Yeah, I'm a child of the 80's as well. My first concert was Metallica at Day On The Green in Oakland in 1985 and my 3rd concert was Metallica opening for Ozzy at the Cow Palace on the Puppets tour in 1986. I got to see Cliff play twice which was simply amazing. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of shows and those two still stick out as highlights. Cliff was just that good. I saw Metallica another 10 times between 86 and 92 and they rocked it hard, but other than Sad But True (which is one of the heaviest things I've ever heard live!) when they dug into the stuff from the Black Album, their shows just came to a screeching halt.
I understand that millions upon millions of people adore the Black Album, but those of us that helped build that band really felt let down by it. Load on the other hand just pissed us all off! That's when we all realized that Cliff's influence on the band had gone for good.
I really hope that the Rik Rubin/Rob Trujillo infusion can help them get back to playing seriously aggressive music. Sure, they can't live in the past and keep doing Puppets over and over, but they shouldn't completely ignore their past and continue to churn out the radio friendly drivel they have been for the past 17 years.
In their almost 25 years as a recording unit, if you think about it, they've sucked for a lot longer than they were great.
Naw, Kill 'em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and...And Justice For All were all alcohol fueled albums as well. The Black album, Load and Re-Load were as well, but those were not metal albums. Those were radio friendly rock albums that never reached the same level of complexity or had even near the same amount of fire in them that their predecessors did. Their first non-alcohol fueled album ever was St. Anger and even though that achieved a level of aggression that they hadn't explored in 15 years, it was still a tame album.
Granted. The Black Album sold something like 1 billion copies, but again, it was radio friendly rock. It was "metal for the masses". Watered down dreck. And now that Metallica was palettable to wider audience, most people do consider this their watershed album. Those of us that helped build Metallica into what it is now felt abandoned by the band and that they were now just in it for the money. I kinda wish Nirvana had been able to put the nail in their coffin then like they did to all the hair metal bands like Poison and Warrant and Dokken.
Luckily there were other musical movements going on at the time to keep music interesting and exciting, like the Funk/Thrash (man I hate that term) movement in the Bay Area that produced Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Primus and Buckethead and Seattle was giving us Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney and, even though they were in SF now, The Melvins.
By 1992, Metallica was no different from a band like Third Eye Blind or The Gin Blossoms. Stuff that even your mom couldn't object to. Metallica soared to superstardom by dropping nearly all of the fans that got them to where they were and that is just inexcusable.
I would never ever... EVER... compare Zappa to Aerosmith. Aerosmith was... WAS... a great rock and roll band back in the 70's. They put out a few legendary rock and roll albums. It was all about the attitude and part of that attitude was linked to their lifestyle. When their lifestyle chilled out, so did their music.
Now Zappa. Zappa! The man was a fucking genius and his musical contributions will go down in history. Aerosmith will be noted for writing some good tunes, but Zappa will go down in the annals of music with the likes of Beethoven or Miles Davis.
Zappa was great from Freak Out until the day he passed. He didn't have up or down periods like so many pop bands do. He made music for the sake of making music... not for the sake of selling X number of units. His music was not tied to the fickle whims of an adolescent audience and therefore he could do whatever the fuck he pleased.
It's the Cliff Burton Effect. You can hear it's legacy on Justice. When Bob Rock came into the equation, he ruined them. He wanted to "strip them down to their essence". Since he was a producer of pop bands, namely Motley Crue and Bon Jovi, and that meant taking out what made them so epic. Long form songs. The best sounding over driven guitar ever. He taught James how to sing! Blasphemy! I can understand teaching him how to not shred his vocal chords, but Nothing Else Matters was a travesty.
Hopefully Rik Rubin can put some fire back in the band. Rik is a fan of music and knows what made them so great in the first place. He told them to go back and listen to Ride The Lightning and Puppets before heading into the studio. He also told them to come into the studio with 15 songs already written, rehearsed and ready to play. None of this "let's take 5 years to fiddle around pasting together songs in ProTools" crap they had been doing under Bob Rock. They need to realize what made them great was that they were a band, a band that kicked your ass from the stage. They can't do The Beatles or Pink Floyd thing and be overly conceptual. They need to get pissed, write riffs that seemingly don't go together, cram them into place and then crank it up to 11. Hopefully Rob Trujillo will help them get the fire back... but I doubt it. They simply have too much to be thankful for now to ever really be a metal band ever again.
True, bands need to grow and change in order for the members to feel creative and productive, but if your name has fucking METAL in it, if you're not playing metal, you'd best change your name and start over.
Actually, yeah. Aerosmith was THAT insane with drugs. Probably moreso than just about any other band. The recording of Toys in the Attic is legendary for it's insane drug abuse. Joe Perry took over an entire wing of the building they were recording in and did massive amounts of heroin and threatened anyone who came near him with a gun.
I'm not arguing that sobriety ruins a band. I'd say it's more a matter of people getting comfortable and used to a certain level of comfort in their lives that extinguishes the fire. When you have a bazillion dollars it really must be hard to get pissed off at anything enough to fuel a good rock song. Plus they tend to get surrounded by Yes Men who cloud their perception of reality. James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich being prime examples. They somehow have forgotten just how much Cliff Burton added to what Metallica was. The complex arrangements. Gorgeous melodies interwoven into extremely pissed off songs. It was genius and it held on for one more album. Then Bon Jovi's producer took over and "stripped them down to their essence" and made a pop band out of them. Metallica's essence wasn't pop music. Their name is friggin Metallica for crying out loud! Epic f'ing heavy metal is their essence!
Anyway, I know a lot of musicians of varying degrees of success. It's the ones that have to struggle, that have to put their blood sweat and tears into their music that continue to create great music. Success often leads to complacency and thoughts more of "Will this sell?" than of "Let's fucking rock!".
For serious rock 'n roll, there are numerous accounts of bands being at their best when they were out of their heads on drugs or booze. Aerosmith is probably the best example there is though. When they sobered up and started working with songwriters instead of writing stuff solely on their own, they went way downhill. Their best stuff (imo) was at the height of their drug insanity, Toys in the Attic.
But a counter to this is Metallica. The Black Album was fueled by alcohol as was that ever so aptly named album, Load. St. Anger, written with a sober James, was the first time they had gotten heavy in quite some time, but it still lacked in a big way. Their big problem was working with Bob Rock... that and Cliff being dead. No offense to Jason, he's a great bassist, but if you listen to the Ride the Lightning and Puppets stuff, you can hear Cliff's influence through and through. Hetfield and Ulrich get all the credit for the songs, but Metallica never would have made the epic stuff on their 2nd, 3rd and 4th albums if Cliff hadn't so profoundly influenced them.
While I think it's an interesting notion that substance abuse creates great rock 'n roll, I think huge success and a lack of honest people surrounding a group is what causes their downfall far more than their sobriety.
Personally, I don't see why it shouldn't be on both iTunes AND Amazon MP3. I can go to any number of physical music stores and buy this stuff. Why should electronic sales be any different. I happen to be a fan of the iTunes store, mostly for convenience, but if Amazon were my preference, I would want to be able to buy it there as well.
Some friends of mine in a band called Kultur Shock recorded and album with Jack Endino... THE Jack Endino! Responsible for recording early albums by The Melvins, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and a little band called Nirvana.
The album in question was all mastered digitally, but Jack is a tape freak and really dug into the guitar sounds by recording on 2" tape and then digitizing it. The whole production was a mix of recording straight into ProTools or recording to 2" and then digitizing. The album sounds great, especially the guitars.
Jack knew that mastering digitally was the way to go, but some of the instruments needed to be recorded in an analog format and some needed to be recorded digitally to get the best sound possible. This analog > digital argument is just crap. Use whatever format best suits the needs at hand.
Primus went all analog on the Brown Album and look how that turned out! They tried to record Zeppelin style and it sounded like crap. Couple of good tunes, but for the most part it was a speaker buster. Recording on "principle" is ridiculous. Recording by whatever method produces the best results is the way to go and there is no ONE TRUE WAY.
Actually there were quite a few guitarists way before the Beatles that were using distortion caused by poking holes in or slashing their speaker cones. The Beatles brought a lot to the table, but distortion wasn't one of them. The overdriven distortion we love so much today is due more to Tony Iommi lopping off the tip of his finger and playing distorted guitar while tuned down to C than it is to anyone else. We also owe a lot to Hendrix for the evolution of the overdriven sound. He didn't have a dual channel amp way back when. He dialed down the volume knob on his guitar for playing clean and then cranked it up when he wanted to get loud and dirty. He was basically the early stress tester for Mashall amps.
Orange and Marshall amps put through the ringer by Tony Iommi and Hendrix. We wouldn't have metal or punk as we know it today without these two players.
That was not my intent to say that AE was built out of Photoshop. Over time though, many of the features and concepts used in Photoshop have been melded into AE. That's what I was trying to say. There has even been library sharing between the two products. I know one of the old time developers on the AE team. The Photoshop and AE teams share ideas and code all the time.
AE used to be a completely separate beast from Photoshop. Over the years, they have become part of the same family and now share some of the same DNA.
You need to start seeing some shades of gray, man. I NEVER said AE was built out of Photoshop.... that AE is the direct descendent of the original Photoshop development effort. I simply said that AE was like using Photoshop over the linear course of time... not static.
Your abrupt and childish response to my comparison leads me to believe that you should really brush up on some interpretive reading skills. Read between the lines. Not everything is a series of 1's and 0's. What is said/written and what is meant by those words often do match up 100%.
You do that and I'll work on making my prose clearer and closer to my intent.
Poignant. Well articulated. You know what they say about opinions and assholes...
AfterEffects has been a part of the Adobe portfolio for a very long time. There has been a lot of integration between many of their apps. InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator all use the same type engine now. There are many aspects of Photoshop that have been incorporated into AfterEffects. Just because it was purchased doesn't mean there is no collaboration between the development teams of the different programs.
If there is cruft in Photoshop, spill it. Enumerate it's weaknesses. "Bullshit" is not a very compelling argument.
The palette based approach to Photoshop works great. Fifteen year PS user here and the UI has only gotten better over the years. More customizable, more conscious of screen real estate. More and more efficient.
AfterEffects uses a metaphor similar most non-linear digital video editing applications. Photoshop uses metaphors that apply more to painters and photographers. Each of the metaphors works for the intended purpose of the app. How it is used. Motion based work requires a different approach to organization of tools than do still image based editing tools.
You make PS look and behave like AfterEffects and you will have a massive amount of pissed off Photoshop users. AfterEffects is just Photoshop altered for linear, time-based compositing and the UI reflects that. Photoshop is designed to to alter static images and the UI reflects a workflow to accommodate that. AfterEffects is a screen real estate hog. Photoshop, on the other hand, allows you to manage your screen real estate in a manner more befitting of working with still images. The UI paradigms don't gel with each other.
As for GIMP, if you're happy with a version of Photoshop that is about 11 years old... more power to you. GIMP really is about on par with where Photosop was at version 4. That's not to say it's bad. Photoshop 4 was an amazing release, but a lot of the simplest tasks were cumbersome to accomplish. Sure, I can mask just about anything out with alpha channels, some patience and time, but now I have tools to HELP automate (not completely replace) some of these more mundane and time consuming tasks, so I can get my work done far more efficiently and recoup my investment in PS.
It seems to me the people who are most vocal about what needs to be changed in PS, the people who scream the most for it on Linux, are the ones who probably need the raw power of the application the least. Stick with GIMP. It's a good image editor. No competitor to Photoshop, but far more flexible than Paint.
Quit whining about sampling rates and gold cables and such. Just go see the Melvins or Motorhead live and your hearing will come down to the level of normal people who just enjoy music.
Or they would use Adobe Premiere / Adobe Aftereffects for video on the PC, or Cubase (Mac and PC), Sonar (PC Only), or ProTools (Mac and PC) for Music...
Did you just refer to Adobe Premiere as a serious video editing app? Cough. Cough. Premiere is the laughing stock of the video editing world. If they were serious about video editing on a PC... AVID! AVID! AVID! That said, I'm a Final Cut guy, but Avid is the 800 pound gorilla of the industry still and is really great software that runs on both Mac and Windows.
Purchase the AAC file. Copy it to a play list. Burn that play list to an audio CD. Reimport as AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV... what have you. perfectly legal and you can play it on anything.
"If a song as a ringtone isn't a derived product, and RIAA can makes ringtones of popular music without infringing the copyright of the artists..." Of course the record label can do this because they own the physical rights to the songs... not the artist. The artist typically own the performance and publishing rights. The label can do anything they want with the master recording even if the band doesn't want them to. Now, if the band were to wholy, or jointly own the physical rights to the tracks, it would be a whole different ballgame.
One thing that they will eventually not be able to overcome is the level cap. New players aren't going to be interested in the 1-100 level grind should it ever get to that point and you will see less alt leveling. I have one 70 and will only ever have one level capped character because I just can't stomach the grind through old content. Some people do actually enjoy experiencing the old content in a new way via a different class and some people are just obsessed, but once the level cap gets high enough... no one is going to want to start knowing that the good stuff all sits at level 100 and that it's going to take them a year to get there.
Servers usually get just a handful of endgame guilds to begin with and they are all very selective and not terribly open to new players, and even a casual raiding guild like mine doesn't like to take on "projects, as we call them, and help level new people to 70 to grow our ranks. We recruit more 70's that have some up and coming alts.
The very high level cap will be what kills the growth of the game.
As I posted earlier... some people find fun in the game acquiring gear via arenas and battlegrounds. Once they've hit the ceiling for that gear, the game loses it's appeal. A lot of people, myself included, play it primarily for the social aspect. Love my guild! We're never going to be a Black Temple Guild, but we throughly enjoy tackling the challenges that are Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep. It's going to take us a while to clear those places, but that's what keeps us going... getting this group to certain milestones and if we don't get past TK by the time the expansion comes out, we all go nuts, level to 80 and start over.
I have some friends in the heavy hitter guilds on my server (Uldum) and they raid an ungodly amount and are forced to farm an equal amount just so they can afford to raid. They almost always come back to us just so the game is enjoyable again and not a job. Then they laugh at our pathetic gear and we/gkick them repeatedly until they shut up!
But yeah, gear isn't the only motivation present in the game. If that were the case, I would have quit long ago as would have millions of others.
Well, it was actually more a response to "how you need to play in a raid" than it was the difficulty level of anything. If we wanted to keep things interesting on the raid level, we'd take 12 or so people to ZG or AQ20, or do a 10 man Onyxia to really test ourselves.
You know how it is in a raid... be good. Don't steal aggro. If you're a hunter... stand here, shoot, feign. The interesting result of our loony runs was that we all became much better at playing our characters and adapting to new situations. Whereas we had a bunch of people that just played it safe and played their part and now that we're in the endgame stuff in Outland where people have to think and react quickly... our guild is suffering. People don't know how to heal or dps on the move, woefully unaware of their surroundings and dying constantly.
PvP'ing in a non pvp spec has a similar result. Granted, I'm alliance, so absolutely nothing is ever going to help me in WSG, but when it comes to Eye of the Storm, AB or AV, my survivability level is very high now as a result of doing all this unorthodox stuff and learning new skills from it.
Well, I play a level 70 (now beastmaster) hunter. I'm in a guild that got to Nefarian at 60, but no further... No AQ40, Naxx. Once the Tier 1 gear started flowing in, I discovered soloing was not really fun anymore because I could kill just about anything with ease... then came the T2 gear and the problem just got worse. So what did my friends and I do? We started playing the game wrong to introduce new challenges. For example, we'd run Dire Maul with my hunter tanking... all the while I had Aspect of the Pack on so we were almost constantly dazed for the fights.
And an interesting thing happened when we started doing this borderline insane stuff... we all learned new aspects of our characters. I learned that I could effectively tank the older instances... as a hunter! I found a way to generate enough aggro up front that I could effectively hold aggro against a mage.
I'm running into the same problem now as we get into Serpentshrine, but most of the loonies have left the guild and tanking a place like Shattered Halls really just isn't possible with a hunter. It's sad.
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Yeah, I'm a child of the 80's as well. My first concert was Metallica at Day On The Green in Oakland in 1985 and my 3rd concert was Metallica opening for Ozzy at the Cow Palace on the Puppets tour in 1986. I got to see Cliff play twice which was simply amazing. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of shows and those two still stick out as highlights. Cliff was just that good. I saw Metallica another 10 times between 86 and 92 and they rocked it hard, but other than Sad But True (which is one of the heaviest things I've ever heard live!) when they dug into the stuff from the Black Album, their shows just came to a screeching halt.
I understand that millions upon millions of people adore the Black Album, but those of us that helped build that band really felt let down by it. Load on the other hand just pissed us all off! That's when we all realized that Cliff's influence on the band had gone for good.
I really hope that the Rik Rubin/Rob Trujillo infusion can help them get back to playing seriously aggressive music. Sure, they can't live in the past and keep doing Puppets over and over, but they shouldn't completely ignore their past and continue to churn out the radio friendly drivel they have been for the past 17 years.
In their almost 25 years as a recording unit, if you think about it, they've sucked for a lot longer than they were great.
Naw, Kill 'em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and ...And Justice For All were all alcohol fueled albums as well. The Black album, Load and Re-Load were as well, but those were not metal albums. Those were radio friendly rock albums that never reached the same level of complexity or had even near the same amount of fire in them that their predecessors did. Their first non-alcohol fueled album ever was St. Anger and even though that achieved a level of aggression that they hadn't explored in 15 years, it was still a tame album.
Granted. The Black Album sold something like 1 billion copies, but again, it was radio friendly rock. It was "metal for the masses". Watered down dreck. And now that Metallica was palettable to wider audience, most people do consider this their watershed album. Those of us that helped build Metallica into what it is now felt abandoned by the band and that they were now just in it for the money. I kinda wish Nirvana had been able to put the nail in their coffin then like they did to all the hair metal bands like Poison and Warrant and Dokken.
Luckily there were other musical movements going on at the time to keep music interesting and exciting, like the Funk/Thrash (man I hate that term) movement in the Bay Area that produced Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Primus and Buckethead and Seattle was giving us Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney and, even though they were in SF now, The Melvins.
By 1992, Metallica was no different from a band like Third Eye Blind or The Gin Blossoms. Stuff that even your mom couldn't object to. Metallica soared to superstardom by dropping nearly all of the fans that got them to where they were and that is just inexcusable.
I would never ever... EVER... compare Zappa to Aerosmith. Aerosmith was... WAS... a great rock and roll band back in the 70's. They put out a few legendary rock and roll albums. It was all about the attitude and part of that attitude was linked to their lifestyle. When their lifestyle chilled out, so did their music.
Now Zappa. Zappa! The man was a fucking genius and his musical contributions will go down in history. Aerosmith will be noted for writing some good tunes, but Zappa will go down in the annals of music with the likes of Beethoven or Miles Davis.
Zappa was great from Freak Out until the day he passed. He didn't have up or down periods like so many pop bands do. He made music for the sake of making music... not for the sake of selling X number of units. His music was not tied to the fickle whims of an adolescent audience and therefore he could do whatever the fuck he pleased.
It's the Cliff Burton Effect. You can hear it's legacy on Justice. When Bob Rock came into the equation, he ruined them. He wanted to "strip them down to their essence". Since he was a producer of pop bands, namely Motley Crue and Bon Jovi, and that meant taking out what made them so epic. Long form songs. The best sounding over driven guitar ever. He taught James how to sing! Blasphemy! I can understand teaching him how to not shred his vocal chords, but Nothing Else Matters was a travesty.
Hopefully Rik Rubin can put some fire back in the band. Rik is a fan of music and knows what made them so great in the first place. He told them to go back and listen to Ride The Lightning and Puppets before heading into the studio. He also told them to come into the studio with 15 songs already written, rehearsed and ready to play. None of this "let's take 5 years to fiddle around pasting together songs in ProTools" crap they had been doing under Bob Rock. They need to realize what made them great was that they were a band, a band that kicked your ass from the stage. They can't do The Beatles or Pink Floyd thing and be overly conceptual. They need to get pissed, write riffs that seemingly don't go together, cram them into place and then crank it up to 11. Hopefully Rob Trujillo will help them get the fire back... but I doubt it. They simply have too much to be thankful for now to ever really be a metal band ever again.
True, bands need to grow and change in order for the members to feel creative and productive, but if your name has fucking METAL in it, if you're not playing metal, you'd best change your name and start over.
Actually, yeah. Aerosmith was THAT insane with drugs. Probably moreso than just about any other band. The recording of Toys in the Attic is legendary for it's insane drug abuse. Joe Perry took over an entire wing of the building they were recording in and did massive amounts of heroin and threatened anyone who came near him with a gun.
I'm not arguing that sobriety ruins a band. I'd say it's more a matter of people getting comfortable and used to a certain level of comfort in their lives that extinguishes the fire. When you have a bazillion dollars it really must be hard to get pissed off at anything enough to fuel a good rock song. Plus they tend to get surrounded by Yes Men who cloud their perception of reality. James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich being prime examples. They somehow have forgotten just how much Cliff Burton added to what Metallica was. The complex arrangements. Gorgeous melodies interwoven into extremely pissed off songs. It was genius and it held on for one more album. Then Bon Jovi's producer took over and "stripped them down to their essence" and made a pop band out of them. Metallica's essence wasn't pop music. Their name is friggin Metallica for crying out loud! Epic f'ing heavy metal is their essence!
Anyway, I know a lot of musicians of varying degrees of success. It's the ones that have to struggle, that have to put their blood sweat and tears into their music that continue to create great music. Success often leads to complacency and thoughts more of "Will this sell?" than of "Let's fucking rock!".
For serious rock 'n roll, there are numerous accounts of bands being at their best when they were out of their heads on drugs or booze. Aerosmith is probably the best example there is though. When they sobered up and started working with songwriters instead of writing stuff solely on their own, they went way downhill. Their best stuff (imo) was at the height of their drug insanity, Toys in the Attic.
But a counter to this is Metallica. The Black Album was fueled by alcohol as was that ever so aptly named album, Load. St. Anger, written with a sober James, was the first time they had gotten heavy in quite some time, but it still lacked in a big way. Their big problem was working with Bob Rock... that and Cliff being dead. No offense to Jason, he's a great bassist, but if you listen to the Ride the Lightning and Puppets stuff, you can hear Cliff's influence through and through. Hetfield and Ulrich get all the credit for the songs, but Metallica never would have made the epic stuff on their 2nd, 3rd and 4th albums if Cliff hadn't so profoundly influenced them.
While I think it's an interesting notion that substance abuse creates great rock 'n roll, I think huge success and a lack of honest people surrounding a group is what causes their downfall far more than their sobriety.
Personally, I don't see why it shouldn't be on both iTunes AND Amazon MP3. I can go to any number of physical music stores and buy this stuff. Why should electronic sales be any different. I happen to be a fan of the iTunes store, mostly for convenience, but if Amazon were my preference, I would want to be able to buy it there as well.
Exclusivity deals. ugh.
Some friends of mine in a band called Kultur Shock recorded and album with Jack Endino... THE Jack Endino! Responsible for recording early albums by The Melvins, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and a little band called Nirvana.
The album in question was all mastered digitally, but Jack is a tape freak and really dug into the guitar sounds by recording on 2" tape and then digitizing it. The whole production was a mix of recording straight into ProTools or recording to 2" and then digitizing. The album sounds great, especially the guitars.
Jack knew that mastering digitally was the way to go, but some of the instruments needed to be recorded in an analog format and some needed to be recorded digitally to get the best sound possible. This analog > digital argument is just crap. Use whatever format best suits the needs at hand.
Primus went all analog on the Brown Album and look how that turned out! They tried to record Zeppelin style and it sounded like crap. Couple of good tunes, but for the most part it was a speaker buster. Recording on "principle" is ridiculous. Recording by whatever method produces the best results is the way to go and there is no ONE TRUE WAY.
Actually there were quite a few guitarists way before the Beatles that were using distortion caused by poking holes in or slashing their speaker cones. The Beatles brought a lot to the table, but distortion wasn't one of them. The overdriven distortion we love so much today is due more to Tony Iommi lopping off the tip of his finger and playing distorted guitar while tuned down to C than it is to anyone else. We also owe a lot to Hendrix for the evolution of the overdriven sound. He didn't have a dual channel amp way back when. He dialed down the volume knob on his guitar for playing clean and then cranked it up when he wanted to get loud and dirty. He was basically the early stress tester for Mashall amps.
Orange and Marshall amps put through the ringer by Tony Iommi and Hendrix. We wouldn't have metal or punk as we know it today without these two players.
Disagree with me? Go ask Scott Ian.
Technically, Adobe didn't buy Macromedia. They merged.
That was not my intent to say that AE was built out of Photoshop. Over time though, many of the features and concepts used in Photoshop have been melded into AE. That's what I was trying to say. There has even been library sharing between the two products. I know one of the old time developers on the AE team. The Photoshop and AE teams share ideas and code all the time.
AE used to be a completely separate beast from Photoshop. Over the years, they have become part of the same family and now share some of the same DNA.
You need to start seeing some shades of gray, man. I NEVER said AE was built out of Photoshop.... that AE is the direct descendent of the original Photoshop development effort. I simply said that AE was like using Photoshop over the linear course of time... not static.
Your abrupt and childish response to my comparison leads me to believe that you should really brush up on some interpretive reading skills. Read between the lines. Not everything is a series of 1's and 0's. What is said/written and what is meant by those words often do match up 100%.
You do that and I'll work on making my prose clearer and closer to my intent.
Poignant. Well articulated. You know what they say about opinions and assholes...
AfterEffects has been a part of the Adobe portfolio for a very long time. There has been a lot of integration between many of their apps. InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator all use the same type engine now. There are many aspects of Photoshop that have been incorporated into AfterEffects. Just because it was purchased doesn't mean there is no collaboration between the development teams of the different programs.
If there is cruft in Photoshop, spill it. Enumerate it's weaknesses. "Bullshit" is not a very compelling argument.
The palette based approach to Photoshop works great. Fifteen year PS user here and the UI has only gotten better over the years. More customizable, more conscious of screen real estate. More and more efficient.
AfterEffects uses a metaphor similar most non-linear digital video editing applications. Photoshop uses metaphors that apply more to painters and photographers. Each of the metaphors works for the intended purpose of the app. How it is used. Motion based work requires a different approach to organization of tools than do still image based editing tools.
You make PS look and behave like AfterEffects and you will have a massive amount of pissed off Photoshop users. AfterEffects is just Photoshop altered for linear, time-based compositing and the UI reflects that. Photoshop is designed to to alter static images and the UI reflects a workflow to accommodate that. AfterEffects is a screen real estate hog. Photoshop, on the other hand, allows you to manage your screen real estate in a manner more befitting of working with still images. The UI paradigms don't gel with each other.
As for GIMP, if you're happy with a version of Photoshop that is about 11 years old... more power to you. GIMP really is about on par with where Photosop was at version 4. That's not to say it's bad. Photoshop 4 was an amazing release, but a lot of the simplest tasks were cumbersome to accomplish. Sure, I can mask just about anything out with alpha channels, some patience and time, but now I have tools to HELP automate (not completely replace) some of these more mundane and time consuming tasks, so I can get my work done far more efficiently and recoup my investment in PS.
It seems to me the people who are most vocal about what needs to be changed in PS, the people who scream the most for it on Linux, are the ones who probably need the raw power of the application the least. Stick with GIMP. It's a good image editor. No competitor to Photoshop, but far more flexible than Paint.
The sky is blue. Thanks for the statement of the obvious.
Statistically, more women buy PC's than Macs. Homosexuals buy more PC's than Macs.
More of every race, color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, whathaveyou buy PC's.
You fail.
Quit whining about sampling rates and gold cables and such. Just go see the Melvins or Motorhead live and your hearing will come down to the level of normal people who just enjoy music.
I picked something roughly comparable to Final Cut, but yes, Avid is the industry standard...
Well, Final Cut and Avid are comparable. Comparing Premiere to FCP is like comparing MS Publisher to Adobe InDesign.
Or they would use Adobe Premiere / Adobe Aftereffects for video on the PC, or Cubase (Mac and PC), Sonar (PC Only), or ProTools (Mac and PC) for Music...
Did you just refer to Adobe Premiere as a serious video editing app? Cough. Cough. Premiere is the laughing stock of the video editing world. If they were serious about video editing on a PC... AVID! AVID! AVID! That said, I'm a Final Cut guy, but Avid is the 800 pound gorilla of the industry still and is really great software that runs on both Mac and Windows.
Premiere... I threw up a little.
Not saying you should use iTunes over Amazon. Just wanted to dispel the "locked into an iPod to use iTunes" myth.
Purchase the AAC file. Copy it to a play list. Burn that play list to an audio CD. Reimport as AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV... what have you. perfectly legal and you can play it on anything.
iTunes does NOT lock you into buying an iPod.
"If a song as a ringtone isn't a derived product, and RIAA can makes ringtones of popular music without infringing the copyright of the artists..."
Of course the record label can do this because they own the physical rights to the songs... not the artist. The artist typically own the performance and publishing rights. The label can do anything they want with the master recording even if the band doesn't want them to. Now, if the band were to wholy, or jointly own the physical rights to the tracks, it would be a whole different ballgame.
One thing that they will eventually not be able to overcome is the level cap. New players aren't going to be interested in the 1-100 level grind should it ever get to that point and you will see less alt leveling. I have one 70 and will only ever have one level capped character because I just can't stomach the grind through old content. Some people do actually enjoy experiencing the old content in a new way via a different class and some people are just obsessed, but once the level cap gets high enough... no one is going to want to start knowing that the good stuff all sits at level 100 and that it's going to take them a year to get there.
Servers usually get just a handful of endgame guilds to begin with and they are all very selective and not terribly open to new players, and even a casual raiding guild like mine doesn't like to take on "projects, as we call them, and help level new people to 70 to grow our ranks. We recruit more 70's that have some up and coming alts.
The very high level cap will be what kills the growth of the game.
As I posted earlier... some people find fun in the game acquiring gear via arenas and battlegrounds. Once they've hit the ceiling for that gear, the game loses it's appeal. A lot of people, myself included, play it primarily for the social aspect. Love my guild! We're never going to be a Black Temple Guild, but we throughly enjoy tackling the challenges that are Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep. It's going to take us a while to clear those places, but that's what keeps us going... getting this group to certain milestones and if we don't get past TK by the time the expansion comes out, we all go nuts, level to 80 and start over.
/gkick them repeatedly until they shut up!
I have some friends in the heavy hitter guilds on my server (Uldum) and they raid an ungodly amount and are forced to farm an equal amount just so they can afford to raid. They almost always come back to us just so the game is enjoyable again and not a job. Then they laugh at our pathetic gear and we
But yeah, gear isn't the only motivation present in the game. If that were the case, I would have quit long ago as would have millions of others.
Well, it was actually more a response to "how you need to play in a raid" than it was the difficulty level of anything. If we wanted to keep things interesting on the raid level, we'd take 12 or so people to ZG or AQ20, or do a 10 man Onyxia to really test ourselves.
You know how it is in a raid... be good. Don't steal aggro. If you're a hunter... stand here, shoot, feign. The interesting result of our loony runs was that we all became much better at playing our characters and adapting to new situations. Whereas we had a bunch of people that just played it safe and played their part and now that we're in the endgame stuff in Outland where people have to think and react quickly... our guild is suffering. People don't know how to heal or dps on the move, woefully unaware of their surroundings and dying constantly.
PvP'ing in a non pvp spec has a similar result. Granted, I'm alliance, so absolutely nothing is ever going to help me in WSG, but when it comes to Eye of the Storm, AB or AV, my survivability level is very high now as a result of doing all this unorthodox stuff and learning new skills from it.
Well, I play a level 70 (now beastmaster) hunter. I'm in a guild that got to Nefarian at 60, but no further... No AQ40, Naxx. Once the Tier 1 gear started flowing in, I discovered soloing was not really fun anymore because I could kill just about anything with ease... then came the T2 gear and the problem just got worse. So what did my friends and I do? We started playing the game wrong to introduce new challenges. For example, we'd run Dire Maul with my hunter tanking... all the while I had Aspect of the Pack on so we were almost constantly dazed for the fights.
And an interesting thing happened when we started doing this borderline insane stuff... we all learned new aspects of our characters. I learned that I could effectively tank the older instances... as a hunter! I found a way to generate enough aggro up front that I could effectively hold aggro against a mage.
I'm running into the same problem now as we get into Serpentshrine, but most of the loonies have left the guild and tanking a place like Shattered Halls really just isn't possible with a hunter. It's sad.