I took a Mac port of LAME (DropMP3) and Codewarrior and hacked it, ensuring that I had not only frequency limit and slope controls but also an ATH suppress threshold control- I understand this is now in LAME but when I did it it was a new trick. The reason is, I do digital audio mastering and consider mp3 another mastering stage. You've got to do fairly significant work to get it to seriously reflect the original master- usually you completely lose all soundstage depth, and the tonal balance goes out the window, with highs either vanishing or wildly exaggerated.
I've been in an endless-remastering phase getting together equipment and software- and I figure I'm going to be whipping out the ol' hacked DropMP3 again, and not using Ogg Vorbis. Why? Partly encoder/decoder availability (try supporting older MacOSes such as you'd find in a dedicated DAW with specific picky hardware! We don't _upgrade_ on a whim, stuff can break), and partly because I suspect I'd have to do all the hacking over again, and I'm lucky I got the LAME sharedlib to work at all- I am _no_ programmer. I am not confident I'd be able to work the magic trick twice...
And the point is, my needs are different from consumer needs. When I was first looking at MP3, I hopped up and down and stamped my tiny feet and demanded a whole bank of controls over the parameters of encoding, to be able to do mastering to mp3 properly. Nobody listened, nobody cared. LAME is open source- I downloaded software, spent far too much on Codewarrior (standard environment for Mac programming, very nice, but priced accordingly), and I did end up able to put in the controls I needed.
Now I have what I needed from MP3, and a copy of the source code, and here's Ogg Vorbis. I love what Ogg Vorbis _means_, but I don't know if I have it in me to do another feat of stumbling, barely-capable hacking on it to get what I need- and the people doing it are not in the least interested in catering to my every whim. I swear, I would drop everything to help them if they wanted to be helped- but they don't. It's their baby, and not my business to tell them how to do it or what platforms (inc. archaic ones) to support.
So fine- I'll keep an eye out for if anything happens, and FWIW the stuff _I_ code (poorly, by programmer standards) is mostly audio these days and all GPLed. So if they want to take anything I do and incorporate it into the standard Vorbis encoder, they're free to do so. I could picture a bit of sidechain compression to bring up detail that the encoding will tend to cut back again, something like that based on what lossy encoding tends to do... but that's as may be.
I won't be using Ogg Vorbis in the _immediate_ future. I have a pet sound player, 'SoundApp', which is a wonderful and free tool (not my own doing), and if that starts supporting Ogg Vorbis I'll take more of an interest. I have personally written the author of SoundApp inquiring about future support for Ogg Vorbis. No reply, but maybe it will come someday. There's a kludge of an encoder that is the only non-commercial Ogg encoder out there for Mac: it crashes on OS8.1. And so it goes...
What gives you the notion that writing software must be constrained to programmers?
At http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html you will find an elaborate program for high-end digital audio mastering from >16bit word lengths. It includes a number of very killer vertical-market type features like multiband sidechain compression. It does NOT have remotely professional file-reading and writing, because those are more 'real programmer' things, and I'm not a 'real programmer'. However, no 'real programmer' has shown any interest in writing such an app, and the market is so tiny that the few people building stuff for it tend to charge in the kilobucks- and the app I did is GPLed and just to have it costs nothing.
So it is not a question of 'so if you wanted said mastering software, how would get it if nobody will write it without money?'. Surprise! Nobody wrote it anyway. The 'market' did not lead to any such software existing, even though I needed it desperately.
And it is not a question of 'yeah, right, like a programmer is going to do hard work like that for free': clue jet coming in on runway six, a programmer didn't do that. I did. It's not done in the way you'd want to sell as shrinkwrapped greedware, but then the market's too small anyhow. The point is, this program _exists_ and grows and evolves based on just one person's ability to mostly sort of program. It's GPLed making it that much easier for the _next_ person who has a personal task to accomplish, to get a head start. And that's how it goes...
I really have little patience for programmers. Programmers are like the people who put the spyware boobytrap 'dial up and invalidate the registration number if the person's reinstalled the program too many times' code into an mp3 player app that I _bought_ and ended up demanding my money back on. There's a lot that you don't really need a programmer for- you need one for good games, for serious server apps, for the _computery_ stuff, but there's a million other things that can be done more crudely by just regular people with a bit of determination.
(I'm not _really_ against programmers- not like that- but I grow very sick and tired of the 'software can't be free, how will you survive without paying US?!?' refrain. Maybe you're not as indispensable as you think.)
I'm sorry, Gowen, but I've long loved the more peculiar side of British humor- stretching all the way back to the Crazy Gang and best seen in the Goon Show and Monty Python.
This guy had concerned and serious public spokesmen warning the public solemnly about:
the dangerous drug 'Cake' which could damage the part of the brain known as Shatner's Bassoon
penis shaped sound waves abusing children over the internet
God knows what else- I don't dare ever actually watch this show, I'll die of laughter:)
This is the funniest thing I've heard of for _decades_. When I read the few details about the 'Cake' show in another thread, my brain sort of went 'gleep!' and shorted out. There's a difference between stupid and unbearably, gloriously loony- and not even the Goons had _real_ _people_ mouthing this sort of thing in all earnestness.
Oh, how wrong you are:) it's a terrible shame Peter Sellers didn't live to see this:)
mp3.com _is_ RIAA now. They were bought up by Vivendi/Universal. You're not going to be finding 'indie' stuff there for much longer. They have already chased off the majority of the really successful acts (for instance, do a little googling to find out what they did to 'Analog Pussy'), and you should see their contract terms: _long_ ago they borrowed enough lawyers from Vivendi to make an Artist Agreement that can turn more ugly than you could believe in a matter of days.
Try Ampcast.com or besonic.com if you want non-RIAA. mp3.com is totally RIAA right down to the lawyers and the deal they offer artists, now. Did you know that if you earn a lot of money with them, they won't pay you?
Well, the American Revolution was more or less fought over taxation, and this is the position Microsoft wish to place themselves in: taxation. It's all very well to talk of hacker uprisings, but it is also possible there will come a point when there is a physical uprising: 1,000,000 Joe Averages, running their little shoe stores or whatever, become outraged at crashes, spyware, MS taxation on their transactions, having copies of XPIII self-destruct on deadline forcing Joe to buy a new copy or license over the net to fix the deadline situation and be able to work, having server-stored vital documents mysteriously disappear or become corrupted or be used to sell to spammers...
At this point, and it could happen, Joe Average freaks out. Thing is, Joe doesn't have any really constructive solutions- what he'll want then is roughly equivalent to nationalizing Microsoft and switching off all those forms of taxes and 'piracy protections' that are abusing him. He has no clue of the significance of things- he will just want to destroy Microsoft at that point.
Actually, that's the only part of it I _don't_ doubt. The actual mechanics of the process won't necessarily work like that, the scaremongering really depends on a great deal of assumptions that are not legitimate (just like people swore up and down that first Jackson, then the Appeals Court, would let MS off with a 'naughty naughty'), but the one aspect that IS entirely convincing is that MS is laying long range plans of this nature.
Unless, of course, you believe that everything they say in the way of empty reassurances is entirely trustworthy, sincere, and not an outright, intentional, manipulative lie. But then, Microsoft does not lie;) right?
The one thing Cringeley DOES have exactly right is Microsoft's intent. This really should enter into the ongoing antitrust investigation. Who says that release of Windows XP is REALLY the Big Issue at stake? I would say that was a relatively minor issue compared with the more longrange plans in process, and although Cringeley is painting worst-case scenarios regarding the _ease_ of MS doing this, he is dead-on regarding the general idea of it.
Maybe there wasn't any contributed by the open source community. I know I release software under the GPL but it's not to try to get 'many hands' programming on it. It's for the principle of the thing.
By the same token, there is no reason there shouldn't be an open version based on the last GPLed release, and no reason why that shouldn't compete directly with the closed version. Deciding to go proprietary does not give you moral rights or entitle you to any sort of market. If they can sell it, fine: if not, why try and protect them in any way?
(2) This is also true: just because YOU do not have, say, ribbon tweeters does not mean nobody does.
(3) Finally, the systems that would BE harmed by high-volume damaging sound are also the more expensive ones- in a way, this only underscores the point.
It's true. They are being a bit confused in suggesting that the _electronics_ can be harmed by such content- not unless it excites ultrasonic resonances and blows an amp that way, and the term for such an amp is 'broken'. But the effect on speakers is no different from transistor clipping, and it's widely known that in some cases weaker amps will blow speakers easier (esp. tweeters) for just this reason: clipping, and the high frequency components this produces.
The report is confusing and vague, but there is much truth to it. Just because _your_ tweeters are not delicate enough to be injured by this sort of thing...
Junkbuster is clearly 'you' modifying content for personal use. It does one thing, that's obvious, it's editing stuff out instead of in- pretty clear cut.
TopText is NOT clearly 'you' modifying content for your own use. Not unless it's YOU that is specifying all those links to things.
My take on it is this: if you want to hack your copy of Mozilla so that every instance of the word 'Kodak' points to a Microsoft page slamming Kodak's horrible refusal to offer customers choice (tm), I think you're a loony and go right ahead. That way, every time you see the word 'Kodak', you will think, "There's that word that I wrote a link to", and no problem there.
If you let a _third_ _party_ come up with the link for you, I object. Write your own link! I'll happily let _you_ fill in the context of a web page and decide what relates to what, even if you're insane, but what gives you the right to turn this over to some third party? They're not you! If you want to read their ads, how about you go to THEIR PAGE and do it? Why on earth do you feel that your opinion matters on what THEY do to my content? You're free to edit what you like yourself, or have Mozilla omit all instances of the word 'the', because this is all your personal interaction with the content. You are the user, it is what you are reading, you can do what the hell you want. Your freedom does not necessarily extend to being entitled to sublicense that off, to shrug and say "Here, I'm reading this page. I know you didn't pay this guy, but put some ads in that I might think are relevant. Surprise me!"
If you want to read their ads that damn badly, how about you go to their page to do so? What gives THEM property rights over my little web homestead?
It's even worse if you're clueless and have no idea I didn't actively choose every one of those links. I'm assuming you are firmly aware I didn't choose those links and I _still_ consider it totally out of line and not their bailiwick. If you're an idiot and think I made the pretty yellow lines myself, the situation is incomparably worse. But of course nobody is ever a luser, or ever encounters a new feature unexpectedly on a strange website and concludes it's the site author's doing:P
Rule 2 is the kicker, in my opinion. It's actually perfectly logical and sensible. Think about it- if someone wants to advertise on MY site, why on earth should they be paying TopText? They can pay TopText some sort of flat rate for use of the technology, but payment for the ad impressions must go to ME.
If this is considered some sort of eminent domain and I'm supposed to NOT have any right to be certain a third party is not modifying my copyrighted material to change its meaning and implications, then they can DAMNED well pay me a royalty set by some impartial arbitrator that is in line with normal advertising rates. It is obscene to behave as if the payment to me should be zero.
TopText do not have RIGHTS to my material, whatever it is. This is a far cry from 'users downloading files and editing in advertising links with a text editor on their own initiative'. It's a third-party hijacking of content. It is indefensible.
Supposing you did have to opt in and set a meta tag to make these become active on your pages and cause the ads to happen dynamically on your content. Would you or would you not inquire, "So, how much are you going to pay me for this?"
People keep talking about using the defeated error correction to insert 'subtle degradation', and actually in some cases they reminded me about how it's not really about the sample being off but the error correction being dickered with- but the deal is, if they do 'subtle degradation', guess what? IT WOULD BE SUBTLE. As in 'not annoying'. Even a random number isn't terribly likely to produce the 'bad pirate! no music!' result, so my money is on the proposition that this is max-amplitude isolated samples, preferably reverse phase from the waveform. This is not that much harder to do, and there's really no justification for not doing it. Admittedly it's easier to correct- but subtle stuff won't BOTHER anybody. Subtle stuff _certainly_ will not survive mp3 encoding. It'll get stripped by the first layer of filtering unless it's as severe as you can get it.
Bah. These wrong samples are EXTREME samples: if they were not, they would not be causing ripped versions to sound terrible. It's revoltingly easy to tell where those are. They are the samples that go like:
3,3,4,4,5,6,7,15342,8,10...
Sorry- you overestimate these people. Software to fix this has existed for _years_ and well before anyone at Macrovision got the desperately bright idea to try this.
3) Why is it so bad or hard just to do after the fact interpolation, using good sound filters?
It's not. Not at all. You don't even use filters. What you do is run a separate filtered version of the signal, which ought to get pretty close but without any highs to it. Then, anytime a sample's way out of whack compared to the adjacent samples, you use the filtered sample instead.
It's barely even a filtering issue, because 99% (or 99.99%) of the music is _untouched_. You're just throwing in a backup sample when you hit an obvious click.
I've tested out my software on a recording where I introduced full volume clicking every 1000 samples, or 44 times a second. I think it would still work pretty well even if the interference was every _ten_ samples, or 4410 times a second. You'd get music out the other side, is what I'm driving at- and mostly 'unfiltered', this doesn't make the rest of the samples sound dull.
...except that cdparanoia was completely defeating it first, and even before then, in the early days of digital audio, CEDAR Audio was developing declickers for audio restoration that would completely defeat it.
_ANY_ declicker worth a damn will defeat it. It is a pathologically easy case for a declicker, and declickers can correct thousands of errors per channel per _second_. And you know what? If you get coy with it and try to NOT make pathologically obvious clicks- the interpolation on CD players won't kick in! It is a complete loser technology in every way.
'Fadden' horribly overestimates the effectiveness of this technology...
Interestingly, it turns out that the declicker's real interesting to use _inverted_: you set it up to kick in on just the harder transients, and have it hop them up a bit. It sounds like a sort of expansion, but rather than broadly expanding everything it just opens out the top of snare hits etc. Dynamite subtle effect...
And hell yes, will it ever clean up Macrovision garbage. I wrote a routine to put in full crank samples every thousand samples... initially I thought it wasn't working, until I remembered to take the 'test file evil noise' generator back _out_ again. Then, it was clear as a bell without the tiniest trace of the junk that I'd put there at roughly twice the amplitude of most of the music...
This normal, useful audio signal processing tool works brilliantly as an access control circumventor. Cuff me:P
I'm on MacOS using _eudora_ and all these sorts of files are dead inanimate matter to me.
Almost a megabyte of dead inanimate matter over a 56K modem just since this afternoon alone...
I am _so_ _pissed_ _off_ at this crap. I've taken to spamcopping the victims, using this note to their postmasters (where applicible):
"Please suspend this user's account. They are propagating the SirCam worm, and that must stop directly.
-postmaster@airwindows.com"
I have it as a clipping ready to be dragged into the spamcop personalize box, which is what I do when I am so overloaded with spam that I can't get time to type, but not so overloaded that I just give up- which has been the case until recently and this is what brought me back into the fray.
_I_ _hate_ _this_... can't we declare Outlook illegal or something? Classify it as a weapon for denial of service attacks.
There are days when I would think it _quite_ fitting for a guy like this to be seized and held without bail for writing spamming software.
That is not the point, and he's not being imprisoned for that. He's being imprisoned for violating the DMCA by circumventing an access mechanism.
I don't CARE how much of a scumbag the guy actually is- let him go and then arrest him again for being a spammer-helper if you consider that a more serious crime. The point is that he's being imprisoned for something that is not justifiable.
Hell, man, I write open source digital audio software. One type of thing you can put into digital audio software is 'declicking', which is a perfectly normal operation that can be used to snuff out intermittent noise or record surface noise. Now, the RIAA labels are introducing a type of distortion into CDs intending that the CD players interpolate past this noise. That makes it, in that context, an access control mechanism.
Are you seriously suggesting that it should be possible for some RIAA clown to have me dragged off in CHAINS for producing and supplying something that just happens to be able to circumvent an imaginary boundary they put up?
Supposing someone uses ROT13 as an access control mechanism. If I write a de-ROT13er, does THAT justify my being hauled off and arrested?
A man is IN JAIL now over this sort of circumventing. This is not a joke! I don't care how many spammers he's assisted, or how much he made. I report spammers to spamcop and release my work as GPLed free software, and buddy? I'm next.
Re-think your attitude, please. You are not being helpful, and as near as I can tell, it's me, not you, next in line to be dragged off in chains. Easy for YOU to shrug it off- this time!
No, actually they can't legally do this. They've really fucked up ('scuse my french). The problem is in two parts: on the one hand, the distortion they add could damage or destroy stereo equipment if uncorrected (and there are players out there, like car stereos, that both fail to correct this and also have wattage enough to fry tweeters instantly given this kind of distortion), and on the other hand, they are surreptitiously introducing this without any type of consumer warning or identification. The combination is fatal. They are hosed- they should have introduced some type of labelling system and tried to brazen it out, and then they'd probably be fine. Right now, they are totally vulnerable to legal action, and probably damages. (obIANAL, yet... this is _awfully_ clear cut)
The music companies have been trying to cover up links to the Mob for _decades!_ They are not nice people, and they are not about 'competency'. You go on and think what you like, but you're only marking yourself as somebody who hasn't even begun to think about speculating on the possibility of considering the idea of beginning to TRY to learn how things actually work. *pant, pant, gasp for breath*;)
Seriously: the music industry are NOT NICE PEOPLE. They ARE dishonest and greedy. Whether you still do business with them is another story, and your affair, and nobody's asking you to clean up the world. But for God's sake, quit with the annoying, self-righteous naivete. I could give you enough background on this to fill a _book_. In fact, someone _has_ written such a book: "Hit Men", by Fredric Dannen.
No, I think to be Red Book standard the error correction has to be implemented so as to work. With this new stuff the error correction's doctored to fail in a certain way, hence the discs are not Red Book and are not legally allowed to carry the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo.
Not a bad talking point: tell people to buy only CDs with the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo, explaining that many discs these days are not allowed to carry this logo because 'they have too much error and the error correction is intentionally broken'. That's literally true.
Yes we can. Yes we are. Actually, nobody needed to write anything new: declicking is already a normal part of digital audio signal processing, and more than that, cdparanoia apparently already runs a declicker on the digital information it gets (it wouldn't be the error correction stage per se, because cdparanoia would already have the 'final data' and would be simply looking for stuff that was obviously wrong and declicking that.
Can't say as I'm surprised. Turns out I don't even need to show anybody what a declicker is because it's already being done. Anyone wants more info on implementing one for their own digital audio project, just ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no link... I never got permission from the DropMP3 author and don't think I am supposed to be distributing hacked versions...
I've been in an endless-remastering phase getting together equipment and software- and I figure I'm going to be whipping out the ol' hacked DropMP3 again, and not using Ogg Vorbis. Why? Partly encoder/decoder availability (try supporting older MacOSes such as you'd find in a dedicated DAW with specific picky hardware! We don't _upgrade_ on a whim, stuff can break), and partly because I suspect I'd have to do all the hacking over again, and I'm lucky I got the LAME sharedlib to work at all- I am _no_ programmer. I am not confident I'd be able to work the magic trick twice...
And the point is, my needs are different from consumer needs. When I was first looking at MP3, I hopped up and down and stamped my tiny feet and demanded a whole bank of controls over the parameters of encoding, to be able to do mastering to mp3 properly. Nobody listened, nobody cared. LAME is open source- I downloaded software, spent far too much on Codewarrior (standard environment for Mac programming, very nice, but priced accordingly), and I did end up able to put in the controls I needed.
Now I have what I needed from MP3, and a copy of the source code, and here's Ogg Vorbis. I love what Ogg Vorbis _means_, but I don't know if I have it in me to do another feat of stumbling, barely-capable hacking on it to get what I need- and the people doing it are not in the least interested in catering to my every whim. I swear, I would drop everything to help them if they wanted to be helped- but they don't. It's their baby, and not my business to tell them how to do it or what platforms (inc. archaic ones) to support.
So fine- I'll keep an eye out for if anything happens, and FWIW the stuff _I_ code (poorly, by programmer standards) is mostly audio these days and all GPLed. So if they want to take anything I do and incorporate it into the standard Vorbis encoder, they're free to do so. I could picture a bit of sidechain compression to bring up detail that the encoding will tend to cut back again, something like that based on what lossy encoding tends to do... but that's as may be.
I won't be using Ogg Vorbis in the _immediate_ future. I have a pet sound player, 'SoundApp', which is a wonderful and free tool (not my own doing), and if that starts supporting Ogg Vorbis I'll take more of an interest. I have personally written the author of SoundApp inquiring about future support for Ogg Vorbis. No reply, but maybe it will come someday. There's a kludge of an encoder that is the only non-commercial Ogg encoder out there for Mac: it crashes on OS8.1. And so it goes...
What gives you the notion that writing software must be constrained to programmers?
At http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html you will find an elaborate program for high-end digital audio mastering from >16bit word lengths. It includes a number of very killer vertical-market type features like multiband sidechain compression. It does NOT have remotely professional file-reading and writing, because those are more 'real programmer' things, and I'm not a 'real programmer'. However, no 'real programmer' has shown any interest in writing such an app, and the market is so tiny that the few people building stuff for it tend to charge in the kilobucks- and the app I did is GPLed and just to have it costs nothing.
So it is not a question of 'so if you wanted said mastering software, how would get it if nobody will write it without money?'. Surprise! Nobody wrote it anyway. The 'market' did not lead to any such software existing, even though I needed it desperately.
And it is not a question of 'yeah, right, like a programmer is going to do hard work like that for free': clue jet coming in on runway six, a programmer didn't do that. I did. It's not done in the way you'd want to sell as shrinkwrapped greedware, but then the market's too small anyhow. The point is, this program _exists_ and grows and evolves based on just one person's ability to mostly sort of program. It's GPLed making it that much easier for the _next_ person who has a personal task to accomplish, to get a head start. And that's how it goes...
I really have little patience for programmers. Programmers are like the people who put the spyware boobytrap 'dial up and invalidate the registration number if the person's reinstalled the program too many times' code into an mp3 player app that I _bought_ and ended up demanding my money back on. There's a lot that you don't really need a programmer for- you need one for good games, for serious server apps, for the _computery_ stuff, but there's a million other things that can be done more crudely by just regular people with a bit of determination.
(I'm not _really_ against programmers- not like that- but I grow very sick and tired of the 'software can't be free, how will you survive without paying US?!?' refrain. Maybe you're not as indispensable as you think.)
I send you this file to have your advice!
This guy had concerned and serious public spokesmen warning the public solemnly about:
This is the funniest thing I've heard of for _decades_. When I read the few details about the 'Cake' show in another thread, my brain sort of went 'gleep!' and shorted out. There's a difference between stupid and unbearably, gloriously loony- and not even the Goons had _real_ _people_ mouthing this sort of thing in all earnestness.
Oh, how wrong you are :) it's a terrible shame Peter Sellers didn't live to see this :)
Try Ampcast.com or besonic.com if you want non-RIAA. mp3.com is totally RIAA right down to the lawyers and the deal they offer artists, now. Did you know that if you earn a lot of money with them, they won't pay you?
I don't blame him ;)
At this point, and it could happen, Joe Average freaks out. Thing is, Joe doesn't have any really constructive solutions- what he'll want then is roughly equivalent to nationalizing Microsoft and switching off all those forms of taxes and 'piracy protections' that are abusing him. He has no clue of the significance of things- he will just want to destroy Microsoft at that point.
Unless, of course, you believe that everything they say in the way of empty reassurances is entirely trustworthy, sincere, and not an outright, intentional, manipulative lie. But then, Microsoft does not lie ;) right?
The one thing Cringeley DOES have exactly right is Microsoft's intent. This really should enter into the ongoing antitrust investigation. Who says that release of Windows XP is REALLY the Big Issue at stake? I would say that was a relatively minor issue compared with the more longrange plans in process, and although Cringeley is painting worst-case scenarios regarding the _ease_ of MS doing this, he is dead-on regarding the general idea of it.
By the same token, there is no reason there shouldn't be an open version based on the last GPLed release, and no reason why that shouldn't compete directly with the closed version. Deciding to go proprietary does not give you moral rights or entitle you to any sort of market. If they can sell it, fine: if not, why try and protect them in any way?
(2) This is also true: just because YOU do not have, say, ribbon tweeters does not mean nobody does.
(3) Finally, the systems that would BE harmed by high-volume damaging sound are also the more expensive ones- in a way, this only underscores the point.
It's true. They are being a bit confused in suggesting that the _electronics_ can be harmed by such content- not unless it excites ultrasonic resonances and blows an amp that way, and the term for such an amp is 'broken'. But the effect on speakers is no different from transistor clipping, and it's widely known that in some cases weaker amps will blow speakers easier (esp. tweeters) for just this reason: clipping, and the high frequency components this produces.
The report is confusing and vague, but there is much truth to it. Just because _your_ tweeters are not delicate enough to be injured by this sort of thing...
TopText is NOT clearly 'you' modifying content for your own use. Not unless it's YOU that is specifying all those links to things.
My take on it is this: if you want to hack your copy of Mozilla so that every instance of the word 'Kodak' points to a Microsoft page slamming Kodak's horrible refusal to offer customers choice (tm), I think you're a loony and go right ahead. That way, every time you see the word 'Kodak', you will think, "There's that word that I wrote a link to", and no problem there.
If you let a _third_ _party_ come up with the link for you, I object. Write your own link! I'll happily let _you_ fill in the context of a web page and decide what relates to what, even if you're insane, but what gives you the right to turn this over to some third party? They're not you! If you want to read their ads, how about you go to THEIR PAGE and do it? Why on earth do you feel that your opinion matters on what THEY do to my content? You're free to edit what you like yourself, or have Mozilla omit all instances of the word 'the', because this is all your personal interaction with the content. You are the user, it is what you are reading, you can do what the hell you want. Your freedom does not necessarily extend to being entitled to sublicense that off, to shrug and say "Here, I'm reading this page. I know you didn't pay this guy, but put some ads in that I might think are relevant. Surprise me!"
If you want to read their ads that damn badly, how about you go to their page to do so? What gives THEM property rights over my little web homestead?
It's even worse if you're clueless and have no idea I didn't actively choose every one of those links. I'm assuming you are firmly aware I didn't choose those links and I _still_ consider it totally out of line and not their bailiwick. If you're an idiot and think I made the pretty yellow lines myself, the situation is incomparably worse. But of course nobody is ever a luser, or ever encounters a new feature unexpectedly on a strange website and concludes it's the site author's doing :P
If this is considered some sort of eminent domain and I'm supposed to NOT have any right to be certain a third party is not modifying my copyrighted material to change its meaning and implications, then they can DAMNED well pay me a royalty set by some impartial arbitrator that is in line with normal advertising rates. It is obscene to behave as if the payment to me should be zero.
TopText do not have RIGHTS to my material, whatever it is. This is a far cry from 'users downloading files and editing in advertising links with a text editor on their own initiative'. It's a third-party hijacking of content. It is indefensible.
Supposing you did have to opt in and set a meta tag to make these become active on your pages and cause the ads to happen dynamically on your content. Would you or would you not inquire, "So, how much are you going to pay me for this?"
People keep talking about using the defeated error correction to insert 'subtle degradation', and actually in some cases they reminded me about how it's not really about the sample being off but the error correction being dickered with- but the deal is, if they do 'subtle degradation', guess what? IT WOULD BE SUBTLE. As in 'not annoying'. Even a random number isn't terribly likely to produce the 'bad pirate! no music!' result, so my money is on the proposition that this is max-amplitude isolated samples, preferably reverse phase from the waveform. This is not that much harder to do, and there's really no justification for not doing it. Admittedly it's easier to correct- but subtle stuff won't BOTHER anybody. Subtle stuff _certainly_ will not survive mp3 encoding. It'll get stripped by the first layer of filtering unless it's as severe as you can get it.
3,3,4,4,5,6,7,15342,8,10...
Sorry- you overestimate these people. Software to fix this has existed for _years_ and well before anyone at Macrovision got the desperately bright idea to try this.
It's not. Not at all. You don't even use filters. What you do is run a separate filtered version of the signal, which ought to get pretty close but without any highs to it. Then, anytime a sample's way out of whack compared to the adjacent samples, you use the filtered sample instead.
It's barely even a filtering issue, because 99% (or 99.99%) of the music is _untouched_. You're just throwing in a backup sample when you hit an obvious click.
I've tested out my software on a recording where I introduced full volume clicking every 1000 samples, or 44 times a second. I think it would still work pretty well even if the interference was every _ten_ samples, or 4410 times a second. You'd get music out the other side, is what I'm driving at- and mostly 'unfiltered', this doesn't make the rest of the samples sound dull.
http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html
_ANY_ declicker worth a damn will defeat it. It is a pathologically easy case for a declicker, and declickers can correct thousands of errors per channel per _second_. And you know what? If you get coy with it and try to NOT make pathologically obvious clicks- the interpolation on CD players won't kick in! It is a complete loser technology in every way.
'Fadden' horribly overestimates the effectiveness of this technology...
http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/MasteringTools Pro.hqx
http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/MasteringTools Screenshot.jpg
http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/MasteringTools ProSource.txt
Interestingly, it turns out that the declicker's real interesting to use _inverted_: you set it up to kick in on just the harder transients, and have it hop them up a bit. It sounds like a sort of expansion, but rather than broadly expanding everything it just opens out the top of snare hits etc. Dynamite subtle effect...
And hell yes, will it ever clean up Macrovision garbage. I wrote a routine to put in full crank samples every thousand samples... initially I thought it wasn't working, until I remembered to take the 'test file evil noise' generator back _out_ again. Then, it was clear as a bell without the tiniest trace of the junk that I'd put there at roughly twice the amplitude of most of the music...
This normal, useful audio signal processing tool works brilliantly as an access control circumventor. Cuff me :P
I'm on MacOS using _eudora_ and all these sorts of files are dead inanimate matter to me.
Almost a megabyte of dead inanimate matter over a 56K modem just since this afternoon alone...
I am _so_ _pissed_ _off_ at this crap. I've taken to spamcopping the victims, using this note to their postmasters (where applicible):
"Please suspend this user's account. They are propagating the SirCam worm, and that must stop directly.
-postmaster@airwindows.com"
I have it as a clipping ready to be dragged into the spamcop personalize box, which is what I do when I am so overloaded with spam that I can't get time to type, but not so overloaded that I just give up- which has been the case until recently and this is what brought me back into the fray. _I_ _hate_ _this_... can't we declare Outlook illegal or something? Classify it as a weapon for denial of service attacks.
That is not the point, and he's not being imprisoned for that. He's being imprisoned for violating the DMCA by circumventing an access mechanism.
I don't CARE how much of a scumbag the guy actually is- let him go and then arrest him again for being a spammer-helper if you consider that a more serious crime. The point is that he's being imprisoned for something that is not justifiable.
Hell, man, I write open source digital audio software. One type of thing you can put into digital audio software is 'declicking', which is a perfectly normal operation that can be used to snuff out intermittent noise or record surface noise. Now, the RIAA labels are introducing a type of distortion into CDs intending that the CD players interpolate past this noise. That makes it, in that context, an access control mechanism.
Are you seriously suggesting that it should be possible for some RIAA clown to have me dragged off in CHAINS for producing and supplying something that just happens to be able to circumvent an imaginary boundary they put up?
Supposing someone uses ROT13 as an access control mechanism. If I write a de-ROT13er, does THAT justify my being hauled off and arrested?
A man is IN JAIL now over this sort of circumventing. This is not a joke! I don't care how many spammers he's assisted, or how much he made. I report spammers to spamcop and release my work as GPLed free software, and buddy? I'm next.
Re-think your attitude, please. You are not being helpful, and as near as I can tell, it's me, not you, next in line to be dragged off in chains. Easy for YOU to shrug it off- this time!
No, actually they can't legally do this. They've really fucked up ('scuse my french). The problem is in two parts: on the one hand, the distortion they add could damage or destroy stereo equipment if uncorrected (and there are players out there, like car stereos, that both fail to correct this and also have wattage enough to fry tweeters instantly given this kind of distortion), and on the other hand, they are surreptitiously introducing this without any type of consumer warning or identification. The combination is fatal. They are hosed- they should have introduced some type of labelling system and tried to brazen it out, and then they'd probably be fine. Right now, they are totally vulnerable to legal action, and probably damages. (obIANAL, yet... this is _awfully_ clear cut)
The music companies have been trying to cover up links to the Mob for _decades!_ They are not nice people, and they are not about 'competency'. You go on and think what you like, but you're only marking yourself as somebody who hasn't even begun to think about speculating on the possibility of considering the idea of beginning to TRY to learn how things actually work. *pant, pant, gasp for breath* ;)
Seriously: the music industry are NOT NICE PEOPLE. They ARE dishonest and greedy. Whether you still do business with them is another story, and your affair, and nobody's asking you to clean up the world. But for God's sake, quit with the annoying, self-righteous naivete. I could give you enough background on this to fill a _book_. In fact, someone _has_ written such a book: "Hit Men", by Fredric Dannen.
Accept a clue, please.
Not a bad talking point: tell people to buy only CDs with the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo, explaining that many discs these days are not allowed to carry this logo because 'they have too much error and the error correction is intentionally broken'. That's literally true.
Can't say as I'm surprised. Turns out I don't even need to show anybody what a declicker is because it's already being done. Anyone wants more info on implementing one for their own digital audio project, just ask me.