Damn straight. This is not like debugging a computer program. It's like street punk posturing. And geeks tend not to understand street punk posturing, or the concept that someone else could be not simply providing them with a puzzle, but twisting their arm or putting a gun to their head because they want the geek DEAD or OBEYING.
On the other hand, judges DO understand how threats work...
"Gateway also faulted another provision of the new licensing agreement, which requires PC makers to pay a Windows royalty on every PC shipped, even if it didn't include Windows. To top it off, to qualify for market development funds, PC makers have to put a Microsoft OS on every PC. As a result, trying to sell non-Windows PCs, or even PCs without software, is a financial loser for computer makers."
"...isn't this where/"
"/we came in?"-Pink Floyd, The Wall
I laughed and laughed o_O
When did the world go completely insane, and where can I get off?:P
Hey, for a long time Apple (with Guy Kawasaki) has conducted setup races.
On one side, a PC tech of distinction, like a magazine editor or Microsoft employee or something.
On the other side, Guy Kawasaki and a 6-year-old. And Guy sits there, and doesn't help. The 6-year-old unpacks the Mac, sets it up, plugs everything in and boots it (I believe it's sometimes also included setting up networking and going online.
Are you kidding? Apple and Linux came out of essentially socialist environments. On the one hand the Homebrew Computer Club, and on the other, Free Software.
Their explanation of the effect is dubious, but what they were experiencing was variations in jitter and BLER (correctable and uncorrectable errors, and timing variations on pit spacing).
Some CD players are sensitive to jitter, and some are not: it is quite measurable and produces characteristic artifacts. As for BLER- did you think Red Book CD audio had LOSSLESS error correction? At all levels?;)
If you want perfect bit-for-bit identical audio archiving, burn a DATA CD, not a Red Book...
"Technical advancement in the industry would grind to a halt."
I seriously contest the idea that commercial forces produce technical advancement. Commercial forces optimize for MARKETABILITY which is quite unrelated. In my field, some of the most commercially successful products are technically deficient to a shocking extent- some of the free products are technically advanced to a shocking extent- and there's some that are well spoken of because they are both. There's no correlation... and hence no argument that the destruction of commercial software would slow technical advancement.
You could actually argue the opposite, quite plausibly.
Supposing technical advancement is correlated with specific PEOPLE who do good work. Obliterating commercial development would switch those people and their work from proprietary to free and public work. As such, it would spread more quickly because the ideas could be taken and adopted more widely, and others could audit and question the work on a technical basis.
Do you have any idea how much effort has been wasted in recent years trying to figure out what causes the sonic problems with the very widely-adopted Digidesign Pro Tools software... which has in recent months been traced to, among other things, summing busses being repeatedly truncated to 24-bit summing stages rather than summed with more accurate mathematics?
It really looks as though in the proprietary sphere things don't need to get good AT ALL, much less 'as slowly as Linux does'.
Maybe you need to stop buying distributions, then. You seem to be considering your value to free software solely in terms of how much money you give to it. That's absurd... and sets an awful precedent.
The point is not your value in terms of a money-spouting consumer unit, but your value as an individual permitted to express yourself in ideas involving computer software.
Supposing you use the GIMP, say. And you have some kind of special need, like being able to run filters on heightfield Targas that split a 16-bit value into adjacent channels.
Your value is not measured in terms of being able to pay someone to make the program do that.
Your value is measured in BEING A PERSON who HAS THE NEED TO DO THAT, and the ability to GET THE SOFTWARE TO DO IT.
If you hire someone to do it for you, your value is STILL in being the person who needed to get the program to do that. Without you and your special need, the program would have remained unable to deal with that special purpose. Your NEED, not your money, is the thing of value here.
If you want to help, keep your damn money- and think of new stuff you want software to do!
"Well, when you give your code away to your competetors..."
This is the best example I've yet seen on why RMS's hardline stance is correct and necessary.
A competitor is someone who is trying to cut you down- perhaps even in a thoroughly hostile way. They're playing a zero-sum game and you have to lose for them to win.
RMS came up with the much-maligned GPL and continues to try to loudly publicize his concepts on this sort of thing. Now, what is the one biggest complaint some people have with the GPL?
It is that they are not permitted to be competitors under the GPL.
They're compelled to cooperate and not given a choice in the matter. Linux distributions are NOT COMPETITORS with GNU software: RMS simply wants to be damned sure of furthering his concepts through the proliferation of the software, and there are plenty of people fighting him.
The whole POINT of the GPL is that there are NO competitors within it. The concept of software competitors is rendered about as sensible as people you meet being linguistics competitors, competing for rights to say certain words. Within the GNU sphere, everyone is potentially a programmer, and nobody is a competitor. Cooperating within a larger community isn't just a good idea, it's the law!:D
This can arise naturally, and has. It can ALSO be destroyed through the actions of others, and that too has happened, and continues to try to happen.
And you can go on considering yourself a passive consumer of 'competing products' in the touching faith that this 'competing' will bring you what you need: but right now, it is RMS and his outright denial of the 'competing' process with software development who's brought you the 'products' you USE.
You don't need to begin programming and participating- but it would be a good thing if you understood why GNU and Linux are not 'competitors' in any rational sense of the word. Maybe you can at some point understand why your buying or not buying 'products' is not a measure of your significance in the free software world...
To paraphrase Douglas Coupland, in the world of GNU software, YOU ARE NOT A MARKET. You're more like a citizen.:)
Heh. This Hiroo Yamagata does seem to be breathtakingly unclear on the concept! I have a hard time imagining how someone could more effectively drive RMS up the wall.
It's like, "So, RMS, do you think commercial adoption of your GNU products will help cut down software piracy?":D
I am reading the KDE.org interview you've linked to, and feeling incredibly sorry for RMS:D
Not if the lawyers seize all their computers and network equipment as evidence. Hey, they might be harboring terrorist communications on them or something:D
God, I hope not. I can see just how and why they would use permafrost, too.
Assuming they _don't_ get their ass handed to them, they will of course escalate as they always have done and always will do, and although it is hard to imagine how they even could, permafrost is the metaphor that would work.
The argument would/will be that there is NO life other than Microsoft products in the computer industry- they'll cancel all Mac products and armtwist the PC vendors even more, publically announcing that supporting Microsoft products (via subscription of course) is the only way to avoid 'computing permafrost'. The idea will be that nothing short of Microsoft can make computing ideas take hold in the very demanding and difficult market out there, which has 'permafrost', so anything smaller than Microsoft inevitably dies. Therefore, support microsoft otherwise there would BE no software. Of any sort. 'Permafrost'. The environment would be incapable of supporting life.
They've certainly worked hard enough to set up a situation where that looks like the case, through acquisitions, threats and protection-racket like stuff. They are very _industrious_ criminals. Threatening people is hard work! They'd continue to do so under 'permafrost' conditions, because of course the reality is that 'life' pops up all over and has to be stamped out to maintain the illusion. The _spin_ on this state of affairs is 'permafrost', or 'there wouldn't be any competing software anyway'.
If they actually use this, I want them to pay me:P
It is hard to credit anyone behaving this way as being 'GPL friendly'. I could see 'unclear on the concept'. But when it is so unclear that it starts harming the concept, then what?
The basic concept behind the GPL is, 'Access to ideas, at all costs'. Nothing's allowed to get in the way of that.
Shawn Gordon is twisting an implementation detail of the GPL ('try to prevent GPL developers from being bankrupted by demands for copies of the source- a 'DOS attack', demand of source!') into a conflict with the basic desire of the GPL ('access to source, at all costs'). Someone should pay for his source and then mirror it far and wide, and the development should be forked away from him.
Why, exactly, should the 'open source world' try to find ways to let the 'closed source companies' into the tent?
If 'the tent' is marked 'open source' and defined on economic and productivity grounds, surely the closed source companies can and should fend for themselves without help? Are you trying to give 'em open source welfare or something?
If 'the tent' is marked 'free software', doesn't the whole concept suggest that proprietary guys are by definition outside it? And again, isn't it best to let them fend for themselves?
I'm not aware of any serious intent to KILL off proprietary software by either open source or Free software advocates. If some or a lot of us wish it would DIE off, well, I'm sure they wish that of us too, welcome to the world. What possible reason could there be for TRYING to help proprietary software? Can't it help itself? Doesn't it have its own 'tent'?
Nah: it's not unheard of for a label to lose advance money on a band that doesn't sell. A loan shark would break their legs to get it back. The label will merely be like, "If you don't recoup our advance, you'll never work in this industry again!" That is too weird for a bank- banks are more concerned with just getting the money back, rather than speculating on the chance of really sucking the debtor dry vs. just permanently rendering them unable to work in the industry.
eek, on the one post out of six that I _don't_ hype my URL to the moon?;)
Yeah. Go to www.ampcast.com/chrisj and go nuts, I have a LOT of samples up. What I do at this point is I put all but one track up on each album "officially", and have no gripe if anyone fills in by putting up the missing tracks later. Gotta get the CDs out first tho, or there's nothing to rip from. I also have weirder stuff, and some pop/rock type music that's fairly old though I need to be coming out with some new songs-with-actual-words-in. Lastly, my mastering software (Mac, but GPLed anyhow) is at www.airwindows.com/dithering.
Try not to be too freaked out by the variety of music on my ampcast pages:) I like a LOT of different stuff. I've done brutal instrumental rock, sorta sedated trancey retro stuff, demented lowfi electronic goofiness, touching melodic pop, stagnant atonal droney ambience, seriously challenging polymetric electronica, stomping country-rock and the best freaking Noise (in the hardcore uncompromising sense) out there:D however, there is no living human who likes ALL that stuff but me, so be warned. God knows what I'll do next. Easy listening, maybe. Oh, I forgot the fretless guitar Frippertronics soundscapes, silly ME.;)
Cheers. I think you can stream stuff if Ampcast bugs you about registering. They only want to keep people from cheating as THEY, not you, pay me a royalty on downloads. I hope to bring them in some money with my CDs when I get them all up there- we have to start doing actual business and selling CDs if they're going to continue the royalty-paying. Oh, and you can 'rate' stuff if you make a myAmp account: there's charts of a sort, pretty decent really, you can rate stuff up or down and it affects the chart.
The deal is, with Free software, those scratches can HOOK UP and be built into something huge- eventually.
The tide does not gallop.
Re:How to do your part and support the revolution
on
Where Music Will Come From
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Never buy music? Ever? While I sympathise with your sentiment, I do have to say what the FSCK are you doing assuming that there is no music other than that controlled by the RIAA?
Speaking as a guy who has just finished remastering CDs for MONTHS, working until past dawn on the remixing and wordlength reduction and getting an ISRC code (for which US indies are forced to go to the RIAA even though it is an INTERNATIONAL STANDARD! hello?!) and getting CD burning software (Jam) that can burn Red Book properly and redoing all the artwork and buying special archival Mitsui CDRs for the masters to be sent, I gotta say what the hell do you think you're doing?
I mean, sure, down with the man, support the EFF, in fact YES share your music, use P2P, you're talking to a guy here who has his indie distributor print "Please copy this CD for your friends" on ALL his CDs, so let's not get snippy about me being mercenary. I think not. But I'm serious: what, exactly, are you trying to accomplish by telling people to "never buy music. Ever."? Do you somehow not realise that you can support people who are NOT the RIAA? People who in some cases (not all) will even support YOUR right to share and trade copies of THEIR music online?
I like your enthusiasm, guy. I _really_ like your determination to go against the RIAA's deeply entrenched hegemony. But you know what?
If you really want to help the revolution in music, MAKE YOUR OWN.
Right now, you're so hung up on hurting the monopoly distribution channel that you don't even see that there is an underground out there- and the more people who say "Never buy music. Ever", the more that starves the underground as well as the RIAA.
I'm with O'Reilly- who, I believe, said in a conference once that if the Internet and copying truly did mean that he couldn't sell books because they were immediately copied, and if he really had no choice and either the Net or his book selling had to go, he'd go with the Net and give up trying to sell books. I'm with him on that.
I'm just finishing the last stages of a massive remastering spree- taking TEN albums, pretty much my entire catalog, and bringing them up to that standard for selling on Ampcast. Sometimes that's a lot of work.
I'm a vinyl record freak myself- I don't intrinsically like CD sound, much less mp3. I have written dithering software to MAKE my CDs sound good enough that I think they represent what the master tape was. I've gone in and done spectral noise gating on certain masters originally from tape, or with hissing guitar preamps present. I've built from scratch a binary-coded passive attentuation mixing console to sum the tracks with unlimited resolution, and bought expensive audiophile input caps (Hovland Musicaps) for the inputs of my A/D converter, a modded Lexicon.
That only gets you so far- after all, my CDs do literally say on them "Please copy this CD for your friends" so obviously, while I accept what will happen anyway, I must also figure out what MORE to do. Beyond 'respect' or 'loyalty'. What can I give people that's cooler even than that?
And so I turn to packaging. I've been wrestling with Ampcast, persuading them to allow me to specify the total form of every piece of artwork on the CD case. I want it to be like when you have a record and you put the cover where you can see it while listening to the record. I want there to be no dotcom banners and small print all over the fucking album cover. I want classic album art purity- and since I'm dealing with an indie and not the RIAA, and since I'm willing to trade off being in Tower Records for producing my artwork RIGHT (NO bar codes!), I may get it- and I'm proceeding as if I can have total artistic freedom.
The most extreme case so far has been my "Postcards From Tehigue" CD. The music is up as mp3s (128K VBR) and the CD is full 44.1/16 dithered with fancy techniques from hi-res masters, but it's funny because it's a wonderfully hi-res capturing of the sound of an antique Apple IIgs making really strange proto-electronic music- done back in 1986 or so. The actual music is pretty well represented by the mp3s, though you miss out on a bit of antique electronic SKRONK that way- so what is to be done with the packaging to match the goofy coolness of this bizarre music?
Answer: I scanned the actual motherboard of a IIgs at pretty high resolution (had to reduce to 1425x1425 for the cover- I used free software from Helmut Dersch, "Panorama Tools", to do the reduction with 256x256 sinc interpolation for REALLY SHARP reduction- again, taking effort to do stuff as 'right' as possible), and I made the tray liner so that the spines are no more or less than the END of the circuit board- some jacks and stuff, metal bits, also scanned with great clarity. No logos. No listings of the producer's girlfriend and dog (separately or, um, overloaded;) ), no pointless enumeration of the street address of the recording company- no names or numbers on the spine, either! The package looks as much as possible like a small circuit board stuck in with your CDs, with ONE exception I couldn't resist- on the CPU chip, I used Photoshop (cloning and several overlay modes) to copy the exact appearance of the printing on other chips, down to the color and the texturing of the surface of the chip, to write as if it'd been printed there:
POSTCARDS FROM TEHIGUE
CHRIS JOHNSON
...so small that you can't possibly see it in the cover art.
I really think that if you are trying to make ART (of whatever sort- even if it's kind of weird) there is always a way to keep following that out to where you're producing something that DOES have a value of uniqueness- even in a world of Star Trek Replicators where NOTHING can be 'unique'. In that world, what you end up doing is producing something so iconoclastic that you end up with just a few people totally floored by it- who're ready to pick up your version of it simply because, well, it's not that much more expensive than copying every detail, and it's YOUR version- the closest they can get to what you actually touched and did.
If you could buy a beautiful painting with a bar code, and download jpgs of the beautiful painting with its bar code, etc. and you had a chance at getting a copy WITHOUT the bar code- would you do it? If you could get a clone without bar code, versus a print that the artist had produced with his own hands (rather like Andy Warhol's screen printing experiments), how much is that worth to you? How much is it worth to a rabid fan of the artist? How much is it worth, if the art is so idiosyncratic that nobody else will make it for you the way you like?
Crappy studio equipment is cheap. The weird part is, with digital there's less and less of a difference between that and the posh pro stuff. The latest, 192K "Pro Tools" DAW system costs the earth but sounds (according to a reputable sound engineer I know) slightly treble-harsh and lacking in the bottom octave. The correlation between glossy sonics and major-label budgets has NEVER been weaker- compare to the cassette portastudio era, or the vinyl record era.
Because digital and computer software are more akin to IDEAS than physical artifacts or precision devices, this will only continue.
There are people right now developing "Pro Tools" clones in open source. I develop mastering software in open source. People develop synthesis, DSP, hunt down the flaws of existing gear- it's like the internet 'security' community, the 'open' camp are farther along than the proprietary guys, move faster, cooperate better. The best horn PA bassbin out there is being designed by a bunch of amateur, semipro, and pro speaker hackers on the internet- I've been designing speakers for more than ten years and some of their docs leave ME staring at the level of technical expertise.
Oh, and you can have an indie company distribute, host and make your CDs for you (duplication rather than replication- SO far) and even that will only cost the buyer $6-12 or so. I price mine at $11.99 and that's because I put months of work into them and it's STILL half what the record industry charges...
Slashdot Mirror
Wait.
On the other hand, judges DO understand how threats work...
"...isn't this where/"
"/we came in?" -Pink Floyd, The Wall
I laughed and laughed o_O
When did the world go completely insane, and where can I get off? :P
On one side, a PC tech of distinction, like a magazine editor or Microsoft employee or something.
On the other side, Guy Kawasaki and a 6-year-old. And Guy sits there, and doesn't help. The 6-year-old unpacks the Mac, sets it up, plugs everything in and boots it (I believe it's sometimes also included setting up networking and going online.
Six-year-old generally wins over the PC team...
Are you kidding? Apple and Linux came out of essentially socialist environments. On the one hand the Homebrew Computer Club, and on the other, Free Software.
Their explanation of the effect is dubious, but what they were experiencing was variations in jitter and BLER (correctable and uncorrectable errors, and timing variations on pit spacing).
Some CD players are sensitive to jitter, and some are not: it is quite measurable and produces characteristic artifacts. As for BLER- did you think Red Book CD audio had LOSSLESS error correction? At all levels? ;)
If you want perfect bit-for-bit identical audio archiving, burn a DATA CD, not a Red Book...
I think you mean 'except for lacking the ability to restrict others in turn'...
I seriously contest the idea that commercial forces produce technical advancement. Commercial forces optimize for MARKETABILITY which is quite unrelated. In my field, some of the most commercially successful products are technically deficient to a shocking extent- some of the free products are technically advanced to a shocking extent- and there's some that are well spoken of because they are both. There's no correlation... and hence no argument that the destruction of commercial software would slow technical advancement.
You could actually argue the opposite, quite plausibly.
Supposing technical advancement is correlated with specific PEOPLE who do good work. Obliterating commercial development would switch those people and their work from proprietary to free and public work. As such, it would spread more quickly because the ideas could be taken and adopted more widely, and others could audit and question the work on a technical basis.
Do you have any idea how much effort has been wasted in recent years trying to figure out what causes the sonic problems with the very widely-adopted Digidesign Pro Tools software... which has in recent months been traced to, among other things, summing busses being repeatedly truncated to 24-bit summing stages rather than summed with more accurate mathematics?
It really looks as though in the proprietary sphere things don't need to get good AT ALL, much less 'as slowly as Linux does'.
The point is not your value in terms of a money-spouting consumer unit, but your value as an individual permitted to express yourself in ideas involving computer software.
Supposing you use the GIMP, say. And you have some kind of special need, like being able to run filters on heightfield Targas that split a 16-bit value into adjacent channels.
Your value is not measured in terms of being able to pay someone to make the program do that.
Your value is measured in BEING A PERSON who HAS THE NEED TO DO THAT, and the ability to GET THE SOFTWARE TO DO IT.
If you hire someone to do it for you, your value is STILL in being the person who needed to get the program to do that. Without you and your special need, the program would have remained unable to deal with that special purpose. Your NEED, not your money, is the thing of value here.
If you want to help, keep your damn money- and think of new stuff you want software to do!
This is the best example I've yet seen on why RMS's hardline stance is correct and necessary.
A competitor is someone who is trying to cut you down- perhaps even in a thoroughly hostile way. They're playing a zero-sum game and you have to lose for them to win.
RMS came up with the much-maligned GPL and continues to try to loudly publicize his concepts on this sort of thing. Now, what is the one biggest complaint some people have with the GPL?
It is that they are not permitted to be competitors under the GPL.
They're compelled to cooperate and not given a choice in the matter. Linux distributions are NOT COMPETITORS with GNU software: RMS simply wants to be damned sure of furthering his concepts through the proliferation of the software, and there are plenty of people fighting him.
The whole POINT of the GPL is that there are NO competitors within it. The concept of software competitors is rendered about as sensible as people you meet being linguistics competitors, competing for rights to say certain words. Within the GNU sphere, everyone is potentially a programmer, and nobody is a competitor. Cooperating within a larger community isn't just a good idea, it's the law! :D
This can arise naturally, and has. It can ALSO be destroyed through the actions of others, and that too has happened, and continues to try to happen.
And you can go on considering yourself a passive consumer of 'competing products' in the touching faith that this 'competing' will bring you what you need: but right now, it is RMS and his outright denial of the 'competing' process with software development who's brought you the 'products' you USE.
You don't need to begin programming and participating- but it would be a good thing if you understood why GNU and Linux are not 'competitors' in any rational sense of the word. Maybe you can at some point understand why your buying or not buying 'products' is not a measure of your significance in the free software world...
To paraphrase Douglas Coupland, in the world of GNU software, YOU ARE NOT A MARKET. You're more like a citizen. :)
It's like, "So, RMS, do you think commercial adoption of your GNU products will help cut down software piracy?" :D
I am reading the KDE.org interview you've linked to, and feeling incredibly sorry for RMS :D
Not if the lawyers seize all their computers and network equipment as evidence. Hey, they might be harboring terrorist communications on them or something :D
Assuming they _don't_ get their ass handed to them, they will of course escalate as they always have done and always will do, and although it is hard to imagine how they even could, permafrost is the metaphor that would work.
The argument would/will be that there is NO life other than Microsoft products in the computer industry- they'll cancel all Mac products and armtwist the PC vendors even more, publically announcing that supporting Microsoft products (via subscription of course) is the only way to avoid 'computing permafrost'. The idea will be that nothing short of Microsoft can make computing ideas take hold in the very demanding and difficult market out there, which has 'permafrost', so anything smaller than Microsoft inevitably dies. Therefore, support microsoft otherwise there would BE no software. Of any sort. 'Permafrost'. The environment would be incapable of supporting life.
They've certainly worked hard enough to set up a situation where that looks like the case, through acquisitions, threats and protection-racket like stuff. They are very _industrious_ criminals. Threatening people is hard work! They'd continue to do so under 'permafrost' conditions, because of course the reality is that 'life' pops up all over and has to be stamped out to maintain the illusion. The _spin_ on this state of affairs is 'permafrost', or 'there wouldn't be any competing software anyway'.
If they actually use this, I want them to pay me :P
Is it?
Prove it.
In that light, it's very strange and suspect to be trying to write software for 'end-users' that are expected to remain end-users...
The nearest analogy I can think of is a publisher who publishes books for only such people that can read but cannot write...
The basic concept behind the GPL is, 'Access to ideas, at all costs'. Nothing's allowed to get in the way of that.
Shawn Gordon is twisting an implementation detail of the GPL ('try to prevent GPL developers from being bankrupted by demands for copies of the source- a 'DOS attack', demand of source!') into a conflict with the basic desire of the GPL ('access to source, at all costs'). Someone should pay for his source and then mirror it far and wide, and the development should be forked away from him.
If 'the tent' is marked 'open source' and defined on economic and productivity grounds, surely the closed source companies can and should fend for themselves without help? Are you trying to give 'em open source welfare or something?
If 'the tent' is marked 'free software', doesn't the whole concept suggest that proprietary guys are by definition outside it? And again, isn't it best to let them fend for themselves?
I'm not aware of any serious intent to KILL off proprietary software by either open source or Free software advocates. If some or a lot of us wish it would DIE off, well, I'm sure they wish that of us too, welcome to the world. What possible reason could there be for TRYING to help proprietary software? Can't it help itself? Doesn't it have its own 'tent'?
Nah: it's not unheard of for a label to lose advance money on a band that doesn't sell. A loan shark would break their legs to get it back. The label will merely be like, "If you don't recoup our advance, you'll never work in this industry again!" That is too weird for a bank- banks are more concerned with just getting the money back, rather than speculating on the chance of really sucking the debtor dry vs. just permanently rendering them unable to work in the industry.
Yeah. Go to www.ampcast.com/chrisj and go nuts, I have a LOT of samples up. What I do at this point is I put all but one track up on each album "officially", and have no gripe if anyone fills in by putting up the missing tracks later. Gotta get the CDs out first tho, or there's nothing to rip from. I also have weirder stuff, and some pop/rock type music that's fairly old though I need to be coming out with some new songs-with-actual-words-in. Lastly, my mastering software (Mac, but GPLed anyhow) is at www.airwindows.com/dithering.
Try not to be too freaked out by the variety of music on my ampcast pages :) I like a LOT of different stuff. I've done brutal instrumental rock, sorta sedated trancey retro stuff, demented lowfi electronic goofiness, touching melodic pop, stagnant atonal droney ambience, seriously challenging polymetric electronica, stomping country-rock and the best freaking Noise (in the hardcore uncompromising sense) out there :D however, there is no living human who likes ALL that stuff but me, so be warned. God knows what I'll do next. Easy listening, maybe. Oh, I forgot the fretless guitar Frippertronics soundscapes, silly ME. ;)
Cheers. I think you can stream stuff if Ampcast bugs you about registering. They only want to keep people from cheating as THEY, not you, pay me a royalty on downloads. I hope to bring them in some money with my CDs when I get them all up there- we have to start doing actual business and selling CDs if they're going to continue the royalty-paying. Oh, and you can 'rate' stuff if you make a myAmp account: there's charts of a sort, pretty decent really, you can rate stuff up or down and it affects the chart.
The deal is, with Free software, those scratches can HOOK UP and be built into something huge- eventually.
The tide does not gallop.
Speaking as a guy who has just finished remastering CDs for MONTHS, working until past dawn on the remixing and wordlength reduction and getting an ISRC code (for which US indies are forced to go to the RIAA even though it is an INTERNATIONAL STANDARD! hello?!) and getting CD burning software (Jam) that can burn Red Book properly and redoing all the artwork and buying special archival Mitsui CDRs for the masters to be sent, I gotta say what the hell do you think you're doing?
I mean, sure, down with the man, support the EFF, in fact YES share your music, use P2P, you're talking to a guy here who has his indie distributor print "Please copy this CD for your friends" on ALL his CDs, so let's not get snippy about me being mercenary. I think not. But I'm serious: what, exactly, are you trying to accomplish by telling people to "never buy music. Ever."? Do you somehow not realise that you can support people who are NOT the RIAA? People who in some cases (not all) will even support YOUR right to share and trade copies of THEIR music online?
I like your enthusiasm, guy. I _really_ like your determination to go against the RIAA's deeply entrenched hegemony. But you know what?
If you really want to help the revolution in music, MAKE YOUR OWN.
Right now, you're so hung up on hurting the monopoly distribution channel that you don't even see that there is an underground out there- and the more people who say "Never buy music. Ever", the more that starves the underground as well as the RIAA.
I'm with O'Reilly- who, I believe, said in a conference once that if the Internet and copying truly did mean that he couldn't sell books because they were immediately copied, and if he really had no choice and either the Net or his book selling had to go, he'd go with the Net and give up trying to sell books. I'm with him on that.
But let's not jump to conclusions, please?
I'm just finishing the last stages of a massive remastering spree- taking TEN albums, pretty much my entire catalog, and bringing them up to that standard for selling on Ampcast. Sometimes that's a lot of work.
I'm a vinyl record freak myself- I don't intrinsically like CD sound, much less mp3. I have written dithering software to MAKE my CDs sound good enough that I think they represent what the master tape was. I've gone in and done spectral noise gating on certain masters originally from tape, or with hissing guitar preamps present. I've built from scratch a binary-coded passive attentuation mixing console to sum the tracks with unlimited resolution, and bought expensive audiophile input caps (Hovland Musicaps) for the inputs of my A/D converter, a modded Lexicon.
That only gets you so far- after all, my CDs do literally say on them "Please copy this CD for your friends" so obviously, while I accept what will happen anyway, I must also figure out what MORE to do. Beyond 'respect' or 'loyalty'. What can I give people that's cooler even than that?
And so I turn to packaging. I've been wrestling with Ampcast, persuading them to allow me to specify the total form of every piece of artwork on the CD case. I want it to be like when you have a record and you put the cover where you can see it while listening to the record. I want there to be no dotcom banners and small print all over the fucking album cover. I want classic album art purity- and since I'm dealing with an indie and not the RIAA, and since I'm willing to trade off being in Tower Records for producing my artwork RIGHT (NO bar codes!), I may get it- and I'm proceeding as if I can have total artistic freedom.
The most extreme case so far has been my "Postcards From Tehigue" CD. The music is up as mp3s (128K VBR) and the CD is full 44.1/16 dithered with fancy techniques from hi-res masters, but it's funny because it's a wonderfully hi-res capturing of the sound of an antique Apple IIgs making really strange proto-electronic music- done back in 1986 or so. The actual music is pretty well represented by the mp3s, though you miss out on a bit of antique electronic SKRONK that way- so what is to be done with the packaging to match the goofy coolness of this bizarre music?
Answer: I scanned the actual motherboard of a IIgs at pretty high resolution (had to reduce to 1425x1425 for the cover- I used free software from Helmut Dersch, "Panorama Tools", to do the reduction with 256x256 sinc interpolation for REALLY SHARP reduction- again, taking effort to do stuff as 'right' as possible), and I made the tray liner so that the spines are no more or less than the END of the circuit board- some jacks and stuff, metal bits, also scanned with great clarity. No logos. No listings of the producer's girlfriend and dog (separately or, um, overloaded ;) ), no pointless enumeration of the street address of the recording company- no names or numbers on the spine, either! The package looks as much as possible like a small circuit board stuck in with your CDs, with ONE exception I couldn't resist- on the CPU chip, I used Photoshop (cloning and several overlay modes) to copy the exact appearance of the printing on other chips, down to the color and the texturing of the surface of the chip, to write as if it'd been printed there:
POSTCARDS FROM TEHIGUE
CHRIS JOHNSON
I really think that if you are trying to make ART (of whatever sort- even if it's kind of weird) there is always a way to keep following that out to where you're producing something that DOES have a value of uniqueness- even in a world of Star Trek Replicators where NOTHING can be 'unique'. In that world, what you end up doing is producing something so iconoclastic that you end up with just a few people totally floored by it- who're ready to pick up your version of it simply because, well, it's not that much more expensive than copying every detail, and it's YOUR version- the closest they can get to what you actually touched and did.
If you could buy a beautiful painting with a bar code, and download jpgs of the beautiful painting with its bar code, etc. and you had a chance at getting a copy WITHOUT the bar code- would you do it? If you could get a clone without bar code, versus a print that the artist had produced with his own hands (rather like Andy Warhol's screen printing experiments), how much is that worth to you? How much is it worth to a rabid fan of the artist? How much is it worth, if the art is so idiosyncratic that nobody else will make it for you the way you like?
Because digital and computer software are more akin to IDEAS than physical artifacts or precision devices, this will only continue.
There are people right now developing "Pro Tools" clones in open source. I develop mastering software in open source. People develop synthesis, DSP, hunt down the flaws of existing gear- it's like the internet 'security' community, the 'open' camp are farther along than the proprietary guys, move faster, cooperate better. The best horn PA bassbin out there is being designed by a bunch of amateur, semipro, and pro speaker hackers on the internet- I've been designing speakers for more than ten years and some of their docs leave ME staring at the level of technical expertise.
Oh, and you can have an indie company distribute, host and make your CDs for you (duplication rather than replication- SO far) and even that will only cost the buyer $6-12 or so. I price mine at $11.99 and that's because I put months of work into them and it's STILL half what the record industry charges...