I said it before, and I'll say it again - there's nothing wrong with copy-protected CDs - as long as they're clearly labeled as such. Label them and let the consumers decide, I say. Cases like this should really fall under false-advertising precedents.
The information is already free. It's just in encrypted form. This is not something like stealing cable, where you buy a connection - agreeing to pay for it - and then reneg. These satellite fuckers are beaming this shit everywhere, without our permission. One has to wear a tinfoil hat to keep these (harmless, but that's not the point) signals from going through our brains.
A device like this should be completely legal. Apples to apples? It's like me reciting my own copyrighted poetry in France and then suing any bilingual Frenchman for not paying for my official translator.
Well...mostly. I'm sure that there are some porn-related Harry Potter knock-offs that don't exactly scream good literature.
Oh yeah. There's:
-Hairy Daughter and the Sorcerer's Bone
-Hairy Daughter and Her Secret Chamber
-Hairy Daughter and the Prisoner of Assbanging
-Hairy Daughter and the Sublet of Desire
-Hairy Daughter and the Orders of the Penis
How about supporting other plug-in formats, not just LADSPA? Pro Tools for me is nothing without plug-ins (besides it's transparent easy-to-use interface). I suspect that Audiosuite and RTAS are proprietary, but surely VST is an open standard? A lot of people have bought 3rd party plug-ins, and it would make the app that much stronger if it supported them.
I have to wonder how much of it is the economy, but still this post on PA (scroll down) today is pretty cool:
"American Greetings Profits Dip 55.7 Pct.
CLEVELAND (AP) American Greetings Corp., hurt by lower sales
and pretax items, reported a 55.7 percent drop in earnings for the
first quarter that ended May 31."
I have to disagree with your disagreement. If the source is the resulting binaries, or the notes and lyrics therin, then who cares if you give out lyric sheets and sheet music? They're both easy enough to reverse engineer anyway. If you don't have the original source audio, you can't make minor improvements (replace the guitar solo with your own, put a new beat behind it, etc.). Open source my way is way more fun.
WCIII. What more do you need? FPS? You got the new Doom coming out. That's more than enough for me, but I guess I have less free time than most people.
Cubase is a fine app. I believe Kruder & Dorfmeister used (and still use) it for their mixes, and this includes remixes for madonna. There's no reason why they couldn't compare with Cubase on both platforms. Or Pro Tools for that matter. Pro Tools is more "professional," but like the other guy said, it's more of a hard disk recording system with plugins than an actual sequencing program.
Now, Reason, that's a fat app.
I was under the impression they were just playing back audio tracks, not MIDI data, which is of course much more CPU intensive, especially when you put lots of plugins on them. For all we know they test could've had just midi on the mac and just raw audio on the PC.
More importantly though, I'd like to know if they're using Seagate Barracuda hard drives or some other brand. Barracuda's are like a million times quieter.
You only have to provide the source code to those who have access to the binary code.
That's true - I forgot about that; thanks. I've been giving away my binaries for free, so I've been giving making the source available to everyone. I think you're right in that you have the option to not give away the source until it's requested.
I wonder if I play a GPL'd game over the web, does that mean I have access to the binaries, and therefore have a right to the source, even though I can't get the binaries - It's just say, a Flash game or something?
One misconception I had was that open source meant you had to give the product away for free. This was even reflected in version 1.0 of the Open Source Music License I wrote (that I based on the GPL). But that's not so! You only have to give the source away, not the end-product. And you don't even have to make it available for download, you need only sell people CDs of the source for the cost of the media.
Open source isn't so much for the benefit of the end-user as the developer. Or rather, other developers. So it's just as easy to make money on an open source project as a closed one, as long as someone else doesn't take your code and make their own version that better and cheaper. So for MS, open sourcing Word would be a bad idea. But for a musician like myself, "better" is relative. So making your music open-source does nothing but good.
Oh sorry, I thought they were trying to compare proc speeds.
Photoshop on a G5 can do a lot more than Mathmatica on a Dell, but it still doesn't tell me shit. You gave to use the SAME freaking app if you want to get meaningful results. Even Cubase on both machines would've been acceptable.
Not sure if it's on the site, or just on the tech specs pdf (where I'm pretty sure I saw it), but the audio comparison is really bugged out. First of all, the title bar says "Logic vs. Cubase," but we're not comparing apps, we're comparing procs. Does that mean they're running Logic on the Macs and Cubase on the PCs? If so, the comparison is absolutely meaningless.
Then they say "with 5 plug-ins." Which ones? Which brands? Waves? Different plug-ins take up different amounts of proc usage. I can only do one high-quality reverb at a time, but lots of eq's. And were there 5 plug-in on each track, or 5 plugins that each track was routed through?
Then their results: 52 track, 115 tracks, etc. That's a lot of tracks. But again, meaningless.
A good benchmark would be:
Digidesign's Pro Tools Free, no audio hardware except what came with the computer. Record 8 tracks of 24-bit/96khz audio (or whatever). Then pile the plugins on, and use the exact same ones in the exact same places on each machine. Let us know when the interface gets sluggish, and then when it craps out. Also let us know how it craps out. Crash? Doesn't respond? But for crying out loud, don't give us worthless numbers.
"In other words, they have subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer to make it seem cheaper, which is absolutely ridiculous."
Those lying fucking bastards. I've never seen that before in my life. Never - I repeat - never, have I seen a product priced at anything less than a perfectly round figure. I'm so glad I read spl's soapbox. I mean, I went to the Apple store, and saw that it was $1999, and I admit it, I said "I could afford this." But thanks to the philanthropy of spl, I was forced to examine it further. If you actually sit down and do the math, $1999 is not, in fact, a thousand dollars and a little more - no, innocent consumer! $1999 is nothing less than a dollar shy of $2000!
And that's cool, if it's only a temporary thing. But I have a feeling that once they get a revenue stream going from this, they're not gonna say "okay, now we have our information, let's change it back to an only-carpool lane."
Impressive? WTF? The whole point of the carpool lane is to get people to CARPOOL. As in, make a fucking friend at work and drive in with him so you reduce the emissions and cut down on the smog and make the air a little nicer to breathe for everyone. If you can't make a little effort to carpool, you don't deserve a speedy commute. No matter how much you pay.
So what, now it's not the carpool lane, it's the carpool/rich-lazy-bastard lane? Sickening.
The issue is not, nor will ever be control. Control may be an issue, but it's a subset of the larger issue, the issue - money. Why do they want to control mp3s? So people are forced to buy the albums. Do you think they'd care about filesharing if somehow, an mp3 would only play if the physical CD was in the drive? Of course not. Do you think they care if a nazi skinhead buys their music? Of course not. As long as he pays for it.
RIAA: public, it hurts the artists when you share their music over p2p
PUBLIC: It does? How so? Do they sell less albums?
RIAA: Well, we don't have any actual evidence of that.
PUBLIC: Do they get frustrated and stop making music?
RIAA: No, of course not.
PUBLIC: So how does it hurt them?
RIAA: It just does.
"Their concern is no different than the usual gang of GNU zealots"
Their concern is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from GNU zealots. Gnu people go OUT OF THEIR WAY to give the public extra freedoms and ways to use their code, something they themselves don't benefit at all from, directly. When someone uses GPL'd code and doesn't abide by the GPL, it's a slap in the face to all their good intentions. Here's the difference:
RIAA: You're listening to my music without paying me. Thief!
GNU: I gave you all this source code so you could, along with me, enrich the coding community. Instead you hoard it like it was your own. You're a selfish and lazy bastard, and you deserve to be prosecuted.
...programs to educate the American public on why copyright violation is bad
Is there any actual evidence that filesharing is bad? Weren't record sales up 10% during the height of Napster? Isn't that the only indicator? I'd be very interested in this. If there are stories of bands that go like "we were doing alright, we just put out our first album, then it went on KaZaa, and nobody bought it, but we have evidence that a million people downloaded the whole album and listened to it more than once and swear that they would've bought it if they weren't able to d/l it for free, and now we all work at a burger joint."
If there's no actual evidence, what are they going to teach? "Well, we've got heresay and conjecture, your honor - those are kinds of evidence." Does anyone actually believe that artists are worse off with filesharing around?
I'm not trying to troll here, I really want to know why anyone would get one, besides the coolness factor. I mean, if you need something small and quiet, you get a laptop. If you need maximum expandability (PCI slots, room for a big fancy heatsink, etc.), you get a tower system. When you add a $200 display, the price tag goes to $900. That's how much an iBook costs. I'm sure there are even cheaper laptops on the PC side. This seems like the worst of both worlds.
The Tower here in Boston - before it closed down and turned into Virgin - used to have an amazing blues section. Blind Lemon, Charley Patton, you name it. Actually it had an amazing everything selection. And the HMV in Harvard Square, before it closed down, had a seperate room for electronic stuff, with stuff like Thievery Corporation and Peace Orchestra. Damned if you'll find Peace Orchestra in Target.
The problem with Tower wasn't their prices or their merchandise, is was that they had this policy of only hiring Sex Pistols rejects who were all ornery fucking bastards that treated you like you were stupid, by default. I hated shopping there and I'm glad it's gone.
Before you release your poems to the public, you have full control over them. You can change them, throw them away, whatever. But when you publish them, you're saying "public, look at my work, and if it's good, buy it so I may profit." At that point, you bring the rest of society into the equation, and your work becomes the joint property of everyone who's life it affects. Copyright law was written so you could have the privilege (it's not a right) of profiting off your work by giving you a monopoly on it for a limited time. Make no mistake, you may be able to profit off if it exclusively, but it belongs to the world.
Been doing it for like a year now. It looks like her stuff is just sounds and loops and stuff, in a big pool. At my site, you can listen to a CD (half-length) of real music, and download the individual tracks or each song if you want to remix it. I also wrote a new license, the OSML, which I based on the GPL.
BTW, the site hasn't been updated in a while because I've been working on a new album. The whole site's gonna have a huge rebirth once I finish it.
Slashdot Mirror
I said it before, and I'll say it again - there's nothing wrong with copy-protected CDs - as long as they're clearly labeled as such. Label them and let the consumers decide, I say. Cases like this should really fall under false-advertising precedents.
The information is already free. It's just in encrypted form. This is not something like stealing cable, where you buy a connection - agreeing to pay for it - and then reneg. These satellite fuckers are beaming this shit everywhere, without our permission. One has to wear a tinfoil hat to keep these (harmless, but that's not the point) signals from going through our brains.
A device like this should be completely legal. Apples to apples? It's like me reciting my own copyrighted poetry in France and then suing any bilingual Frenchman for not paying for my official translator.
Well...mostly. I'm sure that there are some porn-related Harry Potter knock-offs that don't exactly scream good literature.
Oh yeah. There's:
-Hairy Daughter and the Sorcerer's Bone
-Hairy Daughter and Her Secret Chamber
-Hairy Daughter and the Prisoner of Assbanging
-Hairy Daughter and the Sublet of Desire
-Hairy Daughter and the Orders of the Penis
How about supporting other plug-in formats, not just LADSPA? Pro Tools for me is nothing without plug-ins (besides it's transparent easy-to-use interface). I suspect that Audiosuite and RTAS are proprietary, but surely VST is an open standard? A lot of people have bought 3rd party plug-ins, and it would make the app that much stronger if it supported them.
I have to wonder how much of it is the economy, but still this post on PA (scroll down) today is pretty cool:
"American Greetings Profits Dip 55.7 Pct.
CLEVELAND (AP) American Greetings Corp., hurt by lower sales and pretax items, reported a 55.7 percent drop in earnings for the first quarter that ended May 31."
Sorry, I don't get it. Maybe you can explain it?
I think it was the business model of the last dot-com I worked at.
I have to disagree with your disagreement. If the source is the resulting binaries, or the notes and lyrics therin, then who cares if you give out lyric sheets and sheet music? They're both easy enough to reverse engineer anyway. If you don't have the original source audio, you can't make minor improvements (replace the guitar solo with your own, put a new beat behind it, etc.). Open source my way is way more fun.
...fixes the sounds or sounds and images of a live musical performance...
I'm gonna go download lots of Aphex Twin and Brian Eno!
WCIII. What more do you need? FPS? You got the new Doom coming out. That's more than enough for me, but I guess I have less free time than most people.
Cubase is a fine app. I believe Kruder & Dorfmeister used (and still use) it for their mixes, and this includes remixes for madonna. There's no reason why they couldn't compare with Cubase on both platforms. Or Pro Tools for that matter. Pro Tools is more "professional," but like the other guy said, it's more of a hard disk recording system with plugins than an actual sequencing program.
Now, Reason, that's a fat app.
I was under the impression they were just playing back audio tracks, not MIDI data, which is of course much more CPU intensive, especially when you put lots of plugins on them. For all we know they test could've had just midi on the mac and just raw audio on the PC.
More importantly though, I'd like to know if they're using Seagate Barracuda hard drives or some other brand. Barracuda's are like a million times quieter.
You only have to provide the source code to those who have access to the binary code.
That's true - I forgot about that; thanks. I've been giving away my binaries for free, so I've been giving making the source available to everyone. I think you're right in that you have the option to not give away the source until it's requested.
I wonder if I play a GPL'd game over the web, does that mean I have access to the binaries, and therefore have a right to the source, even though I can't get the binaries - It's just say, a Flash game or something?
One misconception I had was that open source meant you had to give the product away for free. This was even reflected in version 1.0 of the Open Source Music License I wrote (that I based on the GPL). But that's not so! You only have to give the source away, not the end-product. And you don't even have to make it available for download, you need only sell people CDs of the source for the cost of the media.
Open source isn't so much for the benefit of the end-user as the developer. Or rather, other developers. So it's just as easy to make money on an open source project as a closed one, as long as someone else doesn't take your code and make their own version that better and cheaper. So for MS, open sourcing Word would be a bad idea. But for a musician like myself, "better" is relative. So making your music open-source does nothing but good.
D'oh. That's right. Well, then, Pro Tools LE.
Oh sorry, I thought they were trying to compare proc speeds.
Photoshop on a G5 can do a lot more than Mathmatica on a Dell, but it still doesn't tell me shit. You gave to use the SAME freaking app if you want to get meaningful results. Even Cubase on both machines would've been acceptable.
The emagic comparison seems a little fishy though
Not sure if it's on the site, or just on the tech specs pdf (where I'm pretty sure I saw it), but the audio comparison is really bugged out. First of all, the title bar says "Logic vs. Cubase," but we're not comparing apps, we're comparing procs. Does that mean they're running Logic on the Macs and Cubase on the PCs? If so, the comparison is absolutely meaningless.
Then they say "with 5 plug-ins." Which ones? Which brands? Waves? Different plug-ins take up different amounts of proc usage. I can only do one high-quality reverb at a time, but lots of eq's. And were there 5 plug-in on each track, or 5 plugins that each track was routed through?
Then their results: 52 track, 115 tracks, etc. That's a lot of tracks. But again, meaningless.
A good benchmark would be:
Digidesign's Pro Tools Free, no audio hardware except what came with the computer. Record 8 tracks of 24-bit/96khz audio (or whatever). Then pile the plugins on, and use the exact same ones in the exact same places on each machine. Let us know when the interface gets sluggish, and then when it craps out. Also let us know how it craps out. Crash? Doesn't respond? But for crying out loud, don't give us worthless numbers.
"In other words, they have subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer to make it seem cheaper, which is absolutely ridiculous."
Those lying fucking bastards. I've never seen that before in my life. Never - I repeat - never, have I seen a product priced at anything less than a perfectly round figure. I'm so glad I read spl's soapbox. I mean, I went to the Apple store, and saw that it was $1999, and I admit it, I said "I could afford this." But thanks to the philanthropy of spl, I was forced to examine it further. If you actually sit down and do the math, $1999 is not, in fact, a thousand dollars and a little more - no, innocent consumer! $1999 is nothing less than a dollar shy of $2000!
And that's cool, if it's only a temporary thing. But I have a feeling that once they get a revenue stream going from this, they're not gonna say "okay, now we have our information, let's change it back to an only-carpool lane."
Impressive? WTF? The whole point of the carpool lane is to get people to CARPOOL. As in, make a fucking friend at work and drive in with him so you reduce the emissions and cut down on the smog and make the air a little nicer to breathe for everyone. If you can't make a little effort to carpool, you don't deserve a speedy commute. No matter how much you pay.
So what, now it's not the carpool lane, it's the carpool/rich-lazy-bastard lane? Sickening.
The issue is not, nor will ever be control. Control may be an issue, but it's a subset of the larger issue, the issue - money. Why do they want to control mp3s? So people are forced to buy the albums. Do you think they'd care about filesharing if somehow, an mp3 would only play if the physical CD was in the drive? Of course not. Do you think they care if a nazi skinhead buys their music? Of course not. As long as he pays for it.
RIAA: public, it hurts the artists when you share their music over p2p
PUBLIC: It does? How so? Do they sell less albums?
RIAA: Well, we don't have any actual evidence of that.
PUBLIC: Do they get frustrated and stop making music?
RIAA: No, of course not.
PUBLIC: So how does it hurt them?
RIAA: It just does.
"Their concern is no different than the usual gang of GNU zealots"
Their concern is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from GNU zealots. Gnu people go OUT OF THEIR WAY to give the public extra freedoms and ways to use their code, something they themselves don't benefit at all from, directly. When someone uses GPL'd code and doesn't abide by the GPL, it's a slap in the face to all their good intentions. Here's the difference:
RIAA: You're listening to my music without paying me. Thief!
GNU: I gave you all this source code so you could, along with me, enrich the coding community. Instead you hoard it like it was your own. You're a selfish and lazy bastard, and you deserve to be prosecuted.
...programs to educate the American public on why copyright violation is bad
Is there any actual evidence that filesharing is bad? Weren't record sales up 10% during the height of Napster? Isn't that the only indicator? I'd be very interested in this. If there are stories of bands that go like "we were doing alright, we just put out our first album, then it went on KaZaa, and nobody bought it, but we have evidence that a million people downloaded the whole album and listened to it more than once and swear that they would've bought it if they weren't able to d/l it for free, and now we all work at a burger joint."
If there's no actual evidence, what are they going to teach? "Well, we've got heresay and conjecture, your honor - those are kinds of evidence." Does anyone actually believe that artists are worse off with filesharing around?
I'm not trying to troll here, I really want to know why anyone would get one, besides the coolness factor. I mean, if you need something small and quiet, you get a laptop. If you need maximum expandability (PCI slots, room for a big fancy heatsink, etc.), you get a tower system. When you add a $200 display, the price tag goes to $900. That's how much an iBook costs. I'm sure there are even cheaper laptops on the PC side. This seems like the worst of both worlds.
Here's a theme song on the whole topic (now version 2!).
Tower Records: $9.99
The Tower here in Boston - before it closed down and turned into Virgin - used to have an amazing blues section. Blind Lemon, Charley Patton, you name it. Actually it had an amazing everything selection. And the HMV in Harvard Square, before it closed down, had a seperate room for electronic stuff, with stuff like Thievery Corporation and Peace Orchestra. Damned if you'll find Peace Orchestra in Target.
The problem with Tower wasn't their prices or their merchandise, is was that they had this policy of only hiring Sex Pistols rejects who were all ornery fucking bastards that treated you like you were stupid, by default. I hated shopping there and I'm glad it's gone.
Before you release your poems to the public, you have full control over them. You can change them, throw them away, whatever. But when you publish them, you're saying "public, look at my work, and if it's good, buy it so I may profit." At that point, you bring the rest of society into the equation, and your work becomes the joint property of everyone who's life it affects. Copyright law was written so you could have the privilege (it's not a right) of profiting off your work by giving you a monopoly on it for a limited time. Make no mistake, you may be able to profit off if it exclusively, but it belongs to the world.
Been doing it for like a year now. It looks like her stuff is just sounds and loops and stuff, in a big pool. At my site, you can listen to a CD (half-length) of real music, and download the individual tracks or each song if you want to remix it. I also wrote a new license, the OSML, which I based on the GPL.
BTW, the site hasn't been updated in a while because I've been working on a new album. The whole site's gonna have a huge rebirth once I finish it.