Even if they really, truly left the creative liberties of their development studios alone, doesn't it seem a little wrong to have only one source for all software? Does that sound like a market to you? (oh, but there will be other developers. They can be as successful as... Looking Glass!)
Really. Look at Looking Glass. Look at the reasons Bungie has given, specifically their sense of where things are heading for _any_ independent developer- Bungie are not small time and if they were seeing that much trouble, the industry is DEAD and just hasn't fallen over yet. THINK.
X-Box _only_. If you think for a second they're going to allow it to come out even for the PC and reduce the pressure behind X-Box, you're out of your mind. They have seized and killed one of the most hotly anticipated games I've ever heard of.
I certainly do wish there was some way to put these people in jail. Isn't constantly, incessantly and flagrantly causing a company to break the law _some_ kind of a crime? Can't these people be locked up for something, anything? Sic the IRS on their personal finances!
Er- going out and _seizing_ top tier game developers who are cooperating with your competition (Halo has headlined Macworld and been featured in Steve Jobs keynotes) and making them turn their game X-Box only is, shall we say, a _bit_ over the line? This is precisely the sort of thing MS has been doing that got it _convicted_ of antitrust and sentenced to be broken up, right down to the likelihood that MS strongarmed Bungie into it.
Bungie are too dedicated, too well known for having goodwill with their customers to have done this for the supplied reasons. Think about it- what would have stopped them from developing for X-Box as independents? NOTHING. It is NORMAL for a game company to maybe ship for a new console, perhaps even be cajoled by the console vendor. We are expected to believe that Bungie savaged their reputation and betrayed a _huge_ fanbase who are among the most dedicated fans in the industry, absolutely backstabbed them, all for the chance to develop for a console that they could have developed for- nay, that they could have been paid OFF to develop for ANYWAY.
It doesn't wash. We're not hearing the whole story.
So, since the 'carrot' is utterly, transparently inadequate as an explanation for what's going on (Halo, the Steve Jobs feature presentation of Macworld, being seized and turned into an X-Box only title), what might there be as far as the 'stick'?
We don't have to look very far. Bungie is well known for being paranoid about distribution. Its early struggles with distributors were agonising- IIRC there's a funny rant on the subject at Bungie.com. This company, more than almost any other, was _painfully_ aware of its delicate lifeline with the distributors.
All Microsoft would have had to do was threaten to have Bungie blacklisted with ALL the distributors and Bungie would have to agree to any terms. "Don't carry Bungie or we'll pull Office". No distributor would risk offending Microsoft, no distributor would carry Bungie, Bungie would be dead- it's that simple. This is the most likely 'stick'- making it easy to understand these shocking and very obvious results.
Yes this is illegal as fuck, and exactly the behaviour MS has just been found guilty of in court. Your point?
The fact that Microsoft is running amok and trying to do as much damage as it can as fast as it can is hardly surprising. It's just a little startling how _obvious_ they're willing to be with it, knowing they can move faster than the courts.
The most interesting point is this: Bungie is pretty much a top-tier developer. If they can be _seized_ in this manner and assigned to X-Box only, no developer is safe, and no market really exists- it's just a play-market. The question people should be asking themselves at this point is: who will be next? Will Id be seized and "Doom" be made an X-Box only title?
Screw that. I'll give whatever ideas I please. If someone does that _they_ are being intellectual muggers, and if the legal system is set up to support them doing it the legal system is wrong. I refuse to stop sharing ideas just because of that. If somebody does that to me I'll just have another idea, fuck 'em. The whole idea of selfcensoring and cutting off all sharing and interaction of ideas due to this threat just offends the hell out of me, and I simply can't accept making any concessions at all in that direction. You only live once, and when you die your money means nothing anymore but your ideas may live on.
Funny- I would never be seen calling them a 'pack of shits', but surely the fact that they bribe, threaten, steal and lie are valid complaints? If these are not valid complaints then what are?
Amazon already is without revenue *g* woops, I mean 'profit'.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Your example, Amazon, uses brick and mortar. The web side is the front end, it's the back end that brings in the money because it's the back end that gives people products.
What you're not seeing is how quickly technology can develop to take care of piddling details like handling Amazon-like loads. A few years ago most people were on 14.4 modems, now most people are on 56K- or would that be cable? Information _can_ be free and it's rather startlingly absurd to claim the opposite. Go tell the FSF *g* now there's an outfit that's made a difference with only a very old-school web site. Consider how much it cost to send 20 gigs of data across the Arpanet with how much it costs now to send the data five times as far and God knows how much faster. You _cannot_ behave like information is coal or ore- it is much more slippery than that, under some conditions it can proliferate madly and span the globe.
I admit I am not a dotcom *g* I think the classic dotcom phenomenon was silly greedhead ridiculousness and I am happy they are all going broke. You're trying to suggest that only by throwing the financial resources of a Big Studly Company at a problem can you get any meaningful result (beyond just some guy and his little files, or whatever). You might want to look at not me- but Gnutella- and reconsider. The connectivity of the net is cheap- the _electrical_ power sucked up by all the little computers is staggering, but the information exchange? That's tiny, slippery, hard to even quantify unless you're filling the pipe, and there are so many pipes... and every day we roar onward devising new consumerware with more horsepower and bigger tires and selling it to their egos. You are probably sitting at a computer that totally stomps what most of the _big_ sites ran when the Internet sprang from Al Gore's forehead;) now, what will it be like some years down the road when Joe Average's home computer rivals what Amazon runs now- and can handle a comparable network load? Amazon is already worldwide- there is no more unless they start selling to Mars. All that's left is for that technical capacity to take the orders of the whole internet... to come to the home. It might be a great time to be a cottage industry- with the technical capacity, the CPU, the network, the programs to handle that sort of full dotcommage trickling down to where regular people have them to play QuakeIIII^HDoom. *g*...or do you think that the bytes needed to send an order from one computer to another will also follow Moore's Law?
Why is it the site's job to make money? That seems flatly ludicrous.
Look, let me sound off from a probably-not-unusual position- I am a dotcom. Literally- I have 'airwindows.com', have had it since May '98, and that's where I keep my stuff. I have linux XPMs there, and some desktop pictures, and actually stories and novels I wrote (well, one finished novel and two unfinished). I have the software I use to remind myself what's going on each day, and the software I use to generate the site from a bunch of flat-text files, and I have the GPLed source for the programs.
I pay $45 a month to my ISP for this plus my dialup account. Some of that is extra megs of space at about $1 a meg- you can see why I turn to mp3.com for my music;) but the site is not ABOUT paying ME- _I_ pay for it, because I want it to be there.
Where is the need for ads, for micropayments to force any readers of my books to cough up a halfpenny for each chapter? What the hell? I don't get this. If you have a barbeque for your family do you charge each kid a quarter for the extra cooking you do for them? If you go down to the town swimming pool and take pleasure in doing fancy dives or showing people how to do the backstroke, do you then charge them a nickel? There is something crazy wedged into the collective unconscious about this sort of thing, and this talk of micropayments really, really highlights it. _WHY_ is it a given to some people that if I write little poems and put them on a web page, I must therefore be in favor of billing people a penny to see each one- and flaky or 'amateur' if I choose not to? This is nuts, just nuts.
(p.s. first 200 karma! woohoo! yay! and there was much rejoicing! Quick, somebody moderate me down and make me go "Wauuugghh!" as I get dragged horribly _back_ _under_ the double century mark! let's have a war between '+1 Funny' and '-1 Fscking Karma Whore!' moderations! *hehehee* do yer worst, I just laugh at all that anyway:) I promise if I get a '-1' to make a followup post saying 'waugh!', hit me:) )
"Somewhere in the mailing list I noticed the author was talking about how he kept the specifics of the quantization process open. Meaning it could be changed very easily, which in turn means that the compression could be very precisely tuned, that should be much more useful then simply picking bitrate/hz/stereo.
Now this is what interests me. Usually when I am participating in discussions on this kind of stuff, it is as a musician, but underlying that is more than ten years of extremely hardcore audio geekness- I would feel pretty confident in saying that w.r.t sound engineering hardware I am as good as Monty is with this compression programming. (I realise that sounds like a big claim- it is. I make no such claim about programming or software:) )
From that viewpoint, I have to say that the idea of being able to 'very precisely tune' the compression is wildly exciting, just wildly exciting. Does everybody fully understand where that leads? It gets away from the computer geek core skills, but you know there are geeks whose core skills it leads _towards_. What you are talking about is effectively a form of MASTERING. Let me take a minute and give a little background on what this could be like...
First, mastering. Once music gets mixed down to a final two tracks (or more, if you're doing funky surround stuff, but mostly it's two tracks), what you have isn't the final media. You have a 30 ips openreel two-track tape, maybe, or you might have a 48k/20bit digital master if you're smart, or possibly just a 16 bit 44.1K DAT or something if you're not. If you have a CD you've basically done the mastering yourself- and that's not necessarily good, because you might suck at it and the idea is to do it really really well, possibly at huge expense and possibly not.
Mastering engineers always desperately want some form of much-higher-quality media to work from- if you are making a CD they would prefer 20 or 24 bit output. If you're making a record, you could use that or the traditional two-track open reel tape which generally exceeds vinyl playback quality levels by a wide margin. In some cases a mastering engineer making a CD might want analog open-reel tape instead of _any_ form of digital: the idea is that he knows waaaay better than most musicians how to do the transfer, and may have lots of sophisticated equipment to extract every bit of detail and color off that tape and make it jump out of the CD sounding totally lifelike. Mastering engineers are the ones who will get mad at you if you go around normalising all the levels on your digital master for 'em- the mastering engineer tears his hair in angst at such a situation because he or she knows exactly what damage the algorithm is doing to the sound, and that it can't be undone once done. In analog the mastering engineer handled compressing the sound and imperceptibly summing the bass frequencies of each channel to utilize all of the LP's ability to put across music. In all-digital, for instance the example of mastering a 48K 24 bit mix to CD, the mastering engineer will be keeping untouched versions of the files and experimenting with various EQ algorithms, different multiband compressions, all to try to FORCE the resulting lower quality version to sound BETTER than the supplied master tape. That's really the name of the game- making it sound as good as, isn't enough. And that's where you get into really expensive equipment and total voodoo engineering and guys paid on the scale of computer professionals whose names are recognized by lots of studio engineers and almost nowhere else. Ever heard of Bob Ludwig, Wilma Cozart, Bob Clearmountain?
Now. To bring this neatly into context with Ogg Vorbis, imagine getting access to a Vorbis 'compression settings box' that took up the whole screen crammed with little settings and adjustments. Stuff like 'masking threshold curve for left channel's frequency', or whatever goodies are there- the stuff that apparently none of the MP3 encoder writers think is the user's business. Almost everyone in the world would take a look at that and run screaming. Almost all computer geeks would look really confused and wonder, what is the point, isn't there just one right setting? Almost all serious mastering engineers would take one look and cry YEAAAAHHHH GIMME MORE O' THAAAAT!...and they'd be off and running, and you wouldn't believe what they'd be capable of. _Every_ _single_ _song_ would be tailored to the optimum compression details for THAT SONG, not some mythical standard...
From what I've seen, encoder programmers seem to think the idea is to match test tones as accurately as possible- and that is not going to be good enough, going into the future with digital compressed media. It took reading that comment about 'very precisely tuned' to realize just what's happening with all this. Look, if you told a big recording studio or an 'audiophile' act like Pink Floyd that they had to have their music mastered in just one particular way, but that's OK it's 'optimal', they would KILL AND EAT you *g* the fact is, recording projects vary so widely in both recording quality and SOUND that it's totally, totally impossible to 'master' to mp3 or anything else using a preset algorithm no matter how clever. Compare the sound of Rush (heavy on pushing the edges of the frequency range, dynamic, over-clear) with the sound of Tangerine Dream (really deep ambiences, liquid sound _necessary) with the sound of AC/DC (punchy as hell but it's gotta hit you in the stomach, no shrieky grating edges allowed and no show-offy super low bass) and you can see the problem. All compression must trade off _some_ qualities. But how can one arrangement cover all those bases? That's like mastering all their tapes through the same EQ and compression settings- disastrous.
I always think of a particular guitar note when I think of mastering- it's on Alanis Morrisette's "Jagged Little Pill" CD, I think on the song 'You Learn'. There's a brief instantaneous moment where an acoustic-sounding guitar, quite in the background, 'snaps' a tiny highpitched note on the high E and instantly mutes it again. Sounds like a set of light electric strings on an acoustic. This one short note cuts through the whole mix with stunning airiness, like a tiny instantaneous holograph of the note popping out. It's magical, impossibly delicate and clean- and that's what mastering can do for a song. That Alanis album is brilliantly mastered by Chris Bellman at Grundman Mastering- without him, that moment would NOT BE there. It might not have even felt that way on the original tape! The guy reached out and found the essence of the sound and caused the CD to cast exactly the right sonic spell to reveal it.
MP3ing that track almost certainly obliterates that moment and makes the little 'plink!' into a tinny clonk, ruining it. But if it was possible for the mastering engineer to also master the MP3- I guarantee that things would be very different. If I was doing it I would key off that sound and weight the 'masking' or whatever so that you had the deep pulse and a big emphasis on the airiness- the highs would be stealing lots of data for themselves. The thing is, simply going 'Oh OK' and coding in a radio button for 'more air' is unacceptable- if I had to master that track to MP3, I'd need to keep going back and adjusting the curves of the masking and all that until that instant and other important moments jumped out of the resulting mp3 JUST EXACTLY like it did on the original recording- or *gasp* BETTER! It's not at all a question of finding 'the masking thresholds of the human ear' and coding in those. Mastering engineers need total control over all those details at an amazingly low level, even though they are NOT programmers and wouldn't know memory management or b-trees if one bit them on the ass. Mastering engineers know better than the programmers how to set the 'equaliser dials' for the compression- because that is their JOB, to know that.
So _on_ behalf of all the other mastering engineers who don't read slashdot and aren't rubbing elbows with programmers as great and brilliant as Monty, let me just say- "Give us the controls!" We can't do your job, don't try to do ours! Every project has vastly different needs, and sometimes the needs are quite unusual! I could easily see, for instance, a song in which you masked 3-5K (normally the presence area!) very heavily and threw lots of data at the extreme highs which might normally be masked! I can even name a song that calls for that off the top of my head- "Hot Sun", from Adrian Belew's album "The Lone Rhino". Lots of Bowie's "Low" album would demand a _very_ different compression than most material because it is meant to sound claustrophobic, sometimes quite artificial and grating, and sometimes totally Enoed out lack of highs. I could keep on giving examples for ages- the point is, pleeeeease give us arbitrary control over these things and stop trying to perfect them for consumers all the time. There needs to be a way for mastering engineers to practice their craft on compressed media. If you make that possible, then we will start getting music from talented mastering engineers that really pushes the technology to the limit- and the difference will not be subtle, it will be a massive blast of very individualised sounds, letting different bands _really_ get their own distinct sound, and everybody will be able to appreciate that while still being able to use the 'consumer' version of the encoder (with all the scary parameters covered up and set to nice 'optimal' values) to rip metallica CDs *g*
If you can't force Ogg Vorbis to be the mainstream format with the help of mastering engineers, maybe could you make an MP3 encoder with a similar level of adjustment over its parameters? This needs to happen.
If I understand things correctly, MP3 encoding can be free (or partly?) but it's been hard for the free encoder coders to catch up with the totally patented and proprietary Freihofer stuff. And so you have Xing which gets tinny and artifact-y, and Blade which is said to be dull and lacking in extended highs, and LAME which some people claim is 'perfect' because it comes between the other two in personality.
When will people understand that these are all settings on the EQ dial? Mastering engineers do not need a single black box with the 'ideal' settings locked in painstakingly. Mastering engineers need KNOBS.
Dude, the _only_ stuff on that page labelled 'experimental' is my collaborations with the rapper 'Gentle Jones' of Regular Sized Monster. Experimental represents the concept and the method- the vocal tracks are Gentle's _DJ_ vocal-only tracks, meant only to be used for overlaying onto a different beat by a DJ. It was never meant to be listened to or used by itself, there is no click track, no net, and in general Gentle's vocal rhythms are _so_ demanding that they are impossible to put music to, without a click.
So I did. Call me a geek;)
Specifically, I thought "Wouldn't it be interesting to overdub music inspired by bebop jazz over these? To try and chase the vocals rather than hanging on the (unheard) click that was once there?". And so I did. If you don't like bebop and avant-garde jazz, you certainly won't like, hear, or understand those tracks. I'm not a bit sorry;) if your brain can't follow Gentle's vocals that's _your_ problem. I'll concede that this is very difficult.
_I_ think Gentle Jones is a fscking _genius_... and he likes these tracks. I think he was surprised anyone could put any sort of music behind just the bare vocal tracks. At any rate, I doubt either of us cares about your opinion- this is in the tradition of bebop, it's musician music and you as the listener aren't expected to be condescended to. Sorry, no 'thump thump thump thump' for you!;)
As for the Mac percentage- oh dear, did I underestimate them? *g* what was your opinion? 60%? 80%? I'm sorry, I don't think that's going to happen *g*
Oh feh- look at _any_ realworld numbers and you'll see quite plainly that Apple hit bottom in '96-'97, as one would expect. If you think making buttloads of profit is equivalent to hemorhaging money for two years straight, you're crazy- look at _any_ figures and you'll see the real story. Apple royally sucked in '96-'97, and recovered in a big way.
Also, your notion of 'one platform to rule them all and in the darkness bind them' is pretty childish- how soon we forget that in order for Windows to do this, they had to break lots of laws and screw everybody they could- and have been busted for just that! And even so, Apple survives, Linux survives, Amiga survives in its own way, etc etc.
The fact is, Apple ought to grow until it's maybe 20% or 30% of the market. Maybe 40% max. That's its niche (big niche, but it's a consumer-oriented system). Different Linuxes, including ones designed specifically for consumer use on older PCs (soon the 'obsolete' PCs will include PIIs and the like) will probably end up somewhere between 15% and 35%- and Windows will end up atrophying to where it is somewhere probably over 50% but less than 75%- and that balance will keep shifting, but in a healthy market each of the vendors will have a solid enough base to support them.
That's _my_ prediction. So if you want to talk 'dominate', if you go purely by numbers it's probably going to be Windows- but Windows will never again be able to totally ignore the other players in the field, and that is as it should be. In some ways that translates to _nobody_ 'dominating', if your definition of domination includes 'you never have to even think about interacting with computer users that don't use _your_ kind of computer'. In a very big world and marketplace, such an attitude is absolutely pathological...
Absolutely. The thing to wish for is that a large, bustling, confusing, bazaarlike MARKET opens up in which people must routinely make some allowances for each other's choices... rather than wishing that one monopoly would be supplanted by another.
I don't think there _is_ one OS so wonderful that 'everybody' would like it, nor should there be. It should be a pie with a lot of pieces, because people's tastes and needs vary so substantially.
I know that my whole 'kick' as a variously-creative person is coming up with something which just a small section of the population will just freak out and think it is absolutely wonderful. I think that's a good motivation. I've seen it happen with my music, repeatedly (see URL link). I've had fun ideas for, say, a Linux window manager which was ultra-minimal and geared to the sophisticated handling of basically snazzy Xterms... something which many people would find entirely annoying, but which would be great fun for CLI lovers- even something that could make GUI people comprehend and understand the CLI thing. It doesn't matter that it wouldn't 'win the market'. If markets were just a race, the only food any of us would eat would be rice, because it clearly 'wins the market' and soundly beats stuff like caviar, Mountain Dew and pizza in 'popularity'. Put down that Mountain Dew and drink trough-water- it's good enough for a billion pigs and horses! *g*
By the same token, it's pretty ridiculous to wish that a single okay combination of software and hardware (OSX, on Mac hardware) will expand, ditch its 'unpopular' hardware and become the only serious choice. That's nonsense- it would lose half its point and become another Windows 95. MacOS is not _about_ being a market leader- it's a gourmet brand, a matter of taste, and should remain so.
I would personally like to see a bunch of Linux and BSD-based OSes pop up to compete for the consumer 'mass market' dollar. But the best chances longterm go not to the most mass-markety, but to the ones that can identify a theme and constituency and stick to it...
*g* I think you picked the wrong crowd to make some of those claims to. You're talking to geeks, this is Slashdot. What you're claiming is very similar to saying Windows NT has to be better, stabler and more secure than Linux because they have more money and their programmers have higher salaries...
The fact is, the mainstream record labels don't necessarily put out good sounding records, nor is a high priced engineer/mixer a sure ticket to sonic Nirvana. I'm thinking in particular of Bob Clearmountain- he didn't adapt to 80's studios very well, and some of his work since his heyday in the 70s is appalling. You've got guys like Glen Ballard who did Alanis Morrisette's first album- guys like Steve Albini known for his work with the Pixies and Nirvana, and the same one whose glorious rant, "Some Of Your Friends Are Probably Already This Fucked", is often cited in Slashdot threads.
The bottom line is this: professional sound is not about money- it's about technology.
You need geeks to master the technology.
Now, plenty of those pricey studios do in fact have geeks, and put out professional sound- but this is the era where you can get a 20-bit 48K eight-track dedicated recorder for well under $3000. The technology has _roared_ ahead, unbelievably. Particularly with regard to electronic artists, the geeks have followed and established the knowledge needed to deal with the technology. Doing ultimate mixing and mastering is really NOT harder than, say, learning C programming and kernel hacking. It's also not easier than that... you need to spend years, and not believe everything you read, and to be able to deal with the sounds of a musical piece in your head as if you were thinking up a new subroutine or something- there are rules and heuristics and it's a true craft, and not so mysterious as all that.
Ironically, just as people are learning how to do this properly, the mainstream is progressively refusing to do it properly. Ever looked at the difference between peak and average levels on your VU meters? The competition for radio airplay has led to albums' sound being _crushed_ with compression, leaving no dynamics or muscle behind the music at all, the purpose being to make the albums LOUDER LOUDER LOUDER than the next one. It's quite like NT being tuned like mad to kick butt on Mindcraft benchmarks at the expense of realworld performance, and it's long established in the commercial sphere and will only get worse.
Soon you will be able to tell the indie artists from the major label ones because the indie albums will all sound very different and have a lot of air and dynamics and creativity in the mixes, and all the major label ones will sound the same- exhaustingly, maddeningly loud and artificial and hyped-up. You won't be able to tell one major label star from another because they will all sound exactly the same...
mp3.com artists make between $2.99 and $7.50 per album, depending on what price they set for it. It's a straight 50/50 split between the artist and mp3.com, who have a really sweet press-to-order system set up.
Sony artists mostly don't get anything, because they are first put into fancy studios etc. to record the material- the 'advance' on royalties- and then the artist must repay the (already spent on musician stuff) advance out of royalties before seeing any money out of the label. Most bands that go platinum with their CD manage to recoup the advance and might see a few thousand dollars to be divided among the whole band for their work. Bands that don't go platinum? They got to see a fancy studio- and are contractually obligated to stay with the label. Sony is just like any other label in this- they are not particularly bad so far as I know. You have to go platinum to break even- it's not a way to earn any kind of money and in practice the band gets $0 for each CD they sell, because very few bands recoup.
(listening to one of my own CDs, for which I will get paid $2.99 in royalties when they cut checks... ahhhh, the bliss of being past the break-even point without worrying about 'recouping':) it's the "Dragons" album, fun stuff)
There have been no changes in the artist arrangement so your band will still get half- it's possible that some of the remainder goes to the lawyers instead of to funding 'payback for playback' for the musicians, or to promotions for the musicians.
Try to think of it as unavoidable racketeering and extortion. I'm one of the mp3.com musicians and they haven't asked me to take a smaller percentage to help pay for lawyers.:)
As you know, mp3.com plays host to a really large number of indie musicians, many of which are really good. How much of that $3 per track do you think mp3.com is going to get to keep? When they sell one of my CDs they keep half... with my blessing... and the buyer gets physical media (rather nice- I just got some mp3.com CDs in the mail and the cover art came out just the way I wanted it, a lot better than I expected. I'm listening to one now).
The major labels can play whatever stupid games they want to try to get $24 per album with no physical media- or even more restrictive things, if they can think them up. They do not force ME to follow suit and I offer one hell of a better deal- in conjunction with the same mp3.com- which has a vested interest in hanging onto people like me, because I can give them quite extensive rights regarding my music (which I still own), and Sony will never give them such a good deal.
It's still the net- don't underestimate the effectiveness of indie content producers in conjunction with something like mp3.com. With them and us it's a real win-win situation- hell, I can buy stuff just retail from mp3.com, resell it at local record stores with the nice covers and all charging the store $5 per CD- the store can sell it at $8.99 and be happy- and in doing so I undercut the major label pricing structure by up to 10$ and _still_ make two bucks a CD.
Yes yes- these days that's not even enough to raise an eyebrow. The frontier of unbelievable stuff is more like the Wolfram 'Mathematica' update that allows them to search your home, or the one I found, the 'farmclub.com' artist agreement in which not only are they disclaimed of all responsibility to do anything at all, not only are you responsible for everything including paying their legal bills and coughing up documents if they ask, not only do they get to terminate you without notice in three days whether or not you're informed but you're trapped for 120 days and even then if they're running a promotion on something you gave them, you can't make them stop and they can run it forever if they want, not only do they get to edit and alter your material freely at their discretion, not only are they obligated to pay you nothing because you agree in the agreement that they're exempted from paying for web distribution and ANY OTHER distribution for any purpose (which covers sale handily)...
...but also, you are sternly forbidden from IMPLYING that they ENDORSE you in any manner. Keep in your place, crummy little artist! *whKsshhh* How dare you IMPLY such things just because the greatcompanysourceofallblessings deigns to let you upload your offering of worthless little music! *g*
Wolfram wanting to search your house beats this- but not by much. _Damn_. *g*
Uh. *boggle* Congratulations, you have just found a usage agreement that out-does the Music Industry (farmclub.com) agreement I came up with. Farmclub does not demand on the rights to search your home *g*
The stuff I said about 'I found the worst one!'?...nevermind;) I found the second worst one. OK, who's got one worse than even this? Any that sign over your firstborn child or something? o_O
...how can you look farther than the music biz, baby! Farmclub.com boasts the worst clickthrough agreement I've ever seen (as shown above, I use mp3.com, and their agreement is waaaaay healthier and more tolerable). Here is the Farmclub agreement (it claims to be "Jimmy and Doug's" farmclub.com: balls, this was clearly written by a classic record company lawyer) and a bit of commentary on just what it's saying:
1.Our Rights: You hereby grant to us the right to distribute and use, on a non-exclusive basis, anywhere and everywhere in the universe, in any media, any sound recordings, compositions, pictures, videos, song lyrics and/or other content (collectively, the "Content") submitted by you to us. We shall have the right to use, market, store, distribute, reproduce, display, perform, transmit and promote the Content on a non-exclusive basis in any way we see fit (for example, as part of a site advertising campaign or marketing promotion) without payment to you. We may therefore, without payment to you, reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display and digitally perform and/or distribute the Content in whole or in part, alone or together with other material, on all media (including but not limited to CDs, the internet, other web sites, television and radio), and in any format by any means now known or hereafter devised (including but not limited to MP3, Real Audio, and Liquid Audio). No, that was not a run-on sentence. We will not, however, sell or license your Content to others (unless you sign a recording agreement with us). You agree that making your Content available to the public through our web site, the distribution of promotional CDs, and any other distribution or any use for promotional or marketing activity is not a "sale or license." We shall also have the right to use the Content in order to promote our products and services and to use the name, likeness and biographical material and any logos, marks or trade names of you or any individuals performing in your band or otherwise represented in the Content or the artist or band included or referred to in the Content without any payment to you or any other persons or companies. We reserve the right to publish new policies concerning the services provided by us and Content to be submitted by you, and you agree to comply with those policies.
Very cute- 'we don't have to pay you for anything for web distribution, as long as it is not sale or license, but you agree that any other distribution or use is ALSO not sale or license'
2.Ownership of Content: You retain full ownership of and all right, title, and interest in and to the Content, including any related copyrights, subject to the non-exclusive rights granted to us under this agreement. As this is a non-exclusive agreement, you are free to grant similar rights to others at any time, subject to this license, even after you agree to be bound by this agreement.
relatively unboobytrapped- for what good it'll do you. Note you aren't allowed to say farmclub uses your material- see below 3.Your Guarantees to Us: By accepting this agreement, you represent and warrant (that is, you guarantee to us) that: (a) you are of legal age to enter into contracts (you're not a minor). If any member of your group is a minor, you hereby warrant that you have the legal right to execute this agreement on behalf of the minor artist and have obtained all necessary consents and guarantee such person's performance of the terms of this agreement; (b) you have full right and power to enter into and perform this agreement, and have secured all third party consents necessary to enter into this agreement and to submit the Content as provided herein; (c) the Content is your or your band's own original work, and contains no sampled or replayed material or material otherwise created by someone who is neither you nor your band unless, prior to uploading the Content, you have obtained a license permitting the use as provided in this agreement of such sampled, replayed, or other material from the original author and/or performer and the current copyright proprietor of such material and/or the copyright proprietor of the underlying work; (d) the Content does not and will not infringe on any third party's intellectual property or other proprietary rights, or rights of publicity or privacy; (e) the Content does not and will not violate any law; (f) the Content is not and will not be defamatory, libelous, pornographic or obscene; (g) the Content does not and will not contain any viruses or other information which may damage or otherwise interfere with our computer systems or data or that of our visitors or other users; (h) all factual assertions that you have made and will make to us are true and complete.
You shall be fully responsible for any violation of your agreements including the representations and warranties made in this paragraph, and you agree to indemnify and hold us and our customers harmless from any and all damages and costs, including reasonable attorneys fees, arising out of or related to your breach of the representations and warranties described in this section. You are solely responsible for all licensing, reporting and payment obligations of all kinds in connection with the Content, its distribution and use (including but not limited to union or guild payments and any other third party payments of any kind). You agree to execute and deliver documents to us that we may request to confirm our rights under this agreement.
If we get in trouble you pay the lawyers- you are responsible for everything, we are responsible for nothing- oh, and if we ask for papers from you to prove we're not responsible for something, cough 'em up. But wait, there's more!
4.Managing Content and Disclaimers: In order to organize the music on our site for visitors, or for promotional or other permitted uses under this agreement, we will categorize Content that you submit to us. If we make an error in good faith in categorization or presentation of your Content, your sole and exclusive remedy will be for us to take all reasonable steps to promptly correct the error as soon as we become aware of it. That said, we have no obligation to review, edit or monitor any Content. We shall also have the right to review your Content and in our discretion, edit, alter, decline to post or remove any of the Content at any time and for any reason.
You acknowledge that our web site may from time to time encounter problems and may not necessarily continue uninterrupted without technical or other errors, and we shall not be responsible to you or others for any such interruptions, errors or problems or an outright discontinuation of our service.
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NONINFRINGEMENT WITH RESPECT TO OUR SITE AND ANY SERVICES PROVIDED BY US.
We have no express or implied obligation to promote or distribute the Content in any particular manner or in any minimum quantities. Also, we make no representation nor warranty regarding your chances of getting a record deal with Jimmy and Doug's Farmclub.com nor the terms of such a recording agreement.
You do not have and we expressly shall not provide you the right to use any of our trademarks, copyrights or other proprietary information or property in connection with any activity, or to create any implied endorsement by us of you, unless authorized by us in our sole discretion in writing in advance.
We get to edit your music if you want. Suck it up and deal. Also we don't have to do anything for you at all, and don't even have to keep our website up and running. Oh, and don't go around IMPLYING that we ENDORSE you or anything! Know your place!
5.Termination: At any time 120 days after the date you first upload Content onto our web site, you may choose to terminate this agreement for that Content by sending an e-mailed request to removemusic@farmclub.com. Once we have received your timely request, we will delete the materials you identify to us as yours (e.g., songs and band records) from our system. Of course, we will not be responsible for, and need not take any steps to withdraw or terminate the future distribution of, any copies of any of your Content that may have been distributed (including by download) by us or from our web site before we removed your Content. Furthermore, Content submitted for purposes of ratings by Farmclub.com visitors will be removed from the listener ratings portion of our web site at the conclusion of a ratings cycle, although the Content will remain in Farm Club's system in the Jukebox until you have provided us a termination request as described above. We retain the right to continue any and all promotions containing Content, in whole or in part, initiated prior to the termination date. We reserve the right to terminate this agreement at any time by so notifying you; the agreement will terminate upon your actual receipt of our notice to you or three days after we have sent a notice of termination to the e-mail address which you supply to us in the registration portion of our web site.
You're stuck with us for 120 days no matter what. Then if you want to get out, you have to specify EVERY bit of material that you want us to stop using- except that if the material is being used for 'rating' by site visitors, tough luck, we keep it until the 'rating cycle' is over- oh, and if we started any sort of promotion, tough- we'll continue that as long as we want. Oh- and _we_ get to terminate you at any time on a maximum of three days notice whether or not you recieve our e-mail notice. But wait, there's more!
6.Damages: Except for a breach of Section 3 of this agreement, neither you nor we will be liable for any consequential, indirect, exemplary, special or incidental damages arising from or relating to this agreement (including, without limitation, damages for loss of business profits, business interruption, loss of business information, or other pecuniary loss).
nobody's responsible, now read on...
7.Miscellaneous: This agreement shall be governed by California law, and all legal proceedings, if any, shall take place in California. This agreement sets forth the entire understanding and agreement between you and us and supersedes all previous agreements, communications, oral or written, between you and us. You represent that you have carefully read this agreement, that you understand its contents, and that you have had an opportunity to seek independent legal advice regarding the advisability of entering into this agreement. Whew! Enough mind-bending legalese. Let's post some music! Click the "I Agree" below if you agree to be bound by this agreement.
Guess what- by reading this and clicking through, you agree that you had a chance to seek legal advice about this horrific agreement, and chose NOT to! So you can't even weasel out by claiming you had no lawyer- you agree that you had plenty of opportunity and decided to represent yourself! See you in court, sunshine...
end agreement
I claim bragger's rights as the finder of the _worst_ clickthrough agreement on the Net:P to make matters worse, go and check out their 'summary' of this sometime. They encourage people to read the (legally meaningless) summary and skip the fine print. The summary doesn't even hint at all this garbage... evil, just evil evil evil...
Re:Wow. Let's talk major denial here.
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"What makes you think it won't happen again?"
Uh, the fact that the law is against them, that the arguments you cite have _squat_ to do with the legal system, that they completely humiliated themselves in court and are damned lucky to not be facing lots of charges for perjury and obstruction of justice?
Maybe you should return to windows programming and leave law, justice and politics to those who are experts in them... furrfu... how surprised people like you have been with each successive step in the justice process... do you think it is so arbitrary? Face it- MS got _hammered_ and it is because they were and are fscking GUILTY and don't even bother to conceal it or change a note! Is that so hard to understand?
"I should go free, because the law is wrong, and I will not admit I did anything wrong!" furrfu- tell it to the judge- oh wait, they did, and that is precisely why they are being hammered, because they were given lots of chances to negotiate something milder and scorned all of them...
Re:Repost, The Punishment Starts Today
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Would it be possible to have Gates and Ballmer fired and kicked out of Microsoft _because_ they insist on running the company as if there is no court order?
Seriously, surely at some point it becomes obvious that they are pursuing a suicidal strategy? They are violating their fiduciary duty.
1: of course this is their strategy, because they've raised the stakes to where it would require a Presidential pardon, or Act of God, to get them off
2: *ROFL* Explain how being a lackey to the biggest, most shameless special interest this side of the NRA is _good_? For Bush to do this would be political suicide. It would make him a laughingstock. They would have to be threatening him on a Mafia-like scale, like 'Do this or we kill your daughter', to be able to compel the President to act in such a way- and the President has more divisions (STR).
Seriously- to expect this, you would be expecting a _politician_ to place Microsoft's interests ABOVE HIS OWN. Ain't gonna happen. Shrub would be looking out for his own image, and screw Microsoft.
Apple aren't saints, you know. Trust me, I've been entirely Macbased for years and write Mac software to boot:) I would think that my opinion carries some weight because at least I use the things and have some familiarity with them.
As Apple expands outward into new products and services (do NOT use the 'i' word, do NOT use the 'i' word...;) ), they begin trying out techniques and mechanisms that lock people into their stuff or force upgrades. I just got the latest 'MacAddict' today- one of the main articles is "How To Create an 'iDisk' without OS9". The iDisk is a sort of networked storage for iMacs and the like, on Apple's servers. They're within their rights to do whatever with it- hell, at one point the usage agreement literally said all intellectual property hosted there became Apple's property! Big stink, and they backed down and revised it. But in theory you're still supposed to be using OS9 for this stuff.
If they had the lock on OSes and software, this type of behavior would be a serious problem. As it is- the main problem seems to be that, for the moment, there _are_ no mainstream consumer OSes that are genuinely enlightened- MS are evil and built to stay that way, and Apple are.. mercurial. There are many good things about them, and many bad things about them- and of course they are under MS's thumb, still.
I do like the idea of OSX and am likely to switch my powermac to that at some point- I am just wary of what conditions will go along with it. I don't mind that there's no guarantee it'll work with an upgraded 9500- that's my problem, I take responsibility. I will have serious reservations over any of the following 'features': automatic updating, connecting to Apple servers to check on stuff like copy-protection, MS middleware built into the system, obligatory idiot-ware. Any of that stuff made _permanent_ would be a dealbreaker for me- I'd be willing to learn what to disable and remove (that's the key to getting Macs rock-stable anyhow! *g*) but I would have major problems if I'm denied a choice in the matter.
What I want is Darwin, solid and _simple_, with Quartz and whatever they're up to with a GUI- and NO TIE-INS! I don't want Appleworks bundled- latest version sucks anyhow. I don't want AOL built into the system- or even AIM. And I don't want IE built into the system- I'd sooner use an antique version of Netscape.
Maybe the iCab folks will be doing a version of their browser for OSX, eventually. I could get very enthusiastic about that- when iCab works I tend to love it. Had some bad luck with betas...
Slashdot Mirror
Really. Look at Looking Glass. Look at the reasons Bungie has given, specifically their sense of where things are heading for _any_ independent developer- Bungie are not small time and if they were seeing that much trouble, the industry is DEAD and just hasn't fallen over yet. THINK.
I certainly do wish there was some way to put these people in jail. Isn't constantly, incessantly and flagrantly causing a company to break the law _some_ kind of a crime? Can't these people be locked up for something, anything? Sic the IRS on their personal finances!
Er- going out and _seizing_ top tier game developers who are cooperating with your competition (Halo has headlined Macworld and been featured in Steve Jobs keynotes) and making them turn their game X-Box only is, shall we say, a _bit_ over the line? This is precisely the sort of thing MS has been doing that got it _convicted_ of antitrust and sentenced to be broken up, right down to the likelihood that MS strongarmed Bungie into it.
Last one out turn off the blink tags!
It doesn't wash. We're not hearing the whole story.
So, since the 'carrot' is utterly, transparently inadequate as an explanation for what's going on (Halo, the Steve Jobs feature presentation of Macworld, being seized and turned into an X-Box only title), what might there be as far as the 'stick'?
We don't have to look very far. Bungie is well known for being paranoid about distribution. Its early struggles with distributors were agonising- IIRC there's a funny rant on the subject at Bungie.com. This company, more than almost any other, was _painfully_ aware of its delicate lifeline with the distributors.
All Microsoft would have had to do was threaten to have Bungie blacklisted with ALL the distributors and Bungie would have to agree to any terms. "Don't carry Bungie or we'll pull Office". No distributor would risk offending Microsoft, no distributor would carry Bungie, Bungie would be dead- it's that simple. This is the most likely 'stick'- making it easy to understand these shocking and very obvious results.
Yes this is illegal as fuck, and exactly the behaviour MS has just been found guilty of in court. Your point?
The fact that Microsoft is running amok and trying to do as much damage as it can as fast as it can is hardly surprising. It's just a little startling how _obvious_ they're willing to be with it, knowing they can move faster than the courts.
The most interesting point is this: Bungie is pretty much a top-tier developer. If they can be _seized_ in this manner and assigned to X-Box only, no developer is safe, and no market really exists- it's just a play-market. The question people should be asking themselves at this point is: who will be next? Will Id be seized and "Doom" be made an X-Box only title?
Screw that. I'll give whatever ideas I please. If someone does that _they_ are being intellectual muggers, and if the legal system is set up to support them doing it the legal system is wrong. I refuse to stop sharing ideas just because of that. If somebody does that to me I'll just have another idea, fuck 'em. The whole idea of selfcensoring and cutting off all sharing and interaction of ideas due to this threat just offends the hell out of me, and I simply can't accept making any concessions at all in that direction. You only live once, and when you die your money means nothing anymore but your ideas may live on.
Funny- I would never be seen calling them a 'pack of shits', but surely the fact that they bribe, threaten, steal and lie are valid complaints? If these are not valid complaints then what are?
Sorry, I don't buy it. Your example, Amazon, uses brick and mortar. The web side is the front end, it's the back end that brings in the money because it's the back end that gives people products.
What you're not seeing is how quickly technology can develop to take care of piddling details like handling Amazon-like loads. A few years ago most people were on 14.4 modems, now most people are on 56K- or would that be cable? Information _can_ be free and it's rather startlingly absurd to claim the opposite. Go tell the FSF *g* now there's an outfit that's made a difference with only a very old-school web site. Consider how much it cost to send 20 gigs of data across the Arpanet with how much it costs now to send the data five times as far and God knows how much faster. You _cannot_ behave like information is coal or ore- it is much more slippery than that, under some conditions it can proliferate madly and span the globe.
I admit I am not a dotcom *g* I think the classic dotcom phenomenon was silly greedhead ridiculousness and I am happy they are all going broke. You're trying to suggest that only by throwing the financial resources of a Big Studly Company at a problem can you get any meaningful result (beyond just some guy and his little files, or whatever). You might want to look at not me- but Gnutella- and reconsider. The connectivity of the net is cheap- the _electrical_ power sucked up by all the little computers is staggering, but the information exchange? That's tiny, slippery, hard to even quantify unless you're filling the pipe, and there are so many pipes... and every day we roar onward devising new consumerware with more horsepower and bigger tires and selling it to their egos. You are probably sitting at a computer that totally stomps what most of the _big_ sites ran when the Internet sprang from Al Gore's forehead ;) now, what will it be like some years down the road when Joe Average's home computer rivals what Amazon runs now- and can handle a comparable network load? Amazon is already worldwide- there is no more unless they start selling to Mars. All that's left is for that technical capacity to take the orders of the whole internet... to come to the home. It might be a great time to be a cottage industry- with the technical capacity, the CPU, the network, the programs to handle that sort of full dotcommage trickling down to where regular people have them to play QuakeIIII^HDoom. *g* ...or do you think that the bytes needed to send an order from one computer to another will also follow Moore's Law?
Look, let me sound off from a probably-not-unusual position- I am a dotcom. Literally- I have 'airwindows.com', have had it since May '98, and that's where I keep my stuff. I have linux XPMs there, and some desktop pictures, and actually stories and novels I wrote (well, one finished novel and two unfinished). I have the software I use to remind myself what's going on each day, and the software I use to generate the site from a bunch of flat-text files, and I have the GPLed source for the programs.
I pay $45 a month to my ISP for this plus my dialup account. Some of that is extra megs of space at about $1 a meg- you can see why I turn to mp3.com for my music ;) but the site is not ABOUT paying ME- _I_ pay for it, because I want it to be there.
Where is the need for ads, for micropayments to force any readers of my books to cough up a halfpenny for each chapter? What the hell? I don't get this. If you have a barbeque for your family do you charge each kid a quarter for the extra cooking you do for them? If you go down to the town swimming pool and take pleasure in doing fancy dives or showing people how to do the backstroke, do you then charge them a nickel? There is something crazy wedged into the collective unconscious about this sort of thing, and this talk of micropayments really, really highlights it. _WHY_ is it a given to some people that if I write little poems and put them on a web page, I must therefore be in favor of billing people a penny to see each one- and flaky or 'amateur' if I choose not to? This is nuts, just nuts.
(p.s. first 200 karma! woohoo! yay! and there was much rejoicing! Quick, somebody moderate me down and make me go "Wauuugghh!" as I get dragged horribly _back_ _under_ the double century mark! let's have a war between '+1 Funny' and '-1 Fscking Karma Whore!' moderations! *hehehee* do yer worst, I just laugh at all that anyway :) I promise if I get a '-1' to make a followup post saying 'waugh!', hit me :) )
Now this is what interests me. Usually when I am participating in discussions on this kind of stuff, it is as a musician, but underlying that is more than ten years of extremely hardcore audio geekness- I would feel pretty confident in saying that w.r.t sound engineering hardware I am as good as Monty is with this compression programming. (I realise that sounds like a big claim- it is. I make no such claim about programming or software :) )
From that viewpoint, I have to say that the idea of being able to 'very precisely tune' the compression is wildly exciting, just wildly exciting. Does everybody fully understand where that leads? It gets away from the computer geek core skills, but you know there are geeks whose core skills it leads _towards_. What you are talking about is effectively a form of MASTERING. Let me take a minute and give a little background on what this could be like...
First, mastering. Once music gets mixed down to a final two tracks (or more, if you're doing funky surround stuff, but mostly it's two tracks), what you have isn't the final media. You have a 30 ips openreel two-track tape, maybe, or you might have a 48k/20bit digital master if you're smart, or possibly just a 16 bit 44.1K DAT or something if you're not. If you have a CD you've basically done the mastering yourself- and that's not necessarily good, because you might suck at it and the idea is to do it really really well, possibly at huge expense and possibly not.
Mastering engineers always desperately want some form of much-higher-quality media to work from- if you are making a CD they would prefer 20 or 24 bit output. If you're making a record, you could use that or the traditional two-track open reel tape which generally exceeds vinyl playback quality levels by a wide margin. In some cases a mastering engineer making a CD might want analog open-reel tape instead of _any_ form of digital: the idea is that he knows waaaay better than most musicians how to do the transfer, and may have lots of sophisticated equipment to extract every bit of detail and color off that tape and make it jump out of the CD sounding totally lifelike. Mastering engineers are the ones who will get mad at you if you go around normalising all the levels on your digital master for 'em- the mastering engineer tears his hair in angst at such a situation because he or she knows exactly what damage the algorithm is doing to the sound, and that it can't be undone once done. In analog the mastering engineer handled compressing the sound and imperceptibly summing the bass frequencies of each channel to utilize all of the LP's ability to put across music. In all-digital, for instance the example of mastering a 48K 24 bit mix to CD, the mastering engineer will be keeping untouched versions of the files and experimenting with various EQ algorithms, different multiband compressions, all to try to FORCE the resulting lower quality version to sound BETTER than the supplied master tape. That's really the name of the game- making it sound as good as, isn't enough. And that's where you get into really expensive equipment and total voodoo engineering and guys paid on the scale of computer professionals whose names are recognized by lots of studio engineers and almost nowhere else. Ever heard of Bob Ludwig, Wilma Cozart, Bob Clearmountain?
Now. To bring this neatly into context with Ogg Vorbis, imagine getting access to a Vorbis 'compression settings box' that took up the whole screen crammed with little settings and adjustments. Stuff like 'masking threshold curve for left channel's frequency', or whatever goodies are there- the stuff that apparently none of the MP3 encoder writers think is the user's business. Almost everyone in the world would take a look at that and run screaming. Almost all computer geeks would look really confused and wonder, what is the point, isn't there just one right setting? Almost all serious mastering engineers would take one look and cry YEAAAAHHHH GIMME MORE O' THAAAAT! ...and they'd be off and running, and you wouldn't believe what they'd be capable of. _Every_ _single_ _song_ would be tailored to the optimum compression details for THAT SONG, not some mythical standard...
From what I've seen, encoder programmers seem to think the idea is to match test tones as accurately as possible- and that is not going to be good enough, going into the future with digital compressed media. It took reading that comment about 'very precisely tuned' to realize just what's happening with all this. Look, if you told a big recording studio or an 'audiophile' act like Pink Floyd that they had to have their music mastered in just one particular way, but that's OK it's 'optimal', they would KILL AND EAT you *g* the fact is, recording projects vary so widely in both recording quality and SOUND that it's totally, totally impossible to 'master' to mp3 or anything else using a preset algorithm no matter how clever. Compare the sound of Rush (heavy on pushing the edges of the frequency range, dynamic, over-clear) with the sound of Tangerine Dream (really deep ambiences, liquid sound _necessary) with the sound of AC/DC (punchy as hell but it's gotta hit you in the stomach, no shrieky grating edges allowed and no show-offy super low bass) and you can see the problem. All compression must trade off _some_ qualities. But how can one arrangement cover all those bases? That's like mastering all their tapes through the same EQ and compression settings- disastrous.
I always think of a particular guitar note when I think of mastering- it's on Alanis Morrisette's "Jagged Little Pill" CD, I think on the song 'You Learn'. There's a brief instantaneous moment where an acoustic-sounding guitar, quite in the background, 'snaps' a tiny highpitched note on the high E and instantly mutes it again. Sounds like a set of light electric strings on an acoustic. This one short note cuts through the whole mix with stunning airiness, like a tiny instantaneous holograph of the note popping out. It's magical, impossibly delicate and clean- and that's what mastering can do for a song. That Alanis album is brilliantly mastered by Chris Bellman at Grundman Mastering- without him, that moment would NOT BE there. It might not have even felt that way on the original tape! The guy reached out and found the essence of the sound and caused the CD to cast exactly the right sonic spell to reveal it.
MP3ing that track almost certainly obliterates that moment and makes the little 'plink!' into a tinny clonk, ruining it. But if it was possible for the mastering engineer to also master the MP3- I guarantee that things would be very different. If I was doing it I would key off that sound and weight the 'masking' or whatever so that you had the deep pulse and a big emphasis on the airiness- the highs would be stealing lots of data for themselves. The thing is, simply going 'Oh OK' and coding in a radio button for 'more air' is unacceptable- if I had to master that track to MP3, I'd need to keep going back and adjusting the curves of the masking and all that until that instant and other important moments jumped out of the resulting mp3 JUST EXACTLY like it did on the original recording- or *gasp* BETTER! It's not at all a question of finding 'the masking thresholds of the human ear' and coding in those. Mastering engineers need total control over all those details at an amazingly low level, even though they are NOT programmers and wouldn't know memory management or b-trees if one bit them on the ass. Mastering engineers know better than the programmers how to set the 'equaliser dials' for the compression- because that is their JOB, to know that.
So _on_ behalf of all the other mastering engineers who don't read slashdot and aren't rubbing elbows with programmers as great and brilliant as Monty, let me just say- "Give us the controls!" We can't do your job, don't try to do ours! Every project has vastly different needs, and sometimes the needs are quite unusual! I could easily see, for instance, a song in which you masked 3-5K (normally the presence area!) very heavily and threw lots of data at the extreme highs which might normally be masked! I can even name a song that calls for that off the top of my head- "Hot Sun", from Adrian Belew's album "The Lone Rhino". Lots of Bowie's "Low" album would demand a _very_ different compression than most material because it is meant to sound claustrophobic, sometimes quite artificial and grating, and sometimes totally Enoed out lack of highs. I could keep on giving examples for ages- the point is, pleeeeease give us arbitrary control over these things and stop trying to perfect them for consumers all the time. There needs to be a way for mastering engineers to practice their craft on compressed media. If you make that possible, then we will start getting music from talented mastering engineers that really pushes the technology to the limit- and the difference will not be subtle, it will be a massive blast of very individualised sounds, letting different bands _really_ get their own distinct sound, and everybody will be able to appreciate that while still being able to use the 'consumer' version of the encoder (with all the scary parameters covered up and set to nice 'optimal' values) to rip metallica CDs *g*
If you can't force Ogg Vorbis to be the mainstream format with the help of mastering engineers, maybe could you make an MP3 encoder with a similar level of adjustment over its parameters? This needs to happen.
If I understand things correctly, MP3 encoding can be free (or partly?) but it's been hard for the free encoder coders to catch up with the totally patented and proprietary Freihofer stuff. And so you have Xing which gets tinny and artifact-y, and Blade which is said to be dull and lacking in extended highs, and LAME which some people claim is 'perfect' because it comes between the other two in personality.
When will people understand that these are all settings on the EQ dial? Mastering engineers do not need a single black box with the 'ideal' settings locked in painstakingly. Mastering engineers need KNOBS.
Give us KNOBS! :)
Dude, the _only_ stuff on that page labelled 'experimental' is my collaborations with the rapper 'Gentle Jones' of Regular Sized Monster. Experimental represents the concept and the method- the vocal tracks are Gentle's _DJ_ vocal-only tracks, meant only to be used for overlaying onto a different beat by a DJ. It was never meant to be listened to or used by itself, there is no click track, no net, and in general Gentle's vocal rhythms are _so_ demanding that they are impossible to put music to, without a click.
So I did. Call me a geek ;)
Specifically, I thought "Wouldn't it be interesting to overdub music inspired by bebop jazz over these? To try and chase the vocals rather than hanging on the (unheard) click that was once there?". And so I did. If you don't like bebop and avant-garde jazz, you certainly won't like, hear, or understand those tracks. I'm not a bit sorry ;) if your brain can't follow Gentle's vocals that's _your_ problem. I'll concede that this is very difficult.
_I_ think Gentle Jones is a fscking _genius_... and he likes these tracks. I think he was surprised anyone could put any sort of music behind just the bare vocal tracks. At any rate, I doubt either of us cares about your opinion- this is in the tradition of bebop, it's musician music and you as the listener aren't expected to be condescended to. Sorry, no 'thump thump thump thump' for you! ;)
As for the Mac percentage- oh dear, did I underestimate them? *g* what was your opinion? 60%? 80%? I'm sorry, I don't think that's going to happen *g*
ah, fun with trolls...
Also, your notion of 'one platform to rule them all and in the darkness bind them' is pretty childish- how soon we forget that in order for Windows to do this, they had to break lots of laws and screw everybody they could- and have been busted for just that! And even so, Apple survives, Linux survives, Amiga survives in its own way, etc etc.
The fact is, Apple ought to grow until it's maybe 20% or 30% of the market. Maybe 40% max. That's its niche (big niche, but it's a consumer-oriented system). Different Linuxes, including ones designed specifically for consumer use on older PCs (soon the 'obsolete' PCs will include PIIs and the like) will probably end up somewhere between 15% and 35%- and Windows will end up atrophying to where it is somewhere probably over 50% but less than 75%- and that balance will keep shifting, but in a healthy market each of the vendors will have a solid enough base to support them.
That's _my_ prediction. So if you want to talk 'dominate', if you go purely by numbers it's probably going to be Windows- but Windows will never again be able to totally ignore the other players in the field, and that is as it should be. In some ways that translates to _nobody_ 'dominating', if your definition of domination includes 'you never have to even think about interacting with computer users that don't use _your_ kind of computer'. In a very big world and marketplace, such an attitude is absolutely pathological...
I don't think there _is_ one OS so wonderful that 'everybody' would like it, nor should there be. It should be a pie with a lot of pieces, because people's tastes and needs vary so substantially.
I know that my whole 'kick' as a variously-creative person is coming up with something which just a small section of the population will just freak out and think it is absolutely wonderful. I think that's a good motivation. I've seen it happen with my music, repeatedly (see URL link). I've had fun ideas for, say, a Linux window manager which was ultra-minimal and geared to the sophisticated handling of basically snazzy Xterms... something which many people would find entirely annoying, but which would be great fun for CLI lovers- even something that could make GUI people comprehend and understand the CLI thing. It doesn't matter that it wouldn't 'win the market'. If markets were just a race, the only food any of us would eat would be rice, because it clearly 'wins the market' and soundly beats stuff like caviar, Mountain Dew and pizza in 'popularity'. Put down that Mountain Dew and drink trough-water- it's good enough for a billion pigs and horses! *g*
By the same token, it's pretty ridiculous to wish that a single okay combination of software and hardware (OSX, on Mac hardware) will expand, ditch its 'unpopular' hardware and become the only serious choice. That's nonsense- it would lose half its point and become another Windows 95. MacOS is not _about_ being a market leader- it's a gourmet brand, a matter of taste, and should remain so.
I would personally like to see a bunch of Linux and BSD-based OSes pop up to compete for the consumer 'mass market' dollar. But the best chances longterm go not to the most mass-markety, but to the ones that can identify a theme and constituency and stick to it...
The fact is, the mainstream record labels don't necessarily put out good sounding records, nor is a high priced engineer/mixer a sure ticket to sonic Nirvana. I'm thinking in particular of Bob Clearmountain- he didn't adapt to 80's studios very well, and some of his work since his heyday in the 70s is appalling. You've got guys like Glen Ballard who did Alanis Morrisette's first album- guys like Steve Albini known for his work with the Pixies and Nirvana, and the same one whose glorious rant, "Some Of Your Friends Are Probably Already This Fucked", is often cited in Slashdot threads.
The bottom line is this: professional sound is not about money- it's about technology.
You need geeks to master the technology.
Now, plenty of those pricey studios do in fact have geeks, and put out professional sound- but this is the era where you can get a 20-bit 48K eight-track dedicated recorder for well under $3000. The technology has _roared_ ahead, unbelievably. Particularly with regard to electronic artists, the geeks have followed and established the knowledge needed to deal with the technology. Doing ultimate mixing and mastering is really NOT harder than, say, learning C programming and kernel hacking. It's also not easier than that... you need to spend years, and not believe everything you read, and to be able to deal with the sounds of a musical piece in your head as if you were thinking up a new subroutine or something- there are rules and heuristics and it's a true craft, and not so mysterious as all that.
Ironically, just as people are learning how to do this properly, the mainstream is progressively refusing to do it properly. Ever looked at the difference between peak and average levels on your VU meters? The competition for radio airplay has led to albums' sound being _crushed_ with compression, leaving no dynamics or muscle behind the music at all, the purpose being to make the albums LOUDER LOUDER LOUDER than the next one. It's quite like NT being tuned like mad to kick butt on Mindcraft benchmarks at the expense of realworld performance, and it's long established in the commercial sphere and will only get worse.
Soon you will be able to tell the indie artists from the major label ones because the indie albums will all sound very different and have a lot of air and dynamics and creativity in the mixes, and all the major label ones will sound the same- exhaustingly, maddeningly loud and artificial and hyped-up. You won't be able to tell one major label star from another because they will all sound exactly the same...
Sony artists mostly don't get anything, because they are first put into fancy studios etc. to record the material- the 'advance' on royalties- and then the artist must repay the (already spent on musician stuff) advance out of royalties before seeing any money out of the label. Most bands that go platinum with their CD manage to recoup the advance and might see a few thousand dollars to be divided among the whole band for their work. Bands that don't go platinum? They got to see a fancy studio- and are contractually obligated to stay with the label. Sony is just like any other label in this- they are not particularly bad so far as I know. You have to go platinum to break even- it's not a way to earn any kind of money and in practice the band gets $0 for each CD they sell, because very few bands recoup.
(listening to one of my own CDs, for which I will get paid $2.99 in royalties when they cut checks... ahhhh, the bliss of being past the break-even point without worrying about 'recouping' :) it's the "Dragons" album, fun stuff)
Try to think of it as unavoidable racketeering and extortion. I'm one of the mp3.com musicians and they haven't asked me to take a smaller percentage to help pay for lawyers. :)
The major labels can play whatever stupid games they want to try to get $24 per album with no physical media- or even more restrictive things, if they can think them up. They do not force ME to follow suit and I offer one hell of a better deal- in conjunction with the same mp3.com- which has a vested interest in hanging onto people like me, because I can give them quite extensive rights regarding my music (which I still own), and Sony will never give them such a good deal.
It's still the net- don't underestimate the effectiveness of indie content producers in conjunction with something like mp3.com. With them and us it's a real win-win situation- hell, I can buy stuff just retail from mp3.com, resell it at local record stores with the nice covers and all charging the store $5 per CD- the store can sell it at $8.99 and be happy- and in doing so I undercut the major label pricing structure by up to 10$ and _still_ make two bucks a CD.
Try THAT with Sony *g*
Wolfram wanting to search your house beats this- but not by much. _Damn_. *g*
The stuff I said about 'I found the worst one!'? ...nevermind ;) I found the second worst one. OK, who's got one worse than even this? Any that sign over your firstborn child or something? o_O
1.Our Rights: You hereby grant to us the right to distribute and use, on a non-exclusive basis, anywhere and everywhere in the universe, in any media, any sound recordings, compositions, pictures, videos, song lyrics and/or other content (collectively, the "Content") submitted by you to us. We shall have the right to use, market, store, distribute, reproduce, display, perform, transmit and promote the Content on a non-exclusive basis in any way we see fit (for example, as part of a site advertising campaign or marketing promotion) without payment to you. We may therefore, without payment to you, reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display and digitally perform and/or distribute the Content in whole or in part, alone or together with other material, on all media (including but not limited to CDs, the internet, other web sites, television and radio), and in any format by any means now known or hereafter devised (including but not limited to MP3, Real Audio, and Liquid Audio). No, that was not a run-on sentence. We will not, however, sell or license your Content to others (unless you sign a recording agreement with us). You agree that making your Content available to the public through our web site, the distribution of promotional CDs, and any other distribution or any use for promotional or marketing activity is not a "sale or license." We shall also have the right to use the Content in order to promote our products and services and to use the name, likeness and biographical material and any logos, marks or trade names of you or any individuals performing in your band or otherwise represented in the Content or the artist or band included or referred to in the Content without any payment to you or any other persons or companies. We reserve the right to publish new policies concerning the services provided by us and Content to be submitted by you, and you agree to comply with those policies.
Very cute- 'we don't have to pay you for anything for web distribution, as long as it is not sale or license, but you agree that any other distribution or use is ALSO not sale or license'
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relatively unboobytrapped- for what good it'll do you. Note you aren't allowed to say farmclub uses your material- see below 3.Your Guarantees to Us: By accepting this agreement, you represent and warrant (that is, you guarantee to us) that: (a) you are of legal age to enter into contracts (you're not a minor). If any member of your group is a minor, you hereby warrant that you have the legal right to execute this agreement on behalf of the minor artist and have obtained all necessary consents and guarantee such person's performance of the terms of this agreement; (b) you have full right and power to enter into and perform this agreement, and have secured all third party consents necessary to enter into this agreement and to submit the Content as provided herein; (c) the Content is your or your band's own original work, and contains no sampled or replayed material or material otherwise created by someone who is neither you nor your band unless, prior to uploading the Content, you have obtained a license permitting the use as provided in this agreement of such sampled, replayed, or other material from the original author and/or performer and the current copyright proprietor of such material and/or the copyright proprietor of the underlying work; (d) the Content does not and will not infringe on any third party's intellectual property or other proprietary rights, or rights of publicity or privacy; (e) the Content does not and will not violate any law; (f) the Content is not and will not be defamatory, libelous, pornographic or obscene; (g) the Content does not and will not contain any viruses or other information which may damage or otherwise interfere with our computer systems or data or that of our visitors or other users; (h) all factual assertions that you have made and will make to us are true and complete.
You shall be fully responsible for any violation of your agreements including the representations and warranties made in this paragraph, and you agree to indemnify and hold us and our customers harmless from any and all damages and costs, including reasonable attorneys fees, arising out of or related to your breach of the representations and warranties described in this section. You are solely responsible for all licensing, reporting and payment obligations of all kinds in connection with the Content, its distribution and use (including but not limited to union or guild payments and any other third party payments of any kind). You agree to execute and deliver documents to us that we may request to confirm our rights under this agreement.
If we get in trouble you pay the lawyers- you are responsible for everything, we are responsible for nothing- oh, and if we ask for papers from you to prove we're not responsible for something, cough 'em up. But wait, there's more!
4.Managing Content and Disclaimers: In order to organize the music on our site for visitors, or for promotional or other permitted uses under this agreement, we will categorize Content that you submit to us. If we make an error in good faith in categorization or presentation of your Content, your sole and exclusive remedy will be for us to take all reasonable steps to promptly correct the error as soon as we become aware of it. That said, we have no obligation to review, edit or monitor any Content. We shall also have the right to review your Content and in our discretion, edit, alter, decline to post or remove any of the Content at any time and for any reason.
You acknowledge that our web site may from time to time encounter problems and may not necessarily continue uninterrupted without technical or other errors, and we shall not be responsible to you or others for any such interruptions, errors or problems or an outright discontinuation of our service.
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We have no express or implied obligation to promote or distribute the Content in any particular manner or in any minimum quantities. Also, we make no representation nor warranty regarding your chances of getting a record deal with Jimmy and Doug's Farmclub.com nor the terms of such a recording agreement.
You do not have and we expressly shall not provide you the right to use any of our trademarks, copyrights or other proprietary information or property in connection with any activity, or to create any implied endorsement by us of you, unless authorized by us in our sole discretion in writing in advance.
We get to edit your music if you want. Suck it up and deal. Also we don't have to do anything for you at all, and don't even have to keep our website up and running. Oh, and don't go around IMPLYING that we ENDORSE you or anything! Know your place!
5.Termination: At any time 120 days after the date you first upload Content onto our web site, you may choose to terminate this agreement for that Content by sending an e-mailed request to removemusic@farmclub.com. Once we have received your timely request, we will delete the materials you identify to us as yours (e.g., songs and band records) from our system. Of course, we will not be responsible for, and need not take any steps to withdraw or terminate the future distribution of, any copies of any of your Content that may have been distributed (including by download) by us or from our web site before we removed your Content. Furthermore, Content submitted for purposes of ratings by Farmclub.com visitors will be removed from the listener ratings portion of our web site at the conclusion of a ratings cycle, although the Content will remain in Farm Club's system in the Jukebox until you have provided us a termination request as described above. We retain the right to continue any and all promotions containing Content, in whole or in part, initiated prior to the termination date. We reserve the right to terminate this agreement at any time by so notifying you; the agreement will terminate upon your actual receipt of our notice to you or three days after we have sent a notice of termination to the e-mail address which you supply to us in the registration portion of our web site.
You're stuck with us for 120 days no matter what. Then if you want to get out, you have to specify EVERY bit of material that you want us to stop using- except that if the material is being used for 'rating' by site visitors, tough luck, we keep it until the 'rating cycle' is over- oh, and if we started any sort of promotion, tough- we'll continue that as long as we want. Oh- and _we_ get to terminate you at any time on a maximum of three days notice whether or not you recieve our e-mail notice. But wait, there's more!
6.Damages: Except for a breach of Section 3 of this agreement, neither you nor we will be liable for any consequential, indirect, exemplary, special or incidental damages arising from or relating to this agreement (including, without limitation, damages for loss of business profits, business interruption, loss of business information, or other pecuniary loss).
nobody's responsible, now read on...
7.Miscellaneous: This agreement shall be governed by California law, and all legal proceedings, if any, shall take place in California. This agreement sets forth the entire understanding and agreement between you and us and supersedes all previous agreements, communications, oral or written, between you and us. You represent that you have carefully read this agreement, that you understand its contents, and that you have had an opportunity to seek independent legal advice regarding the advisability of entering into this agreement. Whew! Enough mind-bending legalese. Let's post some music! Click the "I Agree" below if you agree to be bound by this agreement.
Guess what- by reading this and clicking through, you agree that you had a chance to seek legal advice about this horrific agreement, and chose NOT to! So you can't even weasel out by claiming you had no lawyer- you agree that you had plenty of opportunity and decided to represent yourself! See you in court, sunshine...
end agreement
I claim bragger's rights as the finder of the _worst_ clickthrough agreement on the Net :P to make matters worse, go and check out their 'summary' of this sometime. They encourage people to read the (legally meaningless) summary and skip the fine print. The summary doesn't even hint at all this garbage... evil, just evil evil evil...
Uh, the fact that the law is against them, that the arguments you cite have _squat_ to do with the legal system, that they completely humiliated themselves in court and are damned lucky to not be facing lots of charges for perjury and obstruction of justice?
Maybe you should return to windows programming and leave law, justice and politics to those who are experts in them... furrfu... how surprised people like you have been with each successive step in the justice process... do you think it is so arbitrary? Face it- MS got _hammered_ and it is because they were and are fscking GUILTY and don't even bother to conceal it or change a note! Is that so hard to understand?
"I should go free, because the law is wrong, and I will not admit I did anything wrong!" furrfu- tell it to the judge- oh wait, they did, and that is precisely why they are being hammered, because they were given lots of chances to negotiate something milder and scorned all of them...
Seriously, surely at some point it becomes obvious that they are pursuing a suicidal strategy? They are violating their fiduciary duty.
2: *ROFL* Explain how being a lackey to the biggest, most shameless special interest this side of the NRA is _good_? For Bush to do this would be political suicide. It would make him a laughingstock. They would have to be threatening him on a Mafia-like scale, like 'Do this or we kill your daughter', to be able to compel the President to act in such a way- and the President has more divisions (STR).
Seriously- to expect this, you would be expecting a _politician_ to place Microsoft's interests ABOVE HIS OWN. Ain't gonna happen. Shrub would be looking out for his own image, and screw Microsoft.
Nothing is 'worth' as much as that, man.
Sell your stock. No normal company warrants the 'valuation' an unregulated monopoly gets. He's right- it's all over.
As Apple expands outward into new products and services (do NOT use the 'i' word, do NOT use the 'i' word... ;) ), they begin trying out techniques and mechanisms that lock people into their stuff or force upgrades. I just got the latest 'MacAddict' today- one of the main articles is "How To Create an 'iDisk' without OS9". The iDisk is a sort of networked storage for iMacs and the like, on Apple's servers. They're within their rights to do whatever with it- hell, at one point the usage agreement literally said all intellectual property hosted there became Apple's property! Big stink, and they backed down and revised it. But in theory you're still supposed to be using OS9 for this stuff.
If they had the lock on OSes and software, this type of behavior would be a serious problem. As it is- the main problem seems to be that, for the moment, there _are_ no mainstream consumer OSes that are genuinely enlightened- MS are evil and built to stay that way, and Apple are.. mercurial. There are many good things about them, and many bad things about them- and of course they are under MS's thumb, still.
I do like the idea of OSX and am likely to switch my powermac to that at some point- I am just wary of what conditions will go along with it. I don't mind that there's no guarantee it'll work with an upgraded 9500- that's my problem, I take responsibility. I will have serious reservations over any of the following 'features': automatic updating, connecting to Apple servers to check on stuff like copy-protection, MS middleware built into the system, obligatory idiot-ware. Any of that stuff made _permanent_ would be a dealbreaker for me- I'd be willing to learn what to disable and remove (that's the key to getting Macs rock-stable anyhow! *g*) but I would have major problems if I'm denied a choice in the matter.
What I want is Darwin, solid and _simple_, with Quartz and whatever they're up to with a GUI- and NO TIE-INS! I don't want Appleworks bundled- latest version sucks anyhow. I don't want AOL built into the system- or even AIM. And I don't want IE built into the system- I'd sooner use an antique version of Netscape.
Maybe the iCab folks will be doing a version of their browser for OSX, eventually. I could get very enthusiastic about that- when iCab works I tend to love it. Had some bad luck with betas...