I wouldn't necessarily assign causality to mp3 for the increase in the use of dynamic range compression - things were trending that way already, and mp3 just happened along at roughly the same time that adaptive limiters really came into their own. While it may be the case that the rise in the portable mp3 player contributed, I doubt that it's the sole reason. The loudness war tends to be indifferent to format.
I've seen a few websites that take molecular gastronomy into the realm of DIY, like building your own immersion circulator for sous vide cooking from a copuple hundred $ in parts, instead of a few grand for a "proper" immersion circulator. Also sites listing where to get food-grade additives without paying the markups for chef-branded stuff.
I think eventually it may become the realm of the home nerd-cook, the "food hacker" if you will...
Really depends on how you define "3rd-party hardware."
Apple products are not supposed to be run on non-apple manufactured CPUs. They will #3 against people that try it, although they're not always especially agressive about it (I guess it depends what you're trying to do and whether they consider it a threat to their business/reputation). They also don't seem to mind too terribly much if you run a 3rd-party OS on their hardware, but that's not so much the issue here.
They do, however, suport a lot of third-party peripheral hardware - expansions, interfaces, etc. They actively encourage a lot of that, provided the drivers and hardware meets their fairly finicky standards.
Basically what it comes down to is that apple is very protective of the link between their CPU hardware and their OS. Mess with that, they'll get lawyery. But everything else is much more up-for-grabs.
I think the argument was once you start requiring user intervention in any form - expanding or contracting a window, for example - to make the page look good, then the design has essentially failed.
I don't know if I fully agree with that - the browser *should* be able to do its job...but sometimes how the browser does its job and the requirements of the content conflict.
This came up on another site, recetnly - the discussion was the relative advantages of "liquid" versus fixed layouts in the age of The Giant Monitor.
Surprisingly there were good points to be made on both sides - liquid designs don't always scan well to the human eye when they flow out across a maximized, high-res 24" widescreen monitor (or even a 17", sometimes) - you can often end up with one very long line of text and some enormous menu bar with 5 options.
The upshot was that there wasn't really a hard-and-fast rule, and that it should really be tailored to the kind of content you are trying to display.
All I can say is, at least the useless Flash Splash Screen is starting to die out.
You don't think that maybe Al Qaeda was just trying to mess with us when they did that? I mean, c'mon, seriously, their whole modus operandi is to spread fear and confusion, so weighing in on any side of the election was going to do that. Their actual political beleifs are so far removed from either party that from their perspective it probably wouldn't matter who won. They just want to screw with us.
Except on #2 - you're not always screwing over the RIAA. Sometimes you're jsut screwing over some guy who runs a label out of his garage.
From a statistical standpoint, most of the time, yes, you're screwing over the RIAA (because the most-commonly-purchased tracks are from big-label artists) and I sort of support that (since the artist is getting screwed either way anyway). But every once in a while you'll get an artist or a label who is not an RIAA or IFPI member (the vast majority of smaller labels) and they get just as boned as the RIAA but have a much smaller resource base to start out with.
This is the whole problem with the industry now. The RIAA's tactics - and what it's driving many consumers to - are killing music, but not *their* music. Indie lables are too often caught in the corssfire - they lose a more significant percentage of revenue for every pirated/downlaoded album, and they lose a marketing channel every time the RIAA goes after an unsanctioned website or source.
I would wholeheartedly endorse allofmp3 IF they would make it easier/possible for the small artists they list to get their hands on the meagre royalties that they're owed - if you're not a label or artist that can handle russian law (not to mention the russian language) right now it's likely you'll never see one ruble of what you may be owed. If I could sell my stuff there for bargain-basement prices and know I was going to get at least a cut, I would be up front flying their banner. But right now, their security-through-cyrillic-legal-obscurity methods pretty much ensure that this won't happen.
...but then there's nothing stopping non-RIAA artists from collecting directly. The RIAA represents a monetarily significant fraction of the recording industry, yes, but numerically, not so much.
Of course, if allofmp3 was only selling independent artists and not the latest WarnerSonyVersal mega-artists, they probably wouldn't be as (in)famous.
For the record, not every label or artist is represented by IFPI or RIAA. Most indie labels - the ones, I might point out, from whom allofmp3 built much of their early collection - have no connection with either organization.
Of course, most indies don't have any connection with ROMS, either, which is why none of the indie artists I know who were listed ever saw a dime either.
What was never clear to me was whether allofmp3 was actually paying ROMS directly or just "offering to pay" if the artist/label/copyright holder/etc came calling.
It's theoretically possible, but practically impossible.
If it were compression at just one standard setting, you could hypothetically have an expander that just reverses it.
But the limiting that goes on in final mastering has adaptive release times and other settings (and, god help you, often is done in multiband) so it's far, far too variable to just apply an single expander to. You'd need a lot more info about the original recording in order to know how to expand the compressed/limited version.
The recording engineer should always apply a little compression or limiting at the mastering stage. It has the effect of adding a little "smear" to the music to bind a lot of the recordings together, it helps the album as a whole hang together, and they tend to have very specialized gear for doing that and EQ and such at a master-track level, basically adding the final polish. Mastering can often make or break a record.
The problem is not whether the recording/mastering engineer should be doing it, it's how much. Modern recordings (since the advent of tape, anyway) have always had a little post-processing. The issue in the loudness wars is that it's now possible with modern equipment to apply these normal effects in very extreme ways to drive the perceived loudness beyond sane levels.
Now, ever mastering engineer I've ever talked to HATES the loudness wars with a passion. Nobody wants to take their compressor/limiter and crank the sucker until the waveform looks like a big fuzzy block. The problem is, artists and labels demand that they do anyway. Nobody wants to be the guy whose album is quieter than everybody else's, and sadly not every band understands the intricacies of the engineering and mastering process - nor should every songwriter be expected to - but in the end it just perpetuates this sort of thing.
Jeez which Bach pieces are you listening to? Sure, the harpischord stuff by design has loduness issues, but something like Partita No 2 in d is ALL about the dynamics. The sarabande, allemande and chacconne especially.
Hell, i've always brought earplugs to concerts. I chalk it up to awareness that "hey, wow, rock concerts are loud, and my older friends nearly went deaf back in the 70's."
If they're louder now than they used to be...well, still, they were always pretty loud and bad for your ears.
Just for the record, there are literally thousands of record companies out there, and only a handful of them belong to the RIAA. There are plenty fo record companies specifically interested in some kind of music, and promoting said kind of music - whether it's regional, or genre-based, or whatever.
So while it's easy to make generalizations about "what record companies want" in terms of profit maximiazation and stickin it to consumers and artists...it's not always the case.
There is the problem of binaural psychoacoustics, though. Most of these recordings are made in stereo, with two essentially "point" sources of sound in front of the listener. Run through headphones, it moves the point sources to the sides of your head, which throws off the perception of the sound.
You can blame digital technology specifically because the tools that have really made this possible are digital - things like Waves L2/L3 Ultramaximizer, for example. Once everything's encoded into the digital domain, they can do things with lookahead and adaptive release that a strictly analog signal path can't. Hence you can squeeze the ever-loving crap out of dynamics in a way that doesn't introduce the artifacts - pumping and breathing - that limiting at that level would cause in an analog compressor.
In the realm of low-end mastering (people like me who do master indie records cheap - not top40 quality jobs but good enough for a demo) there are tools available as digital plugins and rack units that were barely available in the top studios 15 years ago - multiband compressors can be exceptionally surgical but they too can be used to add even more unartifacted (but wearying to the listener) compression at earlier stages of the game.
I think there's an additional issue here, too, that's often overlooked. Since a lot of this stuff is recorded entirely in the digital domain to start out with, there's a lot of focus on adding "analog warmth" to the recordings. There're a number of tools available to do this, and for the most part they do it through selective band compression and a little harmonic distortion. And this gets abused like crazy at the recording/tracking and mastering levels. By the time it gets to the mastering chain, often many, many individual tracks in the mix have been "warmed up", reducing dynamic range long before the mastering engineer gets his hands on it. Of course, it can be used judiciously - I like to use it to make programmed drums sound a little fatter, for example, but I've seen mixes where something like Steinberg Magneto or PSP VintageWarmer has been applied on every single track in a complex mix.
Overcompression CAN work for you, too - look at most "french" house music, where everything is squeezed and sidechained through the kick drum. It's not always a great effect but it can push a song on the dancefloor. But again, only to be used judiciously.
I like Charlie Stross's solution to the Fermi paradox, as proposed in "Accelerando" - basically that as a civilization becomes more advanced and reliant on technology and bandwidth, they're less willing to leave to go out exploring. Sort of the why-leave-home-all-my-stuff-is-there theory. So we haven't encountered intelligent life because everybody out there decided they were going to stay close to home.
The idea of a "technomage" is a fairly decent staple of scifi - I just found them sort of cartoonishly implemented in the B5 universe. Wise, enigmatic, and often with odd D&D style formal british accents...
Sort of the same way with the Minbari, actually - and the rangers. I think JMS transplatend too many Renfest ideas into the future.
Aside from the fact that there seems to be a mistaken conflation above between data compression and dynamics compression (big difference. BIG difference. No less problematic, but still...different topics) Compression and limiting get a bad rap.
They're extraordinarily useful tools in engineering and in mastering, when used judiciously. Adding a nice bit of compression to an overall mix can give you a little warmth (given something like a good opto compressor or something) and a little extra sonic "smear" to sort of glue things together. It's difficult to explain because it's really sort of an aesthetic choice. And limiting can even thougs out a bit over the course of an album, because most performances aren't going to be at the exact same levels all the time.
Compressors and limiters like this aren't always the easiest to use, either. The mastering multibands particularly are surgically precise - you can go from enhancing a track to destroying with just a few slight modifications. They're very, very powerful tools for tweaking a recording for playback on a variety of systems - after all, what sounds great on a set of high-end, flat-response studio monitors may not sound as great in a Honda Civic or in a big boomy dance club.
Problem is, all that power's gotten abused. Digital limiters with lookahead and adaptive release curves mean you can push the gain a lot hotter without the nasty artifacts of overcompression, and anybody who calls themselves a mastering engineer can slam something though Waves L2, squish the life out of it, but make it the hottest thing around. This tech is also no longer just available to people with the dosh to put together a mastering studio - a few hundred bucks can put it in the hands of a local band with dreams of radio stardom and zero background in that phase of production. That's been just as bad for the loudness wars as big mastering houses willing to bend over for the big labels marketing whims.
All these tools can be used for good - to clean up and smooth out an erratic recording, to punch up the drums a little bit on a dance track, to basically make sure that you can hear the album in your car as well as your home stereo or a club.
Sadly, no. Most recordings are already running at pretty close to 0db. The issue is with, compression and limiting the perceived loudness can be increased, not the actual volume. The mastering engineer can turn up the quiet parts without clipping/distorting the peaks (essentially, it's an oversimplification) so the whole thing sounds louder. At first, anyway. Without quiet bits, the human ear stops interpreting loud things as actually being all that loud. So it's really a dumbass marketing thing to make the beignning of a track get the attention of the casual listener.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't necessarily assign causality to mp3 for the increase in the use of dynamic range compression - things were trending that way already, and mp3 just happened along at roughly the same time that adaptive limiters really came into their own. While it may be the case that the rise in the portable mp3 player contributed, I doubt that it's the sole reason. The loudness war tends to be indifferent to format.
I've seen a few websites that take molecular gastronomy into the realm of DIY, like building your own immersion circulator for sous vide cooking from a copuple hundred $ in parts, instead of a few grand for a "proper" immersion circulator. Also sites listing where to get food-grade additives without paying the markups for chef-branded stuff.
I think eventually it may become the realm of the home nerd-cook, the "food hacker" if you will...
Really depends on how you define "3rd-party hardware."
Apple products are not supposed to be run on non-apple manufactured CPUs. They will #3 against people that try it, although they're not always especially agressive about it (I guess it depends what you're trying to do and whether they consider it a threat to their business/reputation). They also don't seem to mind too terribly much if you run a 3rd-party OS on their hardware, but that's not so much the issue here.
They do, however, suport a lot of third-party peripheral hardware - expansions, interfaces, etc. They actively encourage a lot of that, provided the drivers and hardware meets their fairly finicky standards.
Basically what it comes down to is that apple is very protective of the link between their CPU hardware and their OS. Mess with that, they'll get lawyery. But everything else is much more up-for-grabs.
I think the argument was once you start requiring user intervention in any form - expanding or contracting a window, for example - to make the page look good, then the design has essentially failed.
I don't know if I fully agree with that - the browser *should* be able to do its job...but sometimes how the browser does its job and the requirements of the content conflict.
This came up on another site, recetnly - the discussion was the relative advantages of "liquid" versus fixed layouts in the age of The Giant Monitor.
Surprisingly there were good points to be made on both sides - liquid designs don't always scan well to the human eye when they flow out across a maximized, high-res 24" widescreen monitor (or even a 17", sometimes) - you can often end up with one very long line of text and some enormous menu bar with 5 options.
The upshot was that there wasn't really a hard-and-fast rule, and that it should really be tailored to the kind of content you are trying to display.
All I can say is, at least the useless Flash Splash Screen is starting to die out.
You don't think that maybe Al Qaeda was just trying to mess with us when they did that? I mean, c'mon, seriously, their whole modus operandi is to spread fear and confusion, so weighing in on any side of the election was going to do that. Their actual political beleifs are so far removed from either party that from their perspective it probably wouldn't matter who won. They just want to screw with us.
The bass strings behave more like rods than strings, which is one reason it's really hard to acoustically model a piano.
Except on #2 - you're not always screwing over the RIAA. Sometimes you're jsut screwing over some guy who runs a label out of his garage.
From a statistical standpoint, most of the time, yes, you're screwing over the RIAA (because the most-commonly-purchased tracks are from big-label artists) and I sort of support that (since the artist is getting screwed either way anyway). But every once in a while you'll get an artist or a label who is not an RIAA or IFPI member (the vast majority of smaller labels) and they get just as boned as the RIAA but have a much smaller resource base to start out with.
This is the whole problem with the industry now. The RIAA's tactics - and what it's driving many consumers to - are killing music, but not *their* music. Indie lables are too often caught in the corssfire - they lose a more significant percentage of revenue for every pirated/downlaoded album, and they lose a marketing channel every time the RIAA goes after an unsanctioned website or source.
I would wholeheartedly endorse allofmp3 IF they would make it easier/possible for the small artists they list to get their hands on the meagre royalties that they're owed - if you're not a label or artist that can handle russian law (not to mention the russian language) right now it's likely you'll never see one ruble of what you may be owed. If I could sell my stuff there for bargain-basement prices and know I was going to get at least a cut, I would be up front flying their banner. But right now, their security-through-cyrillic-legal-obscurity methods pretty much ensure that this won't happen.
...but then there's nothing stopping non-RIAA artists from collecting directly. The RIAA represents a monetarily significant fraction of the recording industry, yes, but numerically, not so much.
Of course, if allofmp3 was only selling independent artists and not the latest WarnerSonyVersal mega-artists, they probably wouldn't be as (in)famous.
For the record, not every label or artist is represented by IFPI or RIAA. Most indie labels - the ones, I might point out, from whom allofmp3 built much of their early collection - have no connection with either organization.
Of course, most indies don't have any connection with ROMS, either, which is why none of the indie artists I know who were listed ever saw a dime either.
What was never clear to me was whether allofmp3 was actually paying ROMS directly or just "offering to pay" if the artist/label/copyright holder/etc came calling.
I swear Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 491 times.
It's theoretically possible, but practically impossible.
If it were compression at just one standard setting, you could hypothetically have an expander that just reverses it.
But the limiting that goes on in final mastering has adaptive release times and other settings (and, god help you, often is done in multiband) so it's far, far too variable to just apply an single expander to. You'd need a lot more info about the original recording in order to know how to expand the compressed/limited version.
This is slashdot - EVERYTHING gets blamed on the RIAA.
Well, that's not strictly true, now.
The recording engineer should always apply a little compression or limiting at the mastering stage. It has the effect of adding a little "smear" to the music to bind a lot of the recordings together, it helps the album as a whole hang together, and they tend to have very specialized gear for doing that and EQ and such at a master-track level, basically adding the final polish. Mastering can often make or break a record.
The problem is not whether the recording/mastering engineer should be doing it, it's how much. Modern recordings (since the advent of tape, anyway) have always had a little post-processing. The issue in the loudness wars is that it's now possible with modern equipment to apply these normal effects in very extreme ways to drive the perceived loudness beyond sane levels.
Now, ever mastering engineer I've ever talked to HATES the loudness wars with a passion. Nobody wants to take their compressor/limiter and crank the sucker until the waveform looks like a big fuzzy block. The problem is, artists and labels demand that they do anyway. Nobody wants to be the guy whose album is quieter than everybody else's, and sadly not every band understands the intricacies of the engineering and mastering process - nor should every songwriter be expected to - but in the end it just perpetuates this sort of thing.
I...I think we should be friends.
Jeez which Bach pieces are you listening to? Sure, the harpischord stuff by design has loduness issues, but something like Partita No 2 in d is ALL about the dynamics. The sarabande, allemande and chacconne especially.
Hell, i've always brought earplugs to concerts. I chalk it up to awareness that "hey, wow, rock concerts are loud, and my older friends nearly went deaf back in the 70's."
If they're louder now than they used to be...well, still, they were always pretty loud and bad for your ears.
Just for the record, there are literally thousands of record companies out there, and only a handful of them belong to the RIAA. There are plenty fo record companies specifically interested in some kind of music, and promoting said kind of music - whether it's regional, or genre-based, or whatever.
So while it's easy to make generalizations about "what record companies want" in terms of profit maximiazation and stickin it to consumers and artists...it's not always the case.
Just sayin'.
There is the problem of binaural psychoacoustics, though. Most of these recordings are made in stereo, with two essentially "point" sources of sound in front of the listener. Run through headphones, it moves the point sources to the sides of your head, which throws off the perception of the sound.
Few headphones compensate for this.
You can blame digital technology specifically because the tools that have really made this possible are digital - things like Waves L2/L3 Ultramaximizer, for example. Once everything's encoded into the digital domain, they can do things with lookahead and adaptive release that a strictly analog signal path can't. Hence you can squeeze the ever-loving crap out of dynamics in a way that doesn't introduce the artifacts - pumping and breathing - that limiting at that level would cause in an analog compressor.
In the realm of low-end mastering (people like me who do master indie records cheap - not top40 quality jobs but good enough for a demo) there are tools available as digital plugins and rack units that were barely available in the top studios 15 years ago - multiband compressors can be exceptionally surgical but they too can be used to add even more unartifacted (but wearying to the listener) compression at earlier stages of the game.
I think there's an additional issue here, too, that's often overlooked. Since a lot of this stuff is recorded entirely in the digital domain to start out with, there's a lot of focus on adding "analog warmth" to the recordings. There're a number of tools available to do this, and for the most part they do it through selective band compression and a little harmonic distortion. And this gets abused like crazy at the recording/tracking and mastering levels. By the time it gets to the mastering chain, often many, many individual tracks in the mix have been "warmed up", reducing dynamic range long before the mastering engineer gets his hands on it. Of course, it can be used judiciously - I like to use it to make programmed drums sound a little fatter, for example, but I've seen mixes where something like Steinberg Magneto or PSP VintageWarmer has been applied on every single track in a complex mix.
Overcompression CAN work for you, too - look at most "french" house music, where everything is squeezed and sidechained through the kick drum. It's not always a great effect but it can push a song on the dancefloor. But again, only to be used judiciously.
It's a complicated problem.
Hell, when I grew up, the big format was cassette, which had just overthrown 8-track as the medium of choice.
And cassette had *awful* sound quality, compared to other formats available at the time. No two ways about it.
So I dunno if we can really generalize about kids "back in the day" having great ears and lust for quality sound reproduction.
I like Charlie Stross's solution to the Fermi paradox, as proposed in "Accelerando" - basically that as a civilization becomes more advanced and reliant on technology and bandwidth, they're less willing to leave to go out exploring. Sort of the why-leave-home-all-my-stuff-is-there theory. So we haven't encountered intelligent life because everybody out there decided they were going to stay close to home.
The idea of a "technomage" is a fairly decent staple of scifi - I just found them sort of cartoonishly implemented in the B5 universe. Wise, enigmatic, and often with odd D&D style formal british accents...
Sort of the same way with the Minbari, actually - and the rangers. I think JMS transplatend too many Renfest ideas into the future.
Aside from the fact that there seems to be a mistaken conflation above between data compression and dynamics compression (big difference. BIG difference. No less problematic, but still...different topics) Compression and limiting get a bad rap.
They're extraordinarily useful tools in engineering and in mastering, when used judiciously. Adding a nice bit of compression to an overall mix can give you a little warmth (given something like a good opto compressor or something) and a little extra sonic "smear" to sort of glue things together. It's difficult to explain because it's really sort of an aesthetic choice. And limiting can even thougs out a bit over the course of an album, because most performances aren't going to be at the exact same levels all the time.
Compressors and limiters like this aren't always the easiest to use, either. The mastering multibands particularly are surgically precise - you can go from enhancing a track to destroying with just a few slight modifications. They're very, very powerful tools for tweaking a recording for playback on a variety of systems - after all, what sounds great on a set of high-end, flat-response studio monitors may not sound as great in a Honda Civic or in a big boomy dance club.
Problem is, all that power's gotten abused. Digital limiters with lookahead and adaptive release curves mean you can push the gain a lot hotter without the nasty artifacts of overcompression, and anybody who calls themselves a mastering engineer can slam something though Waves L2, squish the life out of it, but make it the hottest thing around. This tech is also no longer just available to people with the dosh to put together a mastering studio - a few hundred bucks can put it in the hands of a local band with dreams of radio stardom and zero background in that phase of production. That's been just as bad for the loudness wars as big mastering houses willing to bend over for the big labels marketing whims.
All these tools can be used for good - to clean up and smooth out an erratic recording, to punch up the drums a little bit on a dance track, to basically make sure that you can hear the album in your car as well as your home stereo or a club.
Sadly, no. Most recordings are already running at pretty close to 0db. The issue is with, compression and limiting the perceived loudness can be increased, not the actual volume. The mastering engineer can turn up the quiet parts without clipping/distorting the peaks (essentially, it's an oversimplification) so the whole thing sounds louder. At first, anyway. Without quiet bits, the human ear stops interpreting loud things as actually being all that loud. So it's really a dumbass marketing thing to make the beignning of a track get the attention of the casual listener.