The same technique is also used the other way around in audio sequencers like, for example, Cubase audio VST. If you can modify pitch without affecting timbre nor timing, you can modify timing without affecting the other two. And then you can do quantization over audio tracks if you properly identify notes (level spikes, edges, and so on). Quantization is putting each note where it should go (in time) given a resolution and a reference (metronome) and it is a very common practice in MIDI editing.
I don't agree with the point of mixing up these two: Globalization and 9/11 attack, I'll explain my view. For me, the attack MAY BE just "somebody doesn't like the things that the USA do out there", and I won't go into discussion about their licity although I would like to mention that I am in principle against any kind of violence and therefore neither I like the USA intrusism nor I like the attack.
Now for the globalization movement. I think that there are many different people with many different reasons to be against this "invention" out there. I am myself firmly against the globalization movement so I'll explain my reasons.
Ecological reasons:
It is stupid to ellaborate a biscuit in Spain (actually my home country) and sell it in Australia while ellaborating some other biscuits there in Australia to sell them in Spain, well understood that good conditions are given for the two countries to ellaborate their own biscuits using either cooking recipe. Full stop. Now a bit further. If doing this is convenient for many companies, as it is the case, then big warning: Something is wrong. And so we arrive to the next chapter, social reasons.
Social reasons:
(Or how these companies, the multinationals, do business.) So it is in fact convenient for many companies to manufacture their products far away, even spending much money in trasportation. It is simple to imagine (or perhaps not so simple) to what extent the worker is being exploited. The concept is so obvious that I won't explain it, I will just say that, at least in Europe, chances are that if you pick any article of clothing in a store and have a look, it has been manufactured in China or Korea. For a cup of rice. You may say: If we rejected to buy those, that people would die. No. If we did so, their corrupt governments could not take place and convenient social laws would be adopted, just in our privilleged countries.
Choice reasons:
We consumers lose our freedom of choice. You may say: If you prefer to pay more and avoid exploitation, well, you are free to do so and let people decide by their own instead of trying to ban globalization or anything. Wrong. If we haven't got the information, then it's impossible for us to know what is going on. It would be neccessary for every piece of product to have a hundred of stickers telling how, when and where it was manufactured, impossible, paranoid. The result would be pretty much the same as with the EULAs. To use the same example: WE THINK THAT "Write Your Own Damn Code" IS GOOD, BUT WE DON'T CARE ABOUT "Grow Your Own Vegetables". Or buy them to a near neighbour or at least NEAR, say in your home country. Not patriotism or anything, it is just that we know better what is going on AT HOME than far away.
My opinions are just opinions, and I am even often changing my views. But my point is that these reasons, wrong or right, make sense, I am not a hippy or anarchist but a design engineer, I LIKE to think. Therefore I don't like this link between the 9/11 attack and globalization.
If you find this interesting, this link may be of interest to you: Znet (Zmag), specially here.
You are right, and I fully agree. Choice is good and _if the software is free_, then you will have your drivers sooner or later. This is in fact what Linux has demonstrated, and this is what makes this story different from the one I first mentioned, that of OS/2 and Windows 3.1 (both closed software).
I don't care this kind of benchmarks IF I STILL CAN'T USE THE OS. I don't give a shit for a car going from 0 to 100 in 2 secs if nobody is selling the special fuel it needs to run.
If Linux, like Be, had no support for any of my hardware (network card, graphics card, CD-WR, sound card) it would also boot in 15 secs in my machine.
For example, some years ago I switched from OS/2 (awesome) to Windows 3.1 (crap) because of this. I was more or less "forced" by my hardware to do this switch.
Makes me remember the good old days of the fusion between Compaq and Tandem, you know, everybody wondering if the company would change its name to Tampaq or Condem:-)
So what this guy is telling us is that he wants to continue using his same Pentium laptop at good speed (why should speed decrease?) while having things like dithered fonts installed and so on. No that's not reasonable.
Being my fastest machine a Pentium-100, I think that it's just wonderful to see real modularity and interoperability in action: For example, front-ends are front-ends in Unix, and this means that I can toast an audio CD just fine on my 486, just use cdrecord instead of a nice frontend. Try this kind of story in the Windows world and you're screwed.
Also flexibility. This same 486 machine (to give an example) has no screen or keboard.. but it has an old network card and telnet. Again, try something similar in the MS world or any other world.
And still I can do sophisticated documents using vi to describe them. I can well imagine trying to run Windows 95 + Word to work with templates, huge images and so on with this 4 mb ram 486. vi runs great and then I compile and see the result with gv (remotely). Not damn quick but works great.
I really think that Linux is the best OS an old computer can run. And it is good and FAST.
BTW, somebody invent some virtual latin jazz band: say about 7 "robots" that play traditional drums, conga, trumpet, trombone, sax, acoustic bass, piano. All connected to a sequencer and all well distributed in the concerts room of your house. Now that's electronic music.
"there are still limitations to the power and ability of software synthesizers". Wow, really??
Nowadays, we listen music mostly coming from speakers, being CDs or radio at home or even live bands. I am sorry, but that is POOR. Absolutely poor in comparison with live music directly coming from instruments, even if we use a high end hifi.
Now. Synthesizers are often a good solution if we are producing music to be played by speakers. They produce nice sounds that "blend" nicely and create a good overall results. Even, talented musicians and composers can make good themes using ONLY synths.
But if you think that synths can even go close to musicians, go to a small club and listen some live music, hear that jazz trumpet directly from the brass to your ears, listen that cymbal at one side and that snare drum close next to it: No speaker membrane will vibrate as those two. Not trying to convince or anything. I have played electronic drums myself, getting good "recording" quality. But don't go with the electronics to a jazz cafe or anything because anything will sound POOR, even the state of the art Roland Virtual Drums. And I also play trumpet, and that HAS to be played even in recordings..
I care because MS is MS, so we can end up with phones that have default options that automatically connect to MS to upgrade the software of the phone (just like in late Windows', as recently appeared in Slashdot), add a new bug or who knows, while you pay for the transmission. And then pay for the soft upgrade via the monthy payment of your GSM provider thanks to an agreement with MS. I don't like MS for this kind of stories. I've escaped from MS by using free software in my computer and I would like to keep them away from my other devices.
Well, CDs actually degrade more than LPs (for example they are significantly affected by normal daylight), and they last several times less. Obviously, the big advantage is the possibility of making exact copies of the original information each 5 years if you like.
The interesting point is that, due to the much more dynamic range and cutoff freq of the LP, if you take care over your LPs, their playing quality after 50 years of playing it will still be much better than with a CD. So you could always obtain a CD from a LP over the years and still get the highest quality a CD can give (providing you have the neccessary, expensive hardware to do the copy).
I think this observation could apply to many if not all the storage systems which are comparable: Photo CD vs film, DVD vs film, etc, although my experience is only for audio.
People interested in these copy protection technologies worry about the mass consumer, not the consumer demanding high quality music. Just about any soundcard has nowadays enough recording quality for the mass consumer. The majority of Turtle Beach soundcards (even the old ones) have enough quality for almost anyone, moreover, and they are cheap.
As we have the natural right to do so, let's plug our audio CD player to our soundcard with one of those RCA to jack cables and that's it. AND ANYWAY: If any of our audio hardware is poor, then bad luck you artist, your music will sound poor for ALL that guests in my next party at home and then all those friends of mine will not buy your music.
By reading How CDs work I came to the conclusion that CDROM readers collect the data stored in a CDROM in a quite different way than audio CD players use to collect data stored in an audio CD. This is because the binary data stream actually stored by the continuous laser beam has very different formats, mainly due to the implemented error detection and or correction schemes. Thus, their internal digital electronics do different things INTERNALLY (internal microcontrollers and so). Moreover, any of us who has used one of those copiers that broke the protections of that old 5.25" diskettes containing self-loading games in the '80s know that usually it gets more complicated that copying bit by bit.
I've also written several docs using Word and then decided to switch to some reasonable doc writting software.
I looked for reasonably easy to learn WYSIWYM tools, much easier than TeX if possible. I finally chose Lout, which is a small (times smaller that TeX based stuff) nice typesetter included in Debian GNU/Linux. I believe that it can be your solution also.
I use a PC to record audio out of home, often carrying a 14" display. I do so because I like my good old ISA Turtle Beach Tahiti. I see no reason to swith to another card as it is extremely high quality AND it moves data really really fast (my 486 mixes 3 simultaneous 44.1 kHz 16 bit reading them in real time from a normal IDE HD while recording the 4th one AND running a sequencer also, everything under Windown 3.11).
I've been thinking on two different approaches to avoid carrying the display. I've tested the first one and it works.
1. PC CPU (box) with your favourite soundcard + laptop, say some Pentium. Linux w/ X11 and ethernet cards (100 Mb) on both. Run your music software in the PC and export the display to the laptop. I've run something like this myself, being the PC a 486 and using 10 Mb ether, I've been able to run "soundtracker" which is just a tracker (hey, I said a 486). I believe this would work with serious music devel software, say octave.
2. I've been told (could anyone confirm this??) that PCMCIA is actually ISA, ie signals are the same, only physical differences (connector, housing) or at worst just voltage levels change. If this is so, "one" could just build (and eventually design and sell) some adaptor box to plug an ISA card directly to a laptop, perhaps it can be even passive or some simple buffering electronics.
Makes no sense. I've just calculated the names of the notes generated by DTMF tones. I've found that, for example, the freq of 1209 Hz used by digits 1, 4, 7, and * is exactly BETWEEN D and D#. Therefore, you just can't say that 4 equals to D# + G as it is displayed at their site because definitely it doesn't sound as that to ANY ear, definitely anything but perhaps 697 and 1477 Hz (digit 3 is just those) will sound "unacceptable" if we assume our classical approach to tones as they've assumed. That translation is just WRONG and we are NOT playing those melodies shown at their site when we dial unless our number is 33-333333 or something. Every other freq is just too far of a note, believe me. It is not a matter of deviation from the freq in %, it is a matter of semitones. The freq of a note is equal to 440 Hz multiplied by 2^(s/12) being s the number of semitones that you are far from note A. If you calculate s for each DTMF freq, you will see that 1209 Hz is 17.50 semitones above A, which is exactly between D and D#.
Slashdot Mirror
The same technique is also used the other way around in audio sequencers like, for example, Cubase audio VST. If you can modify pitch without affecting timbre nor timing, you can modify timing without affecting the other two. And then you can do quantization over audio tracks if you properly identify notes (level spikes, edges, and so on). Quantization is putting each note where it should go (in time) given a resolution and a reference (metronome) and it is a very common practice in MIDI editing.
I don't agree with the point of mixing up these two: Globalization and 9/11 attack, I'll explain my view. For me, the attack MAY BE just "somebody doesn't like the things that the USA do out there", and I won't go into discussion about their licity although I would like to mention that I am in principle against any kind of violence and therefore neither I like the USA intrusism nor I like the attack.
Now for the globalization movement. I think that there are many different people with many different reasons to be against this "invention" out there. I am myself firmly against the globalization movement so I'll explain my reasons.
Ecological reasons:
It is stupid to ellaborate a biscuit in Spain (actually my home country) and sell it in Australia while ellaborating some other biscuits there in Australia to sell them in Spain, well understood that good conditions are given for the two countries to ellaborate their own biscuits using either cooking recipe. Full stop. Now a bit further. If doing this is convenient for many companies, as it is the case, then big warning: Something is wrong. And so we arrive to the next chapter, social reasons.
Social reasons:
(Or how these companies, the multinationals, do business.) So it is in fact convenient for many companies to manufacture their products far away, even spending much money in trasportation. It is simple to imagine (or perhaps not so simple) to what extent the worker is being exploited. The concept is so obvious that I won't explain it, I will just say that, at least in Europe, chances are that if you pick any article of clothing in a store and have a look, it has been manufactured in China or Korea. For a cup of rice. You may say: If we rejected to buy those, that people would die. No. If we did so, their corrupt governments could not take place and convenient social laws would be adopted, just in our privilleged countries.
Choice reasons:
We consumers lose our freedom of choice. You may say: If you prefer to pay more and avoid exploitation, well, you are free to do so and let people decide by their own instead of trying to ban globalization or anything. Wrong. If we haven't got the information, then it's impossible for us to know what is going on. It would be neccessary for every piece of product to have a hundred of stickers telling how, when and where it was manufactured, impossible, paranoid. The result would be pretty much the same as with the EULAs. To use the same example: WE THINK THAT "Write Your Own Damn Code" IS GOOD, BUT WE DON'T CARE ABOUT "Grow Your Own Vegetables". Or buy them to a near neighbour or at least NEAR, say in your home country. Not patriotism or anything, it is just that we know better what is going on AT HOME than far away.
Economical reasons:
Read this: World Bank Secret Documents Consumes Argentina
My opinions are just opinions, and I am even often changing my views. But my point is that these reasons, wrong or right, make sense, I am not a hippy or anarchist but a design engineer, I LIKE to think. Therefore I don't like this link between the 9/11 attack and globalization.
If you find this interesting, this link may be of interest to you: Znet (Zmag), specially here.
VAlinux + GIgabyte + Nvidia + Amd ??? VAGINA???
You are right, and I fully agree. Choice is good and _if the software is free_, then you will have your drivers sooner or later. This is in fact what Linux has demonstrated, and this is what makes this story different from the one I first mentioned, that of OS/2 and Windows 3.1 (both closed software).
I don't care this kind of benchmarks IF I STILL CAN'T USE THE OS. I don't give a shit for a car going from 0 to 100 in 2 secs if nobody is selling the special fuel it needs to run.
If Linux, like Be, had no support for any of my hardware (network card, graphics card, CD-WR, sound card) it would also boot in 15 secs in my machine.
For example, some years ago I switched from OS/2 (awesome) to Windows 3.1 (crap) because of this. I was more or less "forced" by my hardware to do this switch.
Portanto? Sobretudo? Obrigatoriamente? GARANTINDO??
:-DDD
Venga coño..
Makes me remember the good old days of the fusion between Compaq and Tandem, you know, everybody wondering if the company would change its name to Tampaq or Condem :-)
So what this guy is telling us is that he wants to continue using his same Pentium laptop at good speed (why should speed decrease?) while having things like dithered fonts installed and so on. No that's not reasonable.
Being my fastest machine a Pentium-100, I think that it's just wonderful to see real modularity and interoperability in action: For example, front-ends are front-ends in Unix, and this means that I can toast an audio CD just fine on my 486, just use cdrecord instead of a nice frontend. Try this kind of story in the Windows world and you're screwed.
Also flexibility. This same 486 machine (to give an example) has no screen or keboard.. but it has an old network card and telnet. Again, try something similar in the MS world or any other world.
And still I can do sophisticated documents using vi to describe them. I can well imagine trying to run Windows 95 + Word to work with templates, huge images and so on with this 4 mb ram 486. vi runs great and then I compile and see the result with gv (remotely). Not damn quick but works great.
I really think that Linux is the best OS an old computer can run. And it is good and FAST.
Also it is an adjective, but anyway I found your post quite-a-music-ng.
So a friend of yours has a good password and you reveal it to everybody in the world!! What kind of friend are you!!
BTW, somebody invent some virtual latin jazz band: say about 7 "robots" that play traditional drums, conga, trumpet, trombone, sax, acoustic bass, piano. All connected to a sequencer and all well distributed in the concerts room of your house. Now that's electronic music.
"there are still limitations to the power and ability of software synthesizers". Wow, really??
Nowadays, we listen music mostly coming from speakers, being CDs or radio at home or even live bands. I am sorry, but that is POOR. Absolutely poor in comparison with live music directly coming from instruments, even if we use a high end hifi.
Now. Synthesizers are often a good solution if we are producing music to be played by speakers. They produce nice sounds that "blend" nicely and create a good overall results. Even, talented musicians and composers can make good themes using ONLY synths.
But if you think that synths can even go close to musicians, go to a small club and listen some live music, hear that jazz trumpet directly from the brass to your ears, listen that cymbal at one side and that snare drum close next to it: No speaker membrane will vibrate as those two. Not trying to convince or anything. I have played electronic drums myself, getting good "recording" quality. But don't go with the electronics to a jazz cafe or anything because anything will sound POOR, even the state of the art Roland Virtual Drums. And I also play trumpet, and that HAS to be played even in recordings..
So yes, there are STILL some limitations.
Amazing. But still it's much more fun to play GALAXIAN, which is also about a spaceship but lacks all that super incredible features.
MAME is just great, great.
Dear Mr. Schlock,
[Clippy: Excuse me, it looks like you're writing a letter!]
"FUCK!!!"
(
And it all ends up with an email being automagically sent to that schlock@somewhere which reads:
Dear Mr. Schlock,
Fuck.
)
It works like a deep space compass :-O
I care because MS is MS, so we can end up with phones that have default options that automatically connect to MS to upgrade the software of the phone (just like in late Windows', as recently appeared in Slashdot), add a new bug or who knows, while you pay for the transmission. And then pay for the soft upgrade via the monthy payment of your GSM provider thanks to an agreement with MS. I don't like MS for this kind of stories. I've escaped from MS by using free software in my computer and I would like to keep them away from my other devices.
"It takes 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Dividing the whole 9 months in time slices and assigning a woman to each is what we call pipelining..
Well, CDs actually degrade more than LPs (for example they are significantly affected by normal daylight), and they last several times less. Obviously, the big advantage is the possibility of making exact copies of the original information each 5 years if you like.
The interesting point is that, due to the much more dynamic range and cutoff freq of the LP, if you take care over your LPs, their playing quality after 50 years of playing it will still be much better than with a CD. So you could always obtain a CD from a LP over the years and still get the highest quality a CD can give (providing you have the neccessary, expensive hardware to do the copy).
I think this observation could apply to many if not all the storage systems which are comparable: Photo CD vs film, DVD vs film, etc, although my experience is only for audio.
Pretty much like the junkbuster..
People interested in these copy protection technologies worry about the mass consumer, not the consumer demanding high quality music. Just about any soundcard has nowadays enough recording quality for the mass consumer. The majority of Turtle Beach soundcards (even the old ones) have enough quality for almost anyone, moreover, and they are cheap.
As we have the natural right to do so, let's plug our audio CD player to our soundcard with one of those RCA to jack cables and that's it. AND ANYWAY: If any of our audio hardware is poor, then bad luck you artist, your music will sound poor for ALL that guests in my next party at home and then all those friends of mine will not buy your music.
Too bad we will not be able to copy at 16x..
By reading How CDs work I came to the conclusion that CDROM readers collect the data stored in a CDROM in a quite different way than audio CD players use to collect data stored in an audio CD. This is because the binary data stream actually stored by the continuous laser beam has very different formats, mainly due to the implemented error detection and or correction schemes. Thus, their internal digital electronics do different things INTERNALLY (internal microcontrollers and so). Moreover, any of us who has used one of those copiers that broke the protections of that old 5.25" diskettes containing self-loading games in the '80s know that usually it gets more complicated that copying bit by bit.
Oh is it?
I've also written several docs using Word and then decided to switch to some reasonable doc writting software. I looked for reasonably easy to learn WYSIWYM tools, much easier than TeX if possible. I finally chose Lout, which is a small (times smaller that TeX based stuff) nice typesetter included in Debian GNU/Linux. I believe that it can be your solution also.
I use a PC to record audio out of home, often carrying a 14" display. I do so because I like my good old ISA Turtle Beach Tahiti. I see no reason to swith to another card as it is extremely high quality AND it moves data really really fast (my 486 mixes 3 simultaneous 44.1 kHz 16 bit reading them in real time from a normal IDE HD while recording the 4th one AND running a sequencer also, everything under Windown 3.11).
I've been thinking on two different approaches to avoid carrying the display. I've tested the first one and it works.
1. PC CPU (box) with your favourite soundcard + laptop, say some Pentium. Linux w/ X11 and ethernet cards (100 Mb) on both. Run your music software in the PC and export the display to the laptop. I've run something like this myself, being the PC a 486 and using 10 Mb ether, I've been able to run "soundtracker" which is just a tracker (hey, I said a 486). I believe this would work with serious music devel software, say octave.
2. I've been told (could anyone confirm this??) that PCMCIA is actually ISA, ie signals are the same, only physical differences (connector, housing) or at worst just voltage levels change. If this is so, "one" could just build (and eventually design and sell) some adaptor box to plug an ISA card directly to a laptop, perhaps it can be even passive or some simple buffering electronics.
Please tell me what you thing..
Makes no sense. I've just calculated the names of the notes generated by DTMF tones. I've found that, for example, the freq of 1209 Hz used by digits 1, 4, 7, and * is exactly BETWEEN D and D#. Therefore, you just can't say that 4 equals to D# + G as it is displayed at their site because definitely it doesn't sound as that to ANY ear, definitely anything but perhaps 697 and 1477 Hz (digit 3 is just those) will sound "unacceptable" if we assume our classical approach to tones as they've assumed. That translation is just WRONG and we are NOT playing those melodies shown at their site when we dial unless our number is 33-333333 or something. Every other freq is just too far of a note, believe me. It is not a matter of deviation from the freq in %, it is a matter of semitones. The freq of a note is equal to 440 Hz multiplied by 2^(s/12) being s the number of semitones that you are far from note A. If you calculate s for each DTMF freq, you will see that 1209 Hz is 17.50 semitones above A, which is exactly between D and D#.