Well, I disagree. Parent mentioned that "your ears cannot hear a difference";
Well you seem to be disagreeing with something I haven't yet said...
Whether you can hear it or not is besides the point. In fact, few people will be able to hear the difference between the analog and digital version anyhow. I have just trying to make the point that digital output isn't necessarily lossless as so many people seem to believe, and the benefits of digital instead of analog in this case are probably nil.
As long the errors are outside our range of hearing, or of a kind we can't percieve (phase...) there is, for musical purposes, no difference.
Resampling applies to the full waveform, so it's not just affeting sub or super sonic sounds. Whether you can hear it or not depends on how good your ears are. It's certainly possible for someone with good ears to hear it.
The reason this is so bad is that this guy's life has just been turned upside down
Yes, well, getting the wrong coffee will turn some people's life upside down. All I've read has been minor.
and he's done nothing wrong.
Debatable, and irrelevant anyhow.
The FBI have obtained an over-reaching search warrant (did you actually read what they were allowed to seize?)
Yes I did. They were allowed to seieze all computer material, and any airline materials. That's very specific and relevant. How is that overreaching at all?
at 2am in the morning and then gone straight around and literally broken the front door down,
The warrant was signed at 2am, but there likely did the search several hours later in the day. In any case, you have no evidence either way.
And smashing "the glass on the front door" is a hell of a long way from your claim of "broken the front door down". But I guess you don't really like nasty little "FACTS" to get in the way of your alarmist rantings.
ransacked Chris' flat and taken whatever the hell they wanted.
He did say "ransacked", but I don't believe that at all. I suspect he simply doesn't know what that word actually means, and is just using it to describe them leaving a mess.
No, it's the facts. You just happen to be a flamer, so anything you don't like is flaimbait to you.
I, however, am going to avoid all of your flames and rantings.
Of course, I'm sure you're aware that switching lossy formats every time is going to slow this iterative decay down.
It will TRADE that delay for OTHER artifacts. Typically, discarding MUCH more of the audio, and now having the artifacts of both audio codecs.
Now consider your output WAV as a lossless source,
It isn't. It has lost most of the waveform. That's the whole reason why you don't call lossy codecs "lossless".
That high quality 320/Q0 MP3, like all the others you've seen, will sound no different.
No, it won't. Not at all. That you personally can't hear the difference can't possibly change that fact.
SPDIF has no predefined sample rate.
"SPDIF interface supports 3 standard sample rates: 48kHz, 44.1kHz and 32kHz. All other sample rates are impossible to transmit. Nevertheless, most audio cards support only 48kHz output." http://ac3filter.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10
Don't take my word for it. I know your $0.26 stock soundcard doesn't do that. Go buy a $10 SBLive and see for yourself.
I've been doing digital audio back when you were probably still in diapers. It's just a shame you don't know how stupid most all of your claims sound to anyone who knows anything about digital audio, PC soundcards, lossy audio encoding, etc.
the SPDIF "don't copy" flag might be set, and that may not work either. SPDIF does have a "don't copy" flag.
SCMS is entirely ignored by every soundcard I've ever come across (you've clearly never tried), so you'll have to try harder.
I know perfectly freaking well that I can record unDRM'd shit this way, why would I test that?
Well, for one thing, to prove that what your getting isn't anywhere near lossless, even though you think so.
I don't know what little goofball stuff happens in this process....
There's plenty you don't know, yet you feel the need to give advice on these very subjects.
but like I said to him, your pet Dolphin isn't going to know the difference,
This is just sad at this point. You're convinced of a lot of things you've clearly never checked on. What's your evidence for this statement, and don't even try to tell me it's your years of experience.
Your ears cannot hear a difference between the two, because there *technically is no difference*.
Ridiculous. 44.1 doesn't go into 48 evenly, and that's all there is to it. You can't just insert samples of "nothing" in a digital audio signal and get an audio stream.
No, it's not, as the new generation of Trusted Computing DRM will force the creation of a "Secure Audio Path". So your current soundcard will not be able to play files with the latest DRM and trusted cards will obviously include some kind of protection on the digital out bitstream.
Your argument eats itself...
When the switch to "Trusted" computing happens, you aren't going to be able to find any signed drivers for your USB device anyhow, so no output for you.
both the blue ray and the hd-dvd units can be bricked at will by the content providers,
Prove it.
Lots of idiots have been ranting on it, but it's almost certainly based upon one rather mundane sentence in a Reuters article, which is being widely speculated about, and probably completely misinterperated.
Whatever garbage MP3 files you have, re-encoding them as 320kbps/Q9 files isn't going to make them sound any worse to 99.9% of humans.
Actually, you're wrong there. Certainly encoding from lossless copies to MP3s at highest bitrate and -q0 (NOT Q9!) will sound perfect to most everybody.
HOWEVER, that is certainly NOT the case when repeatedly reencoding.
Use any of the best lossy audio codecs in the world, and encode with the highest possible quality, then decode and reencode the file 10 times... IT WILL SOUND LIKE COMPLETELY CRAP, no matter what.
The situation gets worse with every generation. However, even with only 2 rounds of encoding/decoding, the number of people who will hear distortions is much, much higher than 0.1%. I'd just guess it would be along the lines of 5% or so.
think about a soundcard with a digital out. That means, the bits get decoded and sent to the amp - if the amp (or whatever you plug the digital line into) can capture the bits, you've got a perfect/lossless rip
Unlikely. CDs are 44.1KHz, while soundcards usually require 48KHz, meaning at the very least, the audio is being resampled, which isn't a lossless process.
Volume controls and DSP's may change the bits somehow, and it will take playing-with to get it right... but it will produce satisfactory results once you do.
"Satisfactory" of course, but nowhere near perfect/lossless.
I would test this for people, but I own (and will always own) absolutely ZERO DRM content.
Files without DRM sound the same on the digital output as files without. This is a nonsense excuse.
It's pretty simple to build a fake digital speaker that just redirects the data to a fake digital line in.
Umm... it's even simpler to connect the digital out to the digital-in on my current soundcard.
You can use a digital hole and don't lose any quality at all.
This is just WRONG. You will still very likely lose some quality due to sampling rate conversion your soundcard automatically does.
And besides that, we're talking about re-encoding to MP3 afterwards, so the D/A and A/D conversion with a decent soundcard will be absolutely insignificant, next to the MP3 re-encoding. Only with lossless audio codecs would this matter at all.
If I had sufficent motivation, I certainly could give many more. However, spending time to prove that Wikipedia sucks isn't high on my list.
The information I looked-up on IV drugs on Wikipedia about a year ago was particularly awful. I guess not many wikipedia volunteers are chemists/pharmacists/doctors. But that should give you a place to start if you'd actually care to.
You would save ~12000 human years every year. Every year you would save ~150 lifes!
Only if every one of these people are sitting in-front of their computers, doing NOTHING at all while it boots up...
No looking over at the TV. No listening to music, news, etc. No thought processes of any kind... Otherwise, that time isn't really wasted, just deferred to things you would spend that much more time doing later.
Personally, I hit the power button, and walk away, both for boot-up and shutdown, and I suspect MANY others are the same.
Every millisecond speed increase a day of software everybody uses every day would save 12 lives!
I agree. That's why I continue to use the GTK1 versions of most of my software... Firefox, Sylpheed, XMMS, GIMP, Abiword, GAIM, etc. In a couple cases you have to use an older version with a couple features you might miss, but the benefits are overwhelmingly worth it. Not only do most apps* start up somewhere around 4X faster and far faster/more responsive (even on my 1.2GHz AMD with 1GB RAM) but IMHO, GTK1 looks much better...
A GTK2 page of text (eg. mail in Sylpheed) looks almost double-spaced, with copious ammounts of waste whitespace, while the GTK1 version fits much more on-screen, with exactly the same sized font. No themes affect this at all.
</RANT>
* Firefox excluded, it's only about 2+X faster start-up
But if I was looking for diamonds, diamond.com wouldn't be my first port of call - I'd be more likely to search, or go to a known brand name retailer online.
When you search for "diamonds" on Google, what do you think is going to be one of the first results? More importantly, if you see the first couple are http://www.geocities.com/diamonds , and the third is http://www.diamonds.com/ , which result do you think you'd follow?
In fact, it could be argued, they do BETTER - decent, unique brand names stick in consumer's minds far better than relying on a recycled word.
That only works if you're going to spend significant ammounts of money BUILDING brand recognition to begin with... Most don't.
more often than not it has an entry for whatever it is, and regardless fo whether it is of stellar quality or not it always has the basic details I need to sate my curiosity.
The problem is, Wikipedia manages to do this simple task UNBELIVABLY ineffeciently. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars, and probably BILLIONS of man-hours from dedicated volunteers, all to provide the lowest common denominator of general knowledge.
A handful of guys (lets say as a university project) could put up a $5/month static website with all the topics they've (quickly) researched, and do a BETTER job than Wikipedia.
A small car and a helicopter can both get me down the street, but which is the best tool for the job? Is the helicopter worth the very small benefit it provides?
Sure, you can edit a page into nonsense, but most pages are closely watched so such vandalism will be undone in short order.
Completely wrong.
BLATANT vandalism will be spotted. Bias and factual inaccuracies will be saved and propogated for many years to come. Particularly (but NOT ONLY) those in lower traffic areas, or those where only a small percentage of people are expert enough to spot the problem.
The majority of times I've seen Wikipedia cited on/. went something like this:
Alice: NTSC is 720x480. Bob: You're wrong. Wiki/NTSC says so. Alice: It was changed in 2003. Fixed.
And that's not even the obscure stuff like drug compounds, interactions, derivitives, etc., which I've found on Wikipedia wrong FAR more often than right, requiring the import of a whole book of an encyclopedia to really fix (not a minor typo, completely mistaken full articles).
It's not a perfect law, but if all new internet legislation made this much sense I'd feel quite a bit better about the US Congress.
The biggest problem with it, is that it provides little to no punishment for faulty DMCA notices. The onus is on you to argue with your ISP that they really shouldn't have taken-down your website (Google is one of the few companies that don't go overboard at the first DMCA notice and takedown), and the company gets to keep on doing it.
How this got stuck in the same bill as the "you can't decrypt the movies you bought" BS, I have no idea.
It's a dual-use bill. The original intention was really about stopping companies from selling things like satellite descramblers, it just happens that it was vague enough that it outlawed all fair use.
Wow, when you think of it that way, cable or satellite TV is a hell of a deal.
Only because iTunes is RIDICULOUSLY overpriced. If you have a full-sized satellite dish (NOT DishNet/DirecTV), it actually only costs you maybe $0.50/month per cable channel.
At that, I should be paying (a little over) $3.00/mo for EVERY I ever care to watch. And I would really only want to keep 2 channels if they charged something like $4 per-channel. As much as I like the Daily Show and Colbert Report, it isn't worth the money, and the rest of the manure on Comedy Central is utterly worthless.
When I upgrade to DTV, I'll probably dump cable, and upgrade my Netflix subscription. Akimbo (IPTV) has some real promise, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.
there is an awful layer of DRM which is even as evil as that the content providers can disable your shiny device via a key on the disk if your HDCP key was stolen or was/is in one of the stolen keys lists!
That makes it equally as bad as DVDs.
Remember, DVD-CSS has multiple keys too, it just happened that they were ALL cracked at almost exactly the same time.
it basically scrambles all the signals up to the tv,
As opposed to Macrovision...
Also expect a price hike once the format has killed off dvd,
Except why pay for something twice, than just keep the good format that you have now.
A) You don't have to. If you like low-res analog TV, keep it.
B) DTV/HDTV is a HUGE improvement in many more ways than just the 6X resolution that is most often hyped.
I'm not paying more money per channel I want in HD.
You don't have to pay anything per month for HDTV channels. Point your antenna in the right direction, and you'll get a perfect-quality HD picture, better quality than cable or satellite providers offer.
If I could buy HD movies for 10-20 bucks I might think about it, but currently they are more,
You could have said the same thing about DVDs just a few years ago. New formats always cost more for a while. The cycle will continue.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you seem to be disagreeing with something I haven't yet said...
Whether you can hear it or not is besides the point. In fact, few people will be able to hear the difference between the analog and digital version anyhow. I have just trying to make the point that digital output isn't necessarily lossless as so many people seem to believe, and the benefits of digital instead of analog in this case are probably nil.
Resampling applies to the full waveform, so it's not just affeting sub or super sonic sounds. Whether you can hear it or not depends on how good your ears are. It's certainly possible for someone with good ears to hear it.
Did you actually read the post I was replying to?
Nice try, but no. If you read the article, you'd see:
"This analysis deals with men who were born between 1915 and 1945,"
The "obesity epidemic" doesn't exactly apply to men in that age range.
Yes, well, getting the wrong coffee will turn some people's life upside down. All I've read has been minor.
Debatable, and irrelevant anyhow.
Yes I did. They were allowed to seieze all computer material, and any airline materials. That's very specific and relevant. How is that overreaching at all?
The warrant was signed at 2am, but there likely did the search several hours later in the day. In any case, you have no evidence either way.
And smashing "the glass on the front door" is a hell of a long way from your claim of "broken the front door down". But I guess you don't really like nasty little "FACTS" to get in the way of your alarmist rantings.
He did say "ransacked", but I don't believe that at all. I suspect he simply doesn't know what that word actually means, and is just using it to describe them leaving a mess.
No, it's the facts. You just happen to be a flamer, so anything you don't like is flaimbait to you.
I, however, am going to avoid all of your flames and rantings.
It will TRADE that delay for OTHER artifacts. Typically, discarding MUCH more of the audio, and now having the artifacts of both audio codecs.
It isn't. It has lost most of the waveform. That's the whole reason why you don't call lossy codecs "lossless".
No, it won't. Not at all. That you personally can't hear the difference can't possibly change that fact.
"SPDIF interface supports 3 standard sample rates: 48kHz, 44.1kHz and 32kHz. All other sample rates are impossible to transmit. Nevertheless, most audio cards support only 48kHz output."
http://ac3filter.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10
"Allowed sampling frequencies (Fs) of the audio:
* 44.1kHz from CD
* 48 kHz from DAT
* 32 kHz from DSR "
http://www.epanorama.net/documents/audio/spdif.ht
Good enough?
I've been doing digital audio back when you were probably still in diapers. It's just a shame you don't know how stupid most all of your claims sound to anyone who knows anything about digital audio, PC soundcards, lossy audio encoding, etc.
SCMS is entirely ignored by every soundcard I've ever come across (you've clearly never tried), so you'll have to try harder.
Well, for one thing, to prove that what your getting isn't anywhere near lossless, even though you think so.
There's plenty you don't know, yet you feel the need to give advice on these very subjects.
This is just sad at this point. You're convinced of a lot of things you've clearly never checked on. What's your evidence for this statement, and don't even try to tell me it's your years of experience.
Ridiculous. 44.1 doesn't go into 48 evenly, and that's all there is to it. You can't just insert samples of "nothing" in a digital audio signal and get an audio stream.
Your argument eats itself...
When the switch to "Trusted" computing happens, you aren't going to be able to find any signed drivers for your USB device anyhow, so no output for you.
Prove it.
Lots of idiots have been ranting on it, but it's almost certainly based upon one rather mundane sentence in a Reuters article, which is being widely speculated about, and probably completely misinterperated.
Their own docs and specifications make no mention of any such feature: http://www.aacsla.com/specifications/
etc.
If you want to make crazy claims, get at least some proof to back them up.
You're just prolonging the Goodwin-ism...
You've still given no reason what-so-ever to claim this was somehow worse than any other law enforcement investigation, anywhere in the world.
Actually, you're wrong there. Certainly encoding from lossless copies to MP3s at highest bitrate and -q0 (NOT Q9!) will sound perfect to most everybody.
HOWEVER, that is certainly NOT the case when repeatedly reencoding.
Use any of the best lossy audio codecs in the world, and encode with the highest possible quality, then decode and reencode the file 10 times... IT WILL SOUND LIKE COMPLETELY CRAP, no matter what.
The situation gets worse with every generation. However, even with only 2 rounds of encoding/decoding, the number of people who will hear distortions is much, much higher than 0.1%. I'd just guess it would be along the lines of 5% or so.
Unlikely. CDs are 44.1KHz, while soundcards usually require 48KHz, meaning at the very least, the audio is being resampled, which isn't a lossless process.
"Satisfactory" of course, but nowhere near perfect/lossless.
Files without DRM sound the same on the digital output as files without. This is a nonsense excuse.
Umm... it's even simpler to connect the digital out to the digital-in on my current soundcard.
This is just WRONG. You will still very likely lose some quality due to sampling rate conversion your soundcard automatically does.
And besides that, we're talking about re-encoding to MP3 afterwards, so the D/A and A/D conversion with a decent soundcard will be absolutely insignificant, next to the MP3 re-encoding. Only with lossless audio codecs would this matter at all.
What? Only the gestapo search homes now? They clearly had a search warrant.
If I had sufficent motivation, I certainly could give many more. However, spending time to prove that Wikipedia sucks isn't high on my list.
The information I looked-up on IV drugs on Wikipedia about a year ago was particularly awful. I guess not many wikipedia volunteers are chemists/pharmacists/doctors.
But that should give you a place to start if you'd actually care to.
Only if every one of these people are sitting in-front of their computers, doing NOTHING at all while it boots up...
No looking over at the TV. No listening to music, news, etc. No thought processes of any kind... Otherwise, that time isn't really wasted, just deferred to things you would spend that much more time doing later.
Personally, I hit the power button, and walk away, both for boot-up and shutdown, and I suspect MANY others are the same.
I agree. That's why I continue to use the GTK1 versions of most of my software... Firefox, Sylpheed, XMMS, GIMP, Abiword, GAIM, etc. In a couple cases you have to use an older version with a couple features you might miss, but the benefits are overwhelmingly worth it. Not only do most apps* start up somewhere around 4X faster and far faster/more responsive (even on my 1.2GHz AMD with 1GB RAM) but IMHO, GTK1 looks much better...
A GTK2 page of text (eg. mail in Sylpheed) looks almost double-spaced, with copious ammounts of waste whitespace, while the GTK1 version fits much more on-screen, with exactly the same sized font. No themes affect this at all.
</RANT>
* Firefox excluded, it's only about 2+X faster start-up
When you search for "diamonds" on Google, what do you think is going to be one of the first results? More importantly, if you see the first couple are http://www.geocities.com/diamonds , and the third is http://www.diamonds.com/ , which result do you think you'd follow?
That only works if you're going to spend significant ammounts of money BUILDING brand recognition to begin with... Most don't.
Point me to a site where I can download a reasonbly high-quality, DRM-free song from popular artists for $1.
The problem is, Wikipedia manages to do this simple task UNBELIVABLY ineffeciently. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars, and probably BILLIONS of man-hours from dedicated volunteers, all to provide the lowest common denominator of general knowledge.
A handful of guys (lets say as a university project) could put up a $5/month static website with all the topics they've (quickly) researched, and do a BETTER job than Wikipedia.
A small car and a helicopter can both get me down the street, but which is the best tool for the job? Is the helicopter worth the very small benefit it provides?
The reports, like Wikipedia, used entirely faulty methodology, so their results are, at best, worthless.
Completely wrong.
BLATANT vandalism will be spotted. Bias and factual inaccuracies will be saved and propogated for many years to come. Particularly (but NOT ONLY) those in lower traffic areas, or those where only a small percentage of people are expert enough to spot the problem.
The majority of times I've seen Wikipedia cited on
Alice: NTSC is 720x480.
Bob: You're wrong. Wiki/NTSC says so.
Alice: It was changed in 2003. Fixed.
And that's not even the obscure stuff like drug compounds, interactions, derivitives, etc., which I've found on Wikipedia wrong FAR more often than right, requiring the import of a whole book of an encyclopedia to really fix (not a minor typo, completely mistaken full articles).
Umm... yes. Yes they do. In fact they go for MORE than CDs, in general.
The biggest problem with it, is that it provides little to no punishment for faulty DMCA notices. The onus is on you to argue with your ISP that they really shouldn't have taken-down your website (Google is one of the few companies that don't go overboard at the first DMCA notice and takedown), and the company gets to keep on doing it.
It's a dual-use bill. The original intention was really about stopping companies from selling things like satellite descramblers, it just happens that it was vague enough that it outlawed all fair use.
Only because iTunes is RIDICULOUSLY overpriced. If you have a full-sized satellite dish (NOT DishNet/DirecTV), it actually only costs you maybe $0.50/month per cable channel.
At that, I should be paying (a little over) $3.00/mo for EVERY I ever care to watch. And I would really only want to keep 2 channels if they charged something like $4 per-channel. As much as I like the Daily Show and Colbert Report, it isn't worth the money, and the rest of the manure on Comedy Central is utterly worthless.
When I upgrade to DTV, I'll probably dump cable, and upgrade my Netflix subscription. Akimbo (IPTV) has some real promise, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=HDTV&price1=30 0&price2=400
Though you'll actually find better deals walking into any store (Circuit City, Sears, Target, K-Mart, Best Buy, etc).
That makes it equally as bad as DVDs.
Remember, DVD-CSS has multiple keys too, it just happened that they were ALL cracked at almost exactly the same time.
As opposed to Macrovision...
Completely baseless.
A) You don't have to. If you like low-res analog TV, keep it.
B) DTV/HDTV is a HUGE improvement in many more ways than just the 6X resolution that is most often hyped.
You don't have to pay anything per month for HDTV channels. Point your antenna in the right direction, and you'll get a perfect-quality HD picture, better quality than cable or satellite providers offer.
You could have said the same thing about DVDs just a few years ago. New formats always cost more for a while. The cycle will continue.
They decided to give them away instead of throwing them in a landfill?