a proposal to ignore copy-protected(rather prohibited) CDs. Legally these things aren't even CDs and I'm very curious to know what'll happen, should our production company contact the Label people with the request for unprotected material.
I don't suppose they'll drop stuff from copy protected CDs, but I shure wish they would. These bloody things are getting on my nerves and at some point I'd just like to drop material that comes on non-standard, i.e. faulty media.
A different business model is shure to creep up, should ads realy get the stake.
So what would the face of culture look like ?
We'd be swapping content ? Would it be freely available ? Would we have to pay for everything, because some Orwellian boneheads got their way ?
It isn't unlikely that P2P would be big and that product placement would take off in popular shows. Live streams via the net is another possibility, with analogue recordings to digital VCRs at the very least.
So I'd say the playing field will just move elsewhere and so will the ads. Watch shows when you want, how you want, as often as you want, but see lots of product placement. Perhaps TVs will be only up for rent :).
Tony
There is a good frontend for Windows and Linux and the German government was handing out packages of this project, featured at
http://www.gnupp.org at the CEBIT with discussion and help from officials on how to use and why.
Hey, when's the last time any government did that ? They're actualy paying people to develop this and it's all GPL'ed.
And that frontend ain't bad at all. Check it out.
Tony
What I'd like to know is,
:). Talk about vulnurable ? It was funny, that's all.
do the charcters on the American version of DBZ swear ?
They shure do in the German dub. A shame I never saw those nude episodes. I only joined the fray a year ago. On German TV Son-Goku has just given up in the fight again Cell.
One funny moment in Metal Gear Solid 2 on that note(the game just got released here), is Raiden covering his crotch at all time
The Thread:h ol d=-1&commentsort=1&mode=thread&pid=0
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25942&thres
The singular reply from that Thread for the those without patience:)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25942&cid=2
Tony
Try http://www.custom-consoles.com/ . They build a bunch of neat cases that surround your entire PC. ZIPs up noise nicely I hear. Audio mastering engineers use their cases. On the other hand, building your own case isn't easy. A basic understanding in accoustics and materials is required, not to forget some carpenting skills for actual construction. Or go ask some accoustics guys that build sound studios. Noise is not allowed to leave such places in Germany (25 dB SPL limit - that's a sleepers breathing noise). Tony
The Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse. The drivers work beatifully on the MacOS, but it's a 3-button mouse all the way anyhow. And with a new 2.4 kernel, USB mice are supported. Instant happiness! Tony
I watched Akira at a cinema 1990, a german dub. Since germans dub everything it was good and I watched it another two times. I liked the american dub a little more, but it was very inaccurate on lib movement, sometimes missing out parts of characters completly.
I will be thrilled to see this classic transferred to DVD(anamorphic please!), that hopefully does this cinemascope film justice.
And most of all, lets hope they make it a region-free DVD.
Tony
MP3's are handled the same way, though the music industry won't ever tell you this here. They just call all copying piracy as usual.
It is however illegal to publicaly offer and distribute them. It is not illegal to download them however. I reckon the same applies to Divx stuff, but I'm not too shure about that. If you rent a DVD, you'r ok to copy the thing, but I don't know about circumvention of copyprotection.
Tony
It's worth noting that in Germany copyrights cannot be sold, only licenses can be issued. The copyright will always remain with the author.
The companies there reserve the right to publish in certain medias though.
Check in to planetquake.com/sda I remember the run well. Nightmare mode and lots and lots of rocket boosts. Yeah, here: 0:32 Robert Axelsson in Nightmare mode. http://www.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?sda/nightmare/ e1m8_032.zip
Tony
(Qdq audio head)