Yeah true. Just seems to me that if you were to compress each track individually and do the down mixing in the music player you would end up with much better compression and a better experience because:
there's a lot less entropy in each track
you can tweak the variable bit and other parameters of the compression for each track to balance sound quality and size appropriately
there's plenty of spare cpu cycles on the client side anyways
some people have better than stereo output (dolby/whatever)
people can reuse your music easier because they receive the tracks seperated
Of course, the last reason is exactly the reason why the music industry wouldn't appreciate this format of music distribution, but I'm sure lots of other people would. But maybe it just isn't feasible for some other technical reason I'm not aware of.
Yeah, you totally missed the point of my question. Does lossy compression work better on single instrument tracks than it does on multiple tracks mixed together, i.e., songs?
If you compress a single track of a song into an mp3 (or ogg or whatever) does it compress better than compressing multiple tracks mixed together? It's my understanding that the first step of compressing a wav to mp3 is to seperate out all the sound tracks. This being an imprecise process, wouldn't you get better results if the sound tracks were already seperated? So when musicians are making mp3s do they do it with seperate tracks or do they mix the tracks together and then encode an mp3 from the resulting mix, which immediately goes and tries to seperate the tracks again?
Re:Next week's news: Moon covered by ice
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You're right, I'm sick of all this experimentation, observation, hypothesis, confirming, refuting, erk! What's the point of it? What do the scientists call this process anyway?
Yes, and that's what I do also. But there's a sensible way to do things and then there's the IE6 way of doing things. Both ways might be standards compliant, but the IE6 way is a big fat dirty hack which I shouldn't be forced to do. If IE7 had been released back when I started this project I could have said "I support Firefox, Opera and IE7, not IE6, go upgrade."
of course, I would have prefered them to have released it before I bowed to management and hacked around all the non-standard shit in IE6 which IE7 fixes. urg!
The rules were made up by those lovely people at the International Standards Organisation. Apple has never gone through the process to get Macs certified as ISO 9000 approved manufacturing components. They focus on the home and small office market, they don't care about this stuff.
Not one that's ISO 9000 certified you havn't. Apple has never done the necessary paperwork to get Macs into this market. They don't care about this market. Now they've been bitten on the ass by this stance. That's the irony, aint it sweet.
it's really simple, you press e (or select the elliptical select tool from the toolbox) click-hold where you want to start your circle, hold shift and drag the circle out, if you want a radic circle you hold control as well. Then once you have the circle you want (you can move it around with alt-drag), you click edit->Stroke selection, which brings up a dialog for selecting the tool you want to use for your circle, click stroke and voila, you have a circle
So, err, do we need some kind of international police force to keep the Internet clear of botnets? Should the UN run it? Do they get cool blue suits and have their own swat teams around the world?
That's the usual argument given by The Gimp developers. Drawing a circle is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect a bitmap manipulation program to do. Especially seeing as every other bitmap manipulation program does it.
You, like The Gimp developers, have absolutely no concept of UI design. Providing simple tools for common tasks and leaving complex tools for advanced users is a fundamental element of good UI design. Sigh.
See, what pisses me off is that I'm quite willing to write the code that lets me draw a circle the way I want to draw a circle, but the developers that control The Gimp source code reposistory are not willing to accept the patch, even though there's thousands of people just like me who want that feature. Why should I have to fork? Why can't they just not be pricks?
They're not at each other's throats enough to actually write code though. That's what tells you a flame war is in progress, lots of geeks writing code to prove their point of view.
As I've said in other places, there's plenty of developers who would love to add this stuff to The Gimp. There's even been forks of The Gimp which add this stuff. The problem is not that the users who are also developers don't want this stuff, the problem is that the developers who are in control of the source repository don't want these features.
Every six months I hear something about GTK+ on Mac.. but as far as I know it's still just a toy. Can't imagine why.. maybe Mac developers are just not interested in that kind of development?
Sometime in the future The Gimp developers will cave in and add a circle tool and you will hear a collective sigh of relief. When that happens, I hope you remember this discussion. Now fuck off.
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Of course, the last reason is exactly the reason why the music industry wouldn't appreciate this format of music distribution, but I'm sure lots of other people would. But maybe it just isn't feasible for some other technical reason I'm not aware of.
Yeah, you totally missed the point of my question. Does lossy compression work better on single instrument tracks than it does on multiple tracks mixed together, i.e., songs?
If you compress a single track of a song into an mp3 (or ogg or whatever) does it compress better than compressing multiple tracks mixed together? It's my understanding that the first step of compressing a wav to mp3 is to seperate out all the sound tracks. This being an imprecise process, wouldn't you get better results if the sound tracks were already seperated? So when musicians are making mp3s do they do it with seperate tracks or do they mix the tracks together and then encode an mp3 from the resulting mix, which immediately goes and tries to seperate the tracks again?
You're right, I'm sick of all this experimentation, observation, hypothesis, confirming, refuting, erk! What's the point of it? What do the scientists call this process anyway?
</sarcasm>
Yes, and that's what I do also. But there's a sensible way to do things and then there's the IE6 way of doing things. Both ways might be standards compliant, but the IE6 way is a big fat dirty hack which I shouldn't be forced to do. If IE7 had been released back when I started this project I could have said "I support Firefox, Opera and IE7, not IE6, go upgrade."
yeah, ie7 is already supported.. it's a lot more standards compliant than ie6 was.
of course, I would have prefered them to have released it before I bowed to management and hacked around all the non-standard shit in IE6 which IE7 fixes. urg!
The rules were made up by those lovely people at the International Standards Organisation. Apple has never gone through the process to get Macs certified as ISO 9000 approved manufacturing components. They focus on the home and small office market, they don't care about this stuff.
Not one that's ISO 9000 certified you havn't. Apple has never done the necessary paperwork to get Macs into this market. They don't care about this market. Now they've been bitten on the ass by this stance. That's the irony, aint it sweet.
Yeah, it's kinda funny that Macs are still not certified for use in manufacturing processes.
it's really simple, you press e (or select the elliptical select tool from the toolbox) click-hold where you want to start your circle, hold shift and drag the circle out, if you want a radic circle you hold control as well. Then once you have the circle you want (you can move it around with alt-drag), you click edit->Stroke selection, which brings up a dialog for selecting the tool you want to use for your circle, click stroke and voila, you have a circle
Wow, how can you argue with logic like that.
So, err, do we need some kind of international police force to keep the Internet clear of botnets? Should the UN run it? Do they get cool blue suits and have their own swat teams around the world?
I don't understand. You are aware there are versions of tar that are not GNU software and don't have this feature right?
That's the usual argument given by The Gimp developers. Drawing a circle is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect a bitmap manipulation program to do. Especially seeing as every other bitmap manipulation program does it.
hehe, you are aware that people hack car engine management systems right? I'm sure if more people owned personal aircraft they'd be hacking those too.
What a completely bogus argument.
So each camp makes their own version and the firefight continues. The result is lots of software. That's good.
You, like The Gimp developers, have absolutely no concept of UI design. Providing simple tools for common tasks and leaving complex tools for advanced users is a fundamental element of good UI design. Sigh.
See, what pisses me off is that I'm quite willing to write the code that lets me draw a circle the way I want to draw a circle, but the developers that control The Gimp source code reposistory are not willing to accept the patch, even though there's thousands of people just like me who want that feature. Why should I have to fork? Why can't they just not be pricks?
They're not at each other's throats enough to actually write code though. That's what tells you a flame war is in progress, lots of geeks writing code to prove their point of view.
As I've said in other places, there's plenty of developers who would love to add this stuff to The Gimp. There's even been forks of The Gimp which add this stuff. The problem is not that the users who are also developers don't want this stuff, the problem is that the developers who are in control of the source repository don't want these features.
So, you had your fair share of mod points and now you want someone else's mod points too?
Every six months I hear something about GTK+ on Mac.. but as far as I know it's still just a toy. Can't imagine why.. maybe Mac developers are just not interested in that kind of development?
Integrating The Gimp and Inkscape would be interesting.
What about someone touching up an icon? Not everyone uses bitmap manipulation software for the same thing as you.
Sometime in the future The Gimp developers will cave in and add a circle tool and you will hear a collective sigh of relief. When that happens, I hope you remember this discussion. Now fuck off.