Of the five Dell laptops between my wife and I since 2003, only one of them had any kind of fault (the fan/heat sink on the 5150 laptop had a nasty habit of storing compressed dust in a way that would make the processor overheat after 5-10 minutes of use) and they sent out a recall for that. We've had that many laptops only because we got greedy for speed. We gutted the 5150 and sold it for parts, and have a pair of older, perfectly capable laptops sitting around collecting dust.
I'm on my second Dell desktop, bought my first one in 2002, and it ran like a tank, and I only ended up replacing it in 2008 because I wanted something faster. My wife's Dell desktop has likewise been great to work with. We just bought a Dell Zino HD to run Hulu and Netflix on the TV. What's even better is that every single one of these machines (except for my 2002 desktop) was a refurb or scratch and dent from the Outlet, so I paid maybe 70% of the normal price.
One time a client I worked with ordered eight Dell desktops in an effort to update his office. One of the monitors was a little wonky - I called up Dell, and they overnighted a new monitor.
Just because I have had a really good experience with Dell doesn't mean I think everyone else is full of it - a friend of mine did laptop repair for a living and swears Dell are crap. However, given my experience, I still recommend Dell to my friends.
Why is it no one talks about layered audio when praising HTML5? I've got this silly but fun idea in my head to fully emulate a Boss DR-110 drum machine in Flash. It's not terribly complicated, and I could probably do a LOT of it in HTML and Javascript, except when it comes to audio playback. Granted, I've only done cursory searches, but from what I can tell, playing back six channels of audio simultaneously is not something I can easily do in HTML5/HTML/Javascript. Major show-stopper, that.
The other nice thing about Flash is that I can easily block it. Yes, with Greasemonkey you can block out HTML as is necessary, but NoScript is so much easier to use off the bat.
That's not even touching on technology like Flash Media Server - are there any equivalent server packages that would be as functional in delivering content to HTML5 applications?
My wife got me tickets to Video Games Live a couple of years ago, and we drove to Buffalo (the closest venue at the time) from Philadelphia for the show. While it was pretty cool to see, I was actually kind of disappointed that the performance was amplified and overused backing tracks (I'm not against prerecorded stuff, but use it sparingly please), and really didn't like when that guy came out on stage to wank off on his guitar in front of the orchestra during the final piece.
I guess I was expecting something sonically closer to the "Orchestral Game Music Concerts" performed in Japan in the 90s.
Still, it was quite a spectacle, and it's probably the only chance I'll have of seeing some of my favorite childhood music performed by an orchestra, even if what came out of the speakers was manipulated and pumped up beyond my taste. If you're into video game music, it's definitely something you should go see.
But even 180gm vinyl won't have the same dynamic headroom that a CD has. There was an excellent post on Slashdot about the physical impossibility of a record more accurately reproducing a recording when compared to a CD.
...from earlier in the thread, where I directly compare a modern vinyl release to it's CD equivalent, and the vinyl is actually MORE compressed than the CD. Here's the post. The funny bit is that the vinyl came with a digital download of 320kbps MP3s that were sourced from a vinyl copy of the album. That's a fidelity double whammy, isn't it? Lower dynamic range from vinyl, compressed to MP3? (If you don't end up reading my other post, I bought the vinyl because it was $5 more than the digital download)
I bought the Them Crooked Vultures vinyl because it was $5 more than buying the MP3s - and it came with a download of 320kbps MP3s ripped from the vinyl. Out of curiosity, I downloaded CD-sourced FLACs via nefarious means, opened in SoundForge the FLACs, the 320kbps MP3s, and a copy of the vinyl I made from my own turntable running into an M-Audio ProjectMix I/O.
I then took screenshots of the waveforms of these recordings, and overlayed them in Photoshop, setting the overlay to 'difference' and it was pretty clear that the vinyl was actually compressed MORE than the CD version. The second track in the 320kbps vinyl-sourced MP3s also seems to have a big piece of dust on it in the very beginning.
I don't have them online (and I'm at work right now and can't get them) but you can see that I did a similar process here when Nine Inch Nails released a remastered version of The Downward Spiral
The mix on Them Crooked Vultures vinyl is definitely different than the CD - in that if there were a loudness war on, the vinyl would win that battle. If you had made that point with a record I didn't have, I wouldn't really be able to refute your point, but in this specific case, your loudness wars argument does not hold up. CDs have immensely better dynamic range and frequency response than vinyl, and most of the time, vinyl is pressed from CDs anyway.
When a band saves up enough to pay for a producer and sound engineer, they can hire your brother. Bands and artists don't need studio time and mixing time the way they used to - you can handle a LOT of that yourself at a fraction of the cost, thanks to inexpensive recording hardware and software. Won't sound as good as a well practiced producer? Some of my favorite music sounds like balls from an engineering standpoint. In fact, as bands get more and more budget and afford better production, more often than not, the actual quality of the music goes downhill anyway.
As far as record labels getting a cut of ISP fees, that's a bogus argument. When I pay for DRM-free MP3s from Amazon, the label gets MORE than their fair cut, same as it ever was. They've been making money hand over foot, and rather than reinvesting it into researching decent business models, they pocketed the money, financed their own lavish lifestyles.
Yes, I pay for my internet connection. Websites pay their hosting bills. No one deserves a cut of that unless they're providing me with an extra service. That whining sound that comes out of buggy-whip vendors, I'm sorry, the established music industry, that's the sound of an overinflated sense of entitlement being emitted by greedy, short-sighted people out of touch with reality.
You're upset about ESPN360? I don't even know what that is, but apparently ESPN has their thinking caps on where the RIAA sat on their thumbs.
Government workers, lawyers. Heh. Maybe not so much Pittsburgh to Harrisburg, but definitely Philly to Harrisburg. And I've taken that route myself a couple times, when I felt like having someone else drive, rather than spend the effort on the turnpike.
I lived in Downingtown, 3 blocks from the R5 station there. Took it into Center City and took the subway to 2nd street where my web dev job is. It actually took a little bit longer than driving into the city, but is so much cheaper.
Yes, Regional Rail's subsidized - so are airlines, highways, basically any other method of transportation. Yes, upgrades to Amtrak will be expensive - but a drop in the bucket compared to all the money we've spent in Iraq.
I'm pretty sure they were headphones for some festival staffer. They did not become mine until after the show. I was wearing earplugs, and standing to the side. I'm not a huge Rage fan, but there was a car-crash kind of fixation I had on watching the stream of defeated people as they poured out of the pit. Apparently people outside the festival had jumped the fence to get into the show, as well.
All that's beside the point: Maybe the guy I was replying to had bad luck, but in my experience, Sennheisers are very rugged. I bought a spare headphone cable for my HD-500s when I bought them back in 2001 or so, but I haven't needed it.
Not that I doubt you've had trouble, but I thought I'd chime in with a fun story about hardy Sennheisers.
I have a pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pros that I picked up off the grass at Lollapalooza after the Rage Against the Machine set. One of the ear cushions was missing, and a piece of plastic was gone from the other side. It was much to my surprise that when I got them home and plugged them in, they worked fine. The replacement ear cushions ran $30 from B&M, and were a royal pain to get on, but now these things are as good as new.
THEY SURVIVED THE PIT AT A RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE CONCERT AT A PACKED (75,000) FESTIVAL. Kind of solidified my already established respect for the brand.
I have a pair of HD-5somethings (not sure where they are right now) that I've had for years too. Bought them because the cable is removable - I was tired of buying headphones over and over again because I would bork the cable.
"Will eventually get equal in price" -- Right, the same way CDs will become cheaper than cassettes because they are cheaper to manufacture. Eventually.
Exactly! For most of the population who is even aware of the Mona Lisa, finding a free JPG of it on the Internet is all they'll ever need. Maybe they'll set it as their desktop wallpaper.
Maybe some of them will be inspired by the JPG to go and buy a $5 poster of the Mona Lisa. Some might buy a more expensive print that perhaps better matches the color of the original, maybe spending as much as $30.
And then there are the truly hardcore, who will spend money on plane and/or train tickets to go see the ACTUAL Mona Lisa.
For most people, an MP3 is good enough. Some people would rather pay a little bit extra to get a higher quality copy, be it FLAC or CD or a DualDisc or SACD or whatever. Still others will not be satisfied unless they can go see the band in concert, and come home with a shirt.
The selection at Bleep is a bit more eclectic than Amazon, with its main selection being drawn from the catalog of Warp Records. Some of the better known artists from that roster include Squarepusher, Autechre, Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert, etc. The music is generally hard to describe, a lot of it instrumental. You can preview the tracks using a little flash player they've got. I've bought a number of things through Bleep and the whole process was very pleasant. Also, they have been known to offer FLAC downloads. I doubt you'll be seeing that on Amazon or eMusic anytime soon.
I'm not sure it's really a fair comparison, Amazon vs. Bleep, just because the target audiences differ quite widely.
That's funny! At one time I thought the same thing. Anecdote: I was going through the tedious task of ripping my CDs, and after going through my collection of Nine Inch Nails and Autechre discs, I got the bright idea that instead of ripping my Aphex Twin collection, I'd just download a torrent. Same end result, right? I figured Aphex Twin fans would be fairly careful about audio fidelity, so I grabbed a torrent of some giganto Aphex Twin collection.
The end result was all over the map. Sure, there were a number of albums that were alright, some of them were terrible, with skips and low bitrates and mistitled songs, not to mention whole albums of "rare and unreleased" mislabeled garbage that wasn't even by Aphex Twin. I would have better spent my time continuing to rip them myself.
Alternatively, if I didn't already own the CDs, I would have happily bought large chunks of the Aphex Twin catalog from Bleep.com, which has been doing the DRM-free $1 MP3 download thing for over three years now.
Yeah, my car's stereo has a "Loud" button too (It's the one that makes everything quieter, huh huh.) I believe they're more of a EQ'd volume boost than a form of compression. The mids get scooped and the overall volume is increased. This is not really the kind of compression I was talking about.
don't get me wrong here, I have spent more on a single pair of headphones than most people spend on their entire stereo setup, and while I am a fan of high fidelity recording (or, in some cases, synthesis, really), in some cases I either want the music to be loud and dirty, or the music is good enough that the fidelity doesn't even matter. The general public is even less concerned! Do you think anyone really gives a hoot that the production on a song like "Hips don't Lie" is TERRIBLE? I'm sure the dynamic range has been crushed on its way from ProTools to that shiny CD, err, MP3 even.
I appreciate the lengths some modern recording artists go to in order to create dynamic, intricate recordings (nine inch nails' The Fragile comes to mind, or the 10th anniversary edition of The Downward Spiral) but I also like listening to the likes of The Mummies and Mr Oizo (who publishes under "one speaker is enough" music, iirc).
I have long thought that it would be best if label-produced albums preserved the appropriate amount of dynamic range, leaving compression up to consumer devices. I realize that built-in EQ and reverb settings on stereos don't set a particularly good precedent, but give me a tv and a stereo (in the car too!) with a pair of compressor knobs, please. When those poorly mastered tracks from 80 CDs turn up in the playlist, squash away! When the too-quiet movie switches to the overly compressed car salesman ad, handle that appropriately! The hardware and software are out there.
If you listen to the bleepy-bloopy stuff, it's evident he didn't re-record it. Back when computers couldn't handle more than three notes of polyphony, musicians would get around the inability to chord by playing the notes in the chord in rapid succession. You'd have a hard time convincing me that Timbaland took that track, time-shifted it to extrapolate the notes of the chord, so that he could punch it back into his sequencer so that he could play it back on his Korg.
It's not like he liked three bass notes in the demo track, and re-recorded them with an electric bass.
Tempest's post on Digg clarifies it better, but yeah, he didn't re-record this. Might have done some overdubs, but I'm fairly sure the original's in there.
Hang on, rock music isn't out of style? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Have you had a look at the Billboard Top 100 lately? Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of rock. I even play in a crappy punk band. (Misfits/Ramones crappy punk, not Blink 182/Avril Lavigne crappy punk) However, I know that what I do is really silly, and terribly out of style. It had a nice shot in the arm around 1993, but as a whole, the rock scene has been fairly crappy since ~2000. How many rock records even go multi-platinum anymore?
Rock may not be dead, but it's about as fashionable as wearing combat boots. People probably won't look at you funny for it, and people will always be wearing some form of combat boots as everyday footwear, but it's definitely out of style.
After years without trouble, my website (a rather large fan news site for a rock band) started getting hit by form bots. It was really, really annoying, and I considered implementing captchas, or something. Initially, I blocked form entries that had any hint of HTML, BBCode, Javascript, etc. That worked for about a week. Then I came across an idea that may not work for everyone, but certainly worked great for me:
In the PHP code for the site, I set it to check for the referrer, and if it's not from my own domain, then bounce the bot back to the front page. The logic behind this: No one bookmarks my "News Submission" page. People always browse there. Once I started checking for a referrer, the spam completely stopped. There was no extra step that my viewers had to take, it happened without anyone outside of my staff noticing a change.
I realize this is a temporary solution, and just posting about it increases the chance that someone will read about it and crack it, but it sure has been a nice reprieve. What's ridiculous is that form doesn't post anywhere. It sends me and about six other people an email, and the post never really sees the light of day in its original form.
I'll copy a comment I made somewhere else on this topic.
RIAA screws the artists. AllOfMP3.com screws the artists.
WARP's Bleep.com is DRM free, sometimes available as lossless, and label-direct, with the artist getting half the album or track price. As a plus, the music's all very unusual, you're bound to hear something new there.
thresholdhouse.com also sells directly, both in FLAC and MP3, DRM-free.
The future is neither the villainous RIAA nor the equally villainous AllOfMp3.com style organizations -- individual labels, or even individual artists, should be able to promote themselves well enough that these in-between organizations aren't necessary anymore.
Given a central outlet such as iTunes, the likes of the RIAA are due to be obsoleted. However, sites like AllOfMP3.com aren't going to help that kind of revolution. Good riddance.
Ironically, I only validate my hobby site for XHTML/CSS2 strict compliance. I like to pretend that it keeps me on my toes. However, I don't actually design any of the sites I work on at my job, and they're done entirely in Visual Studio, which makes them entirely unfriendly to standards. I realize this is a lame excuse, but it is far too time consuming, and our clients generally do not care. I obviously am aware of all the benefits, given the attention I've paid compliance via my large-ish hobby sites, but there's not enough motivation to adhere to that in our developing environment.
I might as well add that my happy-go-fun sites run PHP/Perl/MySQL on Apache, and the sites I get paid for run asp.net on IIS.
Slashdot Mirror
Of the five Dell laptops between my wife and I since 2003, only one of them had any kind of fault (the fan/heat sink on the 5150 laptop had a nasty habit of storing compressed dust in a way that would make the processor overheat after 5-10 minutes of use) and they sent out a recall for that. We've had that many laptops only because we got greedy for speed. We gutted the 5150 and sold it for parts, and have a pair of older, perfectly capable laptops sitting around collecting dust.
I'm on my second Dell desktop, bought my first one in 2002, and it ran like a tank, and I only ended up replacing it in 2008 because I wanted something faster. My wife's Dell desktop has likewise been great to work with. We just bought a Dell Zino HD to run Hulu and Netflix on the TV. What's even better is that every single one of these machines (except for my 2002 desktop) was a refurb or scratch and dent from the Outlet, so I paid maybe 70% of the normal price.
One time a client I worked with ordered eight Dell desktops in an effort to update his office. One of the monitors was a little wonky - I called up Dell, and they overnighted a new monitor.
Just because I have had a really good experience with Dell doesn't mean I think everyone else is full of it - a friend of mine did laptop repair for a living and swears Dell are crap. However, given my experience, I still recommend Dell to my friends.
Why is it no one talks about layered audio when praising HTML5? I've got this silly but fun idea in my head to fully emulate a Boss DR-110 drum machine in Flash. It's not terribly complicated, and I could probably do a LOT of it in HTML and Javascript, except when it comes to audio playback. Granted, I've only done cursory searches, but from what I can tell, playing back six channels of audio simultaneously is not something I can easily do in HTML5/HTML/Javascript. Major show-stopper, that.
The other nice thing about Flash is that I can easily block it. Yes, with Greasemonkey you can block out HTML as is necessary, but NoScript is so much easier to use off the bat.
That's not even touching on technology like Flash Media Server - are there any equivalent server packages that would be as functional in delivering content to HTML5 applications?
My wife got me tickets to Video Games Live a couple of years ago, and we drove to Buffalo (the closest venue at the time) from Philadelphia for the show. While it was pretty cool to see, I was actually kind of disappointed that the performance was amplified and overused backing tracks (I'm not against prerecorded stuff, but use it sparingly please), and really didn't like when that guy came out on stage to wank off on his guitar in front of the orchestra during the final piece.
I guess I was expecting something sonically closer to the "Orchestral Game Music Concerts" performed in Japan in the 90s.
Still, it was quite a spectacle, and it's probably the only chance I'll have of seeing some of my favorite childhood music performed by an orchestra, even if what came out of the speakers was manipulated and pumped up beyond my taste. If you're into video game music, it's definitely something you should go see.
But even 180gm vinyl won't have the same dynamic headroom that a CD has. There was an excellent post on Slashdot about the physical impossibility of a record more accurately reproducing a recording when compared to a CD.
...from earlier in the thread, where I directly compare a modern vinyl release to it's CD equivalent, and the vinyl is actually MORE compressed than the CD. Here's the post. The funny bit is that the vinyl came with a digital download of 320kbps MP3s that were sourced from a vinyl copy of the album. That's a fidelity double whammy, isn't it? Lower dynamic range from vinyl, compressed to MP3? (If you don't end up reading my other post, I bought the vinyl because it was $5 more than the digital download)
I bought the Them Crooked Vultures vinyl because it was $5 more than buying the MP3s - and it came with a download of 320kbps MP3s ripped from the vinyl. Out of curiosity, I downloaded CD-sourced FLACs via nefarious means, opened in SoundForge the FLACs, the 320kbps MP3s, and a copy of the vinyl I made from my own turntable running into an M-Audio ProjectMix I/O.
I then took screenshots of the waveforms of these recordings, and overlayed them in Photoshop, setting the overlay to 'difference' and it was pretty clear that the vinyl was actually compressed MORE than the CD version. The second track in the 320kbps vinyl-sourced MP3s also seems to have a big piece of dust on it in the very beginning.
I don't have them online (and I'm at work right now and can't get them) but you can see that I did a similar process here when Nine Inch Nails released a remastered version of The Downward Spiral
The mix on Them Crooked Vultures vinyl is definitely different than the CD - in that if there were a loudness war on, the vinyl would win that battle. If you had made that point with a record I didn't have, I wouldn't really be able to refute your point, but in this specific case, your loudness wars argument does not hold up. CDs have immensely better dynamic range and frequency response than vinyl, and most of the time, vinyl is pressed from CDs anyway.
When a band saves up enough to pay for a producer and sound engineer, they can hire your brother. Bands and artists don't need studio time and mixing time the way they used to - you can handle a LOT of that yourself at a fraction of the cost, thanks to inexpensive recording hardware and software. Won't sound as good as a well practiced producer? Some of my favorite music sounds like balls from an engineering standpoint. In fact, as bands get more and more budget and afford better production, more often than not, the actual quality of the music goes downhill anyway.
As far as record labels getting a cut of ISP fees, that's a bogus argument. When I pay for DRM-free MP3s from Amazon, the label gets MORE than their fair cut, same as it ever was. They've been making money hand over foot, and rather than reinvesting it into researching decent business models, they pocketed the money, financed their own lavish lifestyles.
Yes, I pay for my internet connection. Websites pay their hosting bills. No one deserves a cut of that unless they're providing me with an extra service. That whining sound that comes out of buggy-whip vendors, I'm sorry, the established music industry, that's the sound of an overinflated sense of entitlement being emitted by greedy, short-sighted people out of touch with reality.
You're upset about ESPN360? I don't even know what that is, but apparently ESPN has their thinking caps on where the RIAA sat on their thumbs.
Duh :p
Where is the demand for that route?
Government workers, lawyers. Heh. Maybe not so much Pittsburgh to Harrisburg, but definitely Philly to Harrisburg. And I've taken that route myself a couple times, when I felt like having someone else drive, rather than spend the effort on the turnpike.
I lived in Downingtown, 3 blocks from the R5 station there. Took it into Center City and took the subway to 2nd street where my web dev job is. It actually took a little bit longer than driving into the city, but is so much cheaper.
Yes, Regional Rail's subsidized - so are airlines, highways, basically any other method of transportation. Yes, upgrades to Amtrak will be expensive - but a drop in the bucket compared to all the money we've spent in Iraq.
I'm pretty sure they were headphones for some festival staffer. They did not become mine until after the show. I was wearing earplugs, and standing to the side. I'm not a huge Rage fan, but there was a car-crash kind of fixation I had on watching the stream of defeated people as they poured out of the pit. Apparently people outside the festival had jumped the fence to get into the show, as well.
All that's beside the point: Maybe the guy I was replying to had bad luck, but in my experience, Sennheisers are very rugged. I bought a spare headphone cable for my HD-500s when I bought them back in 2001 or so, but I haven't needed it.
Not that I doubt you've had trouble, but I thought I'd chime in with a fun story about hardy Sennheisers. I have a pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pros that I picked up off the grass at Lollapalooza after the Rage Against the Machine set. One of the ear cushions was missing, and a piece of plastic was gone from the other side. It was much to my surprise that when I got them home and plugged them in, they worked fine. The replacement ear cushions ran $30 from B&M, and were a royal pain to get on, but now these things are as good as new. THEY SURVIVED THE PIT AT A RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE CONCERT AT A PACKED (75,000) FESTIVAL. Kind of solidified my already established respect for the brand. I have a pair of HD-5somethings (not sure where they are right now) that I've had for years too. Bought them because the cable is removable - I was tired of buying headphones over and over again because I would bork the cable.
Metallica, the forefront of bands distributing content online? When did Trent Reznor join Metallica?
What about Nine Inch Nails -and- a Stonehenge replica, circa 1994? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWw-4I4WUv0 (about 15 seconds in)
"Will eventually get equal in price" -- Right, the same way CDs will become cheaper than cassettes because they are cheaper to manufacture. Eventually.
"It's like settling for a JPG of the Mona Lisa."
Exactly! For most of the population who is even aware of the Mona Lisa, finding a free JPG of it on the Internet is all they'll ever need. Maybe they'll set it as their desktop wallpaper.
Maybe some of them will be inspired by the JPG to go and buy a $5 poster of the Mona Lisa. Some might buy a more expensive print that perhaps better matches the color of the original, maybe spending as much as $30.
And then there are the truly hardcore, who will spend money on plane and/or train tickets to go see the ACTUAL Mona Lisa.
For most people, an MP3 is good enough. Some people would rather pay a little bit extra to get a higher quality copy, be it FLAC or CD or a DualDisc or SACD or whatever. Still others will not be satisfied unless they can go see the band in concert, and come home with a shirt.
The selection at Bleep is a bit more eclectic than Amazon, with its main selection being drawn from the catalog of Warp Records. Some of the better known artists from that roster include Squarepusher, Autechre, Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert, etc. The music is generally hard to describe, a lot of it instrumental. You can preview the tracks using a little flash player they've got. I've bought a number of things through Bleep and the whole process was very pleasant. Also, they have been known to offer FLAC downloads. I doubt you'll be seeing that on Amazon or eMusic anytime soon.
I'm not sure it's really a fair comparison, Amazon vs. Bleep, just because the target audiences differ quite widely.
That's funny! At one time I thought the same thing. Anecdote: I was going through the tedious task of ripping my CDs, and after going through my collection of Nine Inch Nails and Autechre discs, I got the bright idea that instead of ripping my Aphex Twin collection, I'd just download a torrent. Same end result, right? I figured Aphex Twin fans would be fairly careful about audio fidelity, so I grabbed a torrent of some giganto Aphex Twin collection.
The end result was all over the map. Sure, there were a number of albums that were alright, some of them were terrible, with skips and low bitrates and mistitled songs, not to mention whole albums of "rare and unreleased" mislabeled garbage that wasn't even by Aphex Twin. I would have better spent my time continuing to rip them myself.
Alternatively, if I didn't already own the CDs, I would have happily bought large chunks of the Aphex Twin catalog from Bleep.com, which has been doing the DRM-free $1 MP3 download thing for over three years now.
Yeah, my car's stereo has a "Loud" button too (It's the one that makes everything quieter, huh huh.) I believe they're more of a EQ'd volume boost than a form of compression. The mids get scooped and the overall volume is increased. This is not really the kind of compression I was talking about.
I appreciate the lengths some modern recording artists go to in order to create dynamic, intricate recordings (nine inch nails' The Fragile comes to mind, or the 10th anniversary edition of The Downward Spiral) but I also like listening to the likes of The Mummies and Mr Oizo (who publishes under "one speaker is enough" music, iirc).
I have long thought that it would be best if label-produced albums preserved the appropriate amount of dynamic range, leaving compression up to consumer devices. I realize that built-in EQ and reverb settings on stereos don't set a particularly good precedent, but give me a tv and a stereo (in the car too!) with a pair of compressor knobs, please. When those poorly mastered tracks from 80 CDs turn up in the playlist, squash away! When the too-quiet movie switches to the overly compressed car salesman ad, handle that appropriately! The hardware and software are out there.
If you listen to the bleepy-bloopy stuff, it's evident he didn't re-record it. Back when computers couldn't handle more than three notes of polyphony, musicians would get around the inability to chord by playing the notes in the chord in rapid succession. You'd have a hard time convincing me that Timbaland took that track, time-shifted it to extrapolate the notes of the chord, so that he could punch it back into his sequencer so that he could play it back on his Korg.
It's not like he liked three bass notes in the demo track, and re-recorded them with an electric bass.
Tempest's post on Digg clarifies it better, but yeah, he didn't re-record this. Might have done some overdubs, but I'm fairly sure the original's in there.
Rock may not be dead, but it's about as fashionable as wearing combat boots. People probably won't look at you funny for it, and people will always be wearing some form of combat boots as everyday footwear, but it's definitely out of style.
Now the trick is to keep the info in there. As an aside, I honestly think that moaning the record label is the wrong approach, and that if somehow Timbaland himself can be reached, he would probably reach out to Tempest - maybe send him a SidStation, trade tips on producing bleepy bloopy music. Don't try to talk artistic merit to the suits. And don't think that big artists are completely unreachable and internet-stupid. Then again, I might be spoiled in my own experience, running a Nine Inch Nails website. Know any other sizeable artists who make their Pro-Tools masters available to the public, upload DVD cuts of out-of-print or unreleased video compilations and 320kbps MP3s live collaborations to the Pirate Bay, and was posting to Prodigy news groups back in 1991.
Seriously though, someone should try to contact Timbaland.
In the PHP code for the site, I set it to check for the referrer, and if it's not from my own domain, then bounce the bot back to the front page. The logic behind this: No one bookmarks my "News Submission" page. People always browse there. Once I started checking for a referrer, the spam completely stopped. There was no extra step that my viewers had to take, it happened without anyone outside of my staff noticing a change.
I realize this is a temporary solution, and just posting about it increases the chance that someone will read about it and crack it, but it sure has been a nice reprieve. What's ridiculous is that form doesn't post anywhere. It sends me and about six other people an email, and the post never really sees the light of day in its original form.
I'll copy a comment I made somewhere else on this topic.
RIAA screws the artists. AllOfMP3.com screws the artists.
WARP's Bleep.com is DRM free, sometimes available as lossless, and label-direct, with the artist getting half the album or track price. As a plus, the music's all very unusual, you're bound to hear something new there.
thresholdhouse.com also sells directly, both in FLAC and MP3, DRM-free.
The future is neither the villainous RIAA nor the equally villainous AllOfMp3.com style organizations -- individual labels, or even individual artists, should be able to promote themselves well enough that these in-between organizations aren't necessary anymore.
Given a central outlet such as iTunes, the likes of the RIAA are due to be obsoleted. However, sites like AllOfMP3.com aren't going to help that kind of revolution. Good riddance.
Ironically, I only validate my hobby site for XHTML/CSS2 strict compliance. I like to pretend that it keeps me on my toes. However, I don't actually design any of the sites I work on at my job, and they're done entirely in Visual Studio, which makes them entirely unfriendly to standards. I realize this is a lame excuse, but it is far too time consuming, and our clients generally do not care. I obviously am aware of all the benefits, given the attention I've paid compliance via my large-ish hobby sites, but there's not enough motivation to adhere to that in our developing environment. I might as well add that my happy-go-fun sites run PHP/Perl/MySQL on Apache, and the sites I get paid for run asp.net on IIS.