You legislate it away by saying not that there's a 'maximum volume' but that the advertisements cannot create a significant difference in volume from the programming.
But then commercials would have to be intrinsically tied to a certain program, wouldn't they? Or how is the producer to know whether the dynamic range in the commercial he's producing should match a program featuring people doing yoga with soft new age music in the background, or one of those Extreme Explosion type shows with lots of thumping bass and heavy metal guitar riffs?
He couldn't, which means you would have to do it "on the fly" and I think that would result in crappy sounding audio.
I would much prefer to trust the artistic vision of the people producing the movies and TV I watch, and mute the commercials myself.
But there's still a way to measure the perceived loudness, correct? Even if it means the station has to decrease the volume of the commercial to match the average of the last n seconds of regular programming, there's a way to fix this.
I am not an audio engineer, but the devil is really in the details.
Consider all of the factors that go in to that perception of "loudness," including room size and acoustic properties, distance from the speaker, other noises in the room and their frequency (which may cancel out some of the audio in the commercial while enhancing others). Sure, we know when a commercial comes blaring on that it's "louder," but it's hard to quantify. You can't say 'nothing over x dB' because that depends entirely on how loud the user has his TV/audio system.
About all you could do would be to try to 'normalize' the audio, and limit extreme changes in volume, but doing that on the fly is bound to result in crap audio. And really, we're still compressing the dynamic range, we're just not intentionally boosting the gain. So what's the viewer do? Turn up the volume, of course.
You also have to be careful about what you cut. If you cut the gain at certain frequency levels, it actually makes speech unintelligible, even though you can still hear the speaker. This is something that would be very bad for the advertiser, and probably result in them making their commercials even *louder.*
I don't see any way it could be done in an automated fashion that would result in good sounding audio. People really have to let advertisers know that they find this type of thing offensive by not supporting companies who employ this tactic and making a fuss about it on teh internets.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but the best solution IMO is to hit the mute button and boycott the advertiser.
I'm tired of the networks jacking the commercial sound up
I doubt very much it has anything to do with the networks.
These "loud commercials" don't have their volume turned up per se; they have their dynamic range compressed (just like a Metallica CD), and the gain increased, making the lows as loud as the highs. This is likely done at the production stage.
The same thing happens when you have your volume cranked up for a quiet scene that's suddenly interrupted by a loud noise, only in the case of these commercials, the whole thing is a "loud noise."
Even if the TV station or cable company are careful to keep everything broadcast safe, it will sound unreasonably loud because *everything* is at peak level, unlike the program you were watching which had highs and lows and a lower average volume.
I'm not sure how you could legislate this problem away.
With the Liberals and NDP pretending that because there's a minority gov't, the people clearly wish to have a coalition rather then the clowns we elected
The Liberals, Bloc and NDP were doing exactly what is called for in a minority situation: cooperating. If Harper and Flaherty hadn't jumped at the chance to "destroy the competition" they wouldn't have had to run and hide in Michaelle Jean's skirt.
The way I remember it, they were trying to push a non-confidence vote through before the Christmas break.
Your memory could use refreshing. Flaherty delivered an economic update, which included plans to eliminate the subsidy political parties receive, as well as civil servants' right to strike and other measures that the opposition parties could never support. All "money bills" are confidence motions, so the government created your pre-Christmas confidence crisis itself.
Flaherty painted the opposition in to a corner by presenting an update they could not support, then called them "undemocratic" ("separatists and socialists," our PM describing the MPs *we the citizens elected*) for threatening to do as they are elected to do.
We just HAD a stinken election.
Which Harper broke his own fixed election date legislation to call. The coalition was an attempt to head off another one.
Please stop this Scientology bashing. We know its a kooky scam, but it sure as hell doesn't belong on this site
Hmmm...
You don't think a story about a religion that was founded by a science fiction writer, teaches that we are from some other planet and uses something called an "E-meter" to locate and eliminate "engrams" in its followers belongs on Slashdot?
I'll chime in with hazem and say it really sucks that you've found yourself in such an unsatisfying situation, but your best bet might be to have a look at what else is out there and consider your options. I can imagine a person with "advanced degrees in psychology and statistical knowledge" as well as the ability to manage IT services while "do(ing) an advanced breakdown of student populations" would interest a lot of companies.
You may have to step outside of your own comfort zone if you've only worked in the academic world, but don't let these bastards grind the life out of you if there's any possibility getting in to a better situation.
C'mon ! Parent is funny not a Troll:) Mods try to have some second degree...
I abandoned the moderation system when they replaced the meta-mod system with the current thumbs up or down one. People abuse the moderation system now with impunity. If you criticize an example of piss-poor moderation, they slap you with Off Topic or Troll.
Save yourself the frustration. Just browse at -1 and ignore the troll-mods.
Next stop, having DVD-Recorders and VCRs removed from the shelves of your local super store
Yeah, it's scary to think about what would happen if the Betamax case were being tried today. The geniuses in the movie industry did their best to kill VCRs for the home market on the basis that they "could be used for copyright infringement." Ruling that recording for the purpose of time shifting was fair use was pretty radical, as was finding that the manufacturers were not responsible for any infringement that does take place.
It seems a lot of countries have developed some pretty radical ideas about copyright law.
Punish the kids who were doing the harassing. Google removed the video within a day, once someone actually bothered to contact them about it, and Google cooperated with Italian police:
The prosecutors had also failed to acknowledge Google's cooperation with the Italian police, Pisapia said. The bullying of the handicapped boy, which had been going on for two years, came to an end after Google identified the person responsible for posting the video and enabled the police to identify the boy's tormentors, he said.
Mine too. Also, the ones we use run for weeks on a single double A battery (increasing the likelihood the device will actually be on and ready to receive that urgent message).
And there's just not much to go wrong with them. Response time is too critical for the business I'm in to trust it to a device that's trying to be a cel phone, mp3 player, camera, game machine, texting device, personal planner, web browser and GPS all at once.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but according to this, "LAME-encoded MP3 can be gapless with players that support the LAME Mp3 info tag."
I use LAME for encoding MP3s, so it's probable that the media players I'm using don't support the tags. I'll have to look in to this further. Thanks for nudging me in the right direction.
Though I know and have experienced what you're referring to, I do not have gaps in my more recently mp3-encoded albums
What are you using to encode them? It could be newer, more efficient encoders no longer pad the beginning of the files. If that's the case I'd like to use that encoder.
Because the subjects rated the 320 MP3 (supposedly the worse) as better sounding than FLAC (supposedly the best).
Actually, an equal number preferred the 320 Kbps MP3 and the FLAC encoded files. It was the 192 Kbps MP3s that was preferred by a higher number of people than the FLAC, by a margin of eight to six. So the 192 Kbps MP3s also received more votes than the 320 Kbps MP3s.
As others have stated, people have become accustomed to the sound of MP3s encoded at a lower bit rate, and people tend to prefer something that's familiar. That's why your kid will turn his nose up at that gourmet meal you worked your ass off to prepare and ask for a Big Mac instead.
The part of the article I found most instructive was this:
The only person to get all four tracks right is someone who listens to their headphones at pitifully low volumes and hasn't attended any rock concerts.
Your ears will always be the most important part of the signal path when it comes to judging fidelity.
I think it's also worth noting that there are other reasons besides audio fidelity to consider other formats. The MP3 format introduces a small amount of silence at the beginning of the track track as it encodes - and decodes - the file. Because the standard has no way of accounting for this padding, it can not be removed during playback, resulting in annoying gaps between tracks that can ruin your enjoyment of live, classical or prog rock albums that really need to be listened to as a continues piece of music. Ogg Vorbis was designed to account for this padding during playback, and lossless formats like FLAC do not introduce padding in the first place, so for that reason alone those formats are preferable over MP3.
As others have suggested, the best scenario would be to encode your library of music in a lossless format like FLAC, then encode those files as needed in either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis for listening on portable devices.
But your horse needs food, shoes, shots and exercise. Not to mention a stable to sleep in and a field to run around in. I'll bet once the gp paid his five bucks at Walmart and plugged the phone in to its jack, he never had to do another thing to maintain it.
You hit the nail on the head. To be fair, at some point they appended the following to article:
We have added a paragraph to clarify that this is simply a casual, anecdotal comparison of two products, and not a definitive study of the benefits of AAC and OGG Vorbis compression formats. We are well aware that AAC, OGG Vorbis, MP3 or WMA files of identical bit rates will not sound the same. If this was a serious study of codec performance, we would have used 16,000 people, not 16.
The article doesn't make the claim that 1/3 of people can't tell 48Kbps audio from 160Kbps audio as the Slashdot headline did. It states that six of the sixteen CBS Interactive employees thought Sky Songs 48Kbps AAC+ sounded better than Spotify's 160Kbps OGG Vorbis stream. I'm with the people who put this down to the poorly trained ear of these listeners. I'm sure the current trend of severely compressing audio to make it sound "louder" when played through crappy computer speakers has something to do with it.
Coffee is supposed to be served in the range of 185 degrees! The National Coffee Association recommends coffee be brewed at "between 195-205 degrees Fahrenheit for optimal extraction" and drunk "immediately". If not drunk immediately, it should be "maintained at 180-185 degrees Fahrenheit."
And groups that work with burn victims have urged the restaurant industry to serve coffee at a lower temperature, especially to customers who are in vehicles are are unable to stand up and brush spilled coffee off of themselves. The reason the victim in the McDonalds case was burned so severely is the coffee soaked in to her clothes and pooled in her seat.
You're right, she was responsible for spilling the coffee, and shares the blame for her injuries. But the spill was not the main cause of her injuries; the temperature of the coffee was. That's why the jury found she was 20% responsible for the burns she suffered to her thighs, buttocks, and groin.
I've often been served food in restaurants on plates that were hot enough to cause severe burns, and never has the server failed to warn me. It's a courtesy, as well as a moral and legal obligation to warn a customer of an unexpected hazard with your product. And sitting at a table is very different than being belted in to a car seat and unable to remove the hot coffee after the spill.
The jury felt the warning on the McDonalds cup was neither large enough nor sufficient to warn of the potential danger, and that's why they found in her favour.
There is no common sense in the US courts. Just see the "Warning! Hot coffee is hot!" sign in McDonalds.
Maybe McDonalds wouldn't need warning signs if they didn't serve coffee at temperatures that can cause third-degree burns after 2-7 seconds of exposure.
Maybe McDonalds wouldn't need warning signs if they had simply helped the 79-year-old victim with her $11,000 in medical expenses, or accepted her later settlement offers of $90,000 and $300,000.
Maybe Mcdonalds wouldn't need warning signs if documents obtained from Mcdonalds didn't establish that more than 700 people were burned to various degrees by Mcdonalds coffee between 1982 - 1992.
Maybe you need to come up with a better example of a lack of "common sense" in US courts, and why such a concept should be a factor in determining the merits of a case.
Not a single post in this thread deserves the Troll or Redundant mods they were given.
The moderation system on Slashdot was seriously broken when they abandoned the old meta-moderation system in favour of the current "is this a good post?" system. This has enabled people to abuse their moderation privileges by hitting posts they don't like with Troll and Redundant mods with impunity. At least with the old system, abuse like this would become apparent after a few meta-mods disagreed with the original moderation. I don't know if any effort is currently being made to identify people who abuse the system, but given frequency of the kind of thing you identified in this thread, it doesn't look like it.
I don't know if anything can really be done in the long run. People with time on their hands will find a way to abuse the system, presumably by creating numerous accounts to increase the frequency they have access to mod points. My response has been to browse at -1 and stop participating in the moderation system (mostly because I don't have the time to do a proper job of it) and to try to not get too worked up about it, but it's frustrating.
Really, at this point I think Slashdot should just abandon the moderation system altogether, but I suppose it's good for the users to have the choice to use it if they like.
A well made laptop needs a "port replicator" or "docking station" like a fish needs a bicycle
The presence of a docking station port is hardly an indication that a laptop is not well made.
Plenty of users - myself included - have need for a larger and/or dual-monitor display and full keyboard for some tasks, while valuing comfort and portability the rest of the time (like when reading Slashot). Docking stations are not absolutely necessary to achieve this, but make it a lot more convenient.
When evaluating how well-made a laptop is, I look at things like how the keys feel, how responsive the touch pad is, how bright and sharp the display is, how the speakers sound, how the lid feels when opening and closing it. How hot it gets.
I also look at what type of connectors it has. Having a docking station connector is a plus.
Slashdot Mirror
But then commercials would have to be intrinsically tied to a certain program, wouldn't they? Or how is the producer to know whether the dynamic range in the commercial he's producing should match a program featuring people doing yoga with soft new age music in the background, or one of those Extreme Explosion type shows with lots of thumping bass and heavy metal guitar riffs?
He couldn't, which means you would have to do it "on the fly" and I think that would result in crappy sounding audio.
I would much prefer to trust the artistic vision of the people producing the movies and TV I watch, and mute the commercials myself.
I am not an audio engineer, but the devil is really in the details.
Consider all of the factors that go in to that perception of "loudness," including room size and acoustic properties, distance from the speaker, other noises in the room and their frequency (which may cancel out some of the audio in the commercial while enhancing others). Sure, we know when a commercial comes blaring on that it's "louder," but it's hard to quantify. You can't say 'nothing over x dB' because that depends entirely on how loud the user has his TV/audio system.
About all you could do would be to try to 'normalize' the audio, and limit extreme changes in volume, but doing that on the fly is bound to result in crap audio. And really, we're still compressing the dynamic range, we're just not intentionally boosting the gain. So what's the viewer do? Turn up the volume, of course.
You also have to be careful about what you cut. If you cut the gain at certain frequency levels, it actually makes speech unintelligible, even though you can still hear the speaker. This is something that would be very bad for the advertiser, and probably result in them making their commercials even *louder.*
I don't see any way it could be done in an automated fashion that would result in good sounding audio. People really have to let advertisers know that they find this type of thing offensive by not supporting companies who employ this tactic and making a fuss about it on teh internets.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but the best solution IMO is to hit the mute button and boycott the advertiser.
I doubt very much it has anything to do with the networks.
These "loud commercials" don't have their volume turned up per se; they have their dynamic range compressed (just like a Metallica CD), and the gain increased, making the lows as loud as the highs. This is likely done at the production stage.
The same thing happens when you have your volume cranked up for a quiet scene that's suddenly interrupted by a loud noise, only in the case of these commercials, the whole thing is a "loud noise."
Even if the TV station or cable company are careful to keep everything broadcast safe, it will sound unreasonably loud because *everything* is at peak level, unlike the program you were watching which had highs and lows and a lower average volume.
I'm not sure how you could legislate this problem away.
The Liberals, Bloc and NDP were doing exactly what is called for in a minority situation: cooperating. If Harper and Flaherty hadn't jumped at the chance to "destroy the competition" they wouldn't have had to run and hide in Michaelle Jean's skirt.
Your memory could use refreshing. Flaherty delivered an economic update, which included plans to eliminate the subsidy political parties receive, as well as civil servants' right to strike and other measures that the opposition parties could never support. All "money bills" are confidence motions, so the government created your pre-Christmas confidence crisis itself.
Flaherty painted the opposition in to a corner by presenting an update they could not support, then called them "undemocratic" ("separatists and socialists," our PM describing the MPs *we the citizens elected*) for threatening to do as they are elected to do.
Which Harper broke his own fixed election date legislation to call. The coalition was an attempt to head off another one.
As she did last year, when she prevented a confidence vote by poroging parliament.
Yeah, we'll post it as soon as an "executive" shows up
Hmmm ...
You don't think a story about a religion that was founded by a science fiction writer, teaches that we are from some other planet and uses something called an "E-meter" to locate and eliminate "engrams" in its followers belongs on Slashdot?
I must be new here.
I'll chime in with hazem and say it really sucks that you've found yourself in such an unsatisfying situation, but your best bet might be to have a look at what else is out there and consider your options. I can imagine a person with "advanced degrees in psychology and statistical knowledge" as well as the ability to manage IT services while "do(ing) an advanced breakdown of student populations" would interest a lot of companies.
You may have to step outside of your own comfort zone if you've only worked in the academic world, but don't let these bastards grind the life out of you if there's any possibility getting in to a better situation.
I abandoned the moderation system when they replaced the meta-mod system with the current thumbs up or down one. People abuse the moderation system now with impunity. If you criticize an example of piss-poor moderation, they slap you with Off Topic or Troll.
Save yourself the frustration. Just browse at -1 and ignore the troll-mods.
Yeah, it's scary to think about what would happen if the Betamax case
were being tried today. The geniuses in the movie industry did their best to kill VCRs for the home market on the basis that they "could be used for copyright infringement." Ruling that recording for the purpose of time shifting was fair use was pretty radical, as was finding that the manufacturers were not responsible for any infringement that does take place.
It seems a lot of countries have developed some pretty radical ideas about copyright law.
Punish the kids who were doing the harassing. Google removed the video within a day, once someone actually bothered to contact them about it, and Google cooperated with Italian police:
Mine too. Also, the ones we use run for weeks on a single double A battery (increasing the likelihood the device will actually be on and ready to receive that urgent message).
And there's just not much to go wrong with them. Response time is too critical for the business I'm in to trust it to a device that's trying to be a cel phone, mp3 player, camera, game machine, texting device, personal planner, web browser and GPS all at once.
Glass that frame listen table of up nothing. Well dirt seatbelt hose if nothing on floor trap.
Syntax stubble for plug "young then laundry tile" firm trick constipation (lolz).
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but according to this, "LAME-encoded MP3 can be gapless with players that support the LAME Mp3 info tag."
I use LAME for encoding MP3s, so it's probable that the media players I'm using don't support the tags. I'll have to look in to this further. Thanks for nudging me in the right direction.
What are you using to encode them? It could be newer, more efficient encoders no longer pad the beginning of the files. If that's the case I'd like to use that encoder.
Actually, an equal number preferred the 320 Kbps MP3 and the FLAC encoded files. It was the 192 Kbps MP3s that was preferred by a higher number of people than the FLAC, by a margin of eight to six. So the 192 Kbps MP3s also received more votes than the 320 Kbps MP3s.
As others have stated, people have become accustomed to the sound of MP3s encoded at a lower bit rate, and people tend to prefer something that's familiar. That's why your kid will turn his nose up at that gourmet meal you worked your ass off to prepare and ask for a Big Mac instead.
The part of the article I found most instructive was this:
Your ears will always be the most important part of the signal path when it comes to judging fidelity.
I think it's also worth noting that there are other reasons besides audio fidelity to consider other formats. The MP3 format introduces a small amount of silence at the beginning of the track track as it encodes - and decodes - the file. Because the standard has no way of accounting for this padding, it can not be removed during playback, resulting in annoying gaps between tracks that can ruin your enjoyment of live, classical or prog rock albums that really need to be listened to as a continues piece of music. Ogg Vorbis was designed to account for this padding during playback, and lossless formats like FLAC do not introduce padding in the first place, so for that reason alone those formats are preferable over MP3.
As others have suggested, the best scenario would be to encode your library of music in a lossless format like FLAC, then encode those files as needed in either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis for listening on portable devices.
Paying the bill maintains his phone service, not the phone.
But your horse needs food, shoes, shots and exercise. Not to mention a stable to sleep in and a field to run around in. I'll bet once the gp paid his five bucks at Walmart and plugged the phone in to its jack, he never had to do another thing to maintain it.
You hit the nail on the head. To be fair, at some point they appended the following to article:
The article doesn't make the claim that 1/3 of people can't tell 48Kbps audio from 160Kbps audio as the Slashdot headline did. It states that six of the sixteen CBS Interactive employees thought Sky Songs 48Kbps AAC+ sounded better than Spotify's 160Kbps OGG Vorbis stream. I'm with the people who put this down to the poorly trained ear of these listeners. I'm sure the current trend of severely compressing audio to make it sound "louder" when played through crappy computer speakers has something to do with it.
And groups that work with burn victims have urged the restaurant industry to serve coffee at a lower temperature, especially to customers who are in vehicles are are unable to stand up and brush spilled coffee off of themselves. The reason the victim in the McDonalds case was burned so severely is the coffee soaked in to her clothes and pooled in her seat.
You're right, she was responsible for spilling the coffee, and shares the blame for her injuries. But the spill was not the main cause of her injuries; the temperature of the coffee was. That's why the jury found she was 20% responsible for the burns she suffered to her thighs, buttocks, and groin.
I've often been served food in restaurants on plates that were hot enough to cause severe burns, and never has the server failed to warn me. It's a courtesy, as well as a moral and legal obligation to warn a customer of an unexpected hazard with your product. And sitting at a table is very different than being belted in to a car seat and unable to remove the hot coffee after the spill.
The jury felt the warning on the McDonalds cup was neither large enough nor sufficient to warn of the potential danger, and that's why they found in her favour.
Maybe McDonalds wouldn't need warning signs if they didn't serve coffee at temperatures that can cause third-degree burns after 2-7 seconds of exposure.
Maybe McDonalds wouldn't need warning signs if they had simply helped the 79-year-old victim with her $11,000 in medical expenses, or accepted her later settlement offers of $90,000 and $300,000.
Maybe Mcdonalds wouldn't need warning signs if documents obtained from Mcdonalds didn't establish that more than 700 people were burned to various degrees by Mcdonalds coffee between 1982 - 1992.
Maybe you need to come up with a better example of a lack of "common sense" in US courts, and why such a concept should be a factor in determining the merits of a case.
The moderation system on Slashdot was seriously broken when they abandoned the old meta-moderation system in favour of the current "is this a good post?" system. This has enabled people to abuse their moderation privileges by hitting posts they don't like with Troll and Redundant mods with impunity. At least with the old system, abuse like this would become apparent after a few meta-mods disagreed with the original moderation. I don't know if any effort is currently being made to identify people who abuse the system, but given frequency of the kind of thing you identified in this thread, it doesn't look like it.
I don't know if anything can really be done in the long run. People with time on their hands will find a way to abuse the system, presumably by creating numerous accounts to increase the frequency they have access to mod points. My response has been to browse at -1 and stop participating in the moderation system (mostly because I don't have the time to do a proper job of it) and to try to not get too worked up about it, but it's frustrating.
Really, at this point I think Slashdot should just abandon the moderation system altogether, but I suppose it's good for the users to have the choice to use it if they like.
I'm guessing you're using a tinyint datatype for that column
The presence of a docking station port is hardly an indication that a laptop is not well made.
Plenty of users - myself included - have need for a larger and/or dual-monitor display and full keyboard for some tasks, while valuing comfort and portability the rest of the time (like when reading Slashot). Docking stations are not absolutely necessary to achieve this, but make it a lot more convenient.
When evaluating how well-made a laptop is, I look at things like how the keys feel, how responsive the touch pad is, how bright and sharp the display is, how the speakers sound, how the lid feels when opening and closing it. How hot it gets.
I also look at what type of connectors it has. Having a docking station connector is a plus.
Let's patent it!