Lets face it - 9 out of 10 times in America, it's not who's right and who's wrong, it's who's got more money to spend on lawyers.
The rest of the world really doesn't care about your seriously flawed legal system. Kazaa is not in the USA. The US legal system can do what the hell it wants, but it's all irrelevant if the Kazaa folks don't step off a plane in the USA. I doubt extridition will apply either, they choose countries that actually had a spine to host Kazaa's business.
It's not all that unusual for this kind of thing. There are lot's of people around the world who cannot go to certain countries because they face legal action. In fact, there are even some US officials who will be arrested for crimes against humanity and war crimes should they ever land in Europe!
In most places, the loser of a law suit pays the costs of the winner. Cuts down on cases just like this. If you are sure you'll win, you can spend all you want, it's the other guys money anyway. It's not perfect but it's better.
Re:They'll never win - Legal fees
on
Kazaa Fights Back
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But then there goes their availability on download.com, and there goes their visibility to US users, and eventually their installed base won't seem so attractive to advertisers.
Things like Kazaa get passed around by word of mouth. I doubt losing their listing on download.com is going to make any difference. Becoming legally untouchable in the USA, homeland of the *AA will do a hell of a lot of difference to their circulation.
Also, iirc, they already tried to argue that they didn't do substantial business in the US, so they shouldn't be held accountable to US law.
Yes, this was on Slashdot at the time. It's a crazy idea, holding you accountable to the entire worlds laws. How would you feel if a country like China was to pursue you legally for saying Mao was misguided? It's on their law books, and Chinese people on the net could read your comment.
How about the freedom to allow technological progress without it being bastardised by those with a financial interest in the old system?
Sorry, but I'm not willing to stand for draconian laws banning new and revolutionary communication tools just so a bunch of executives can continue picking up pretty little girls and boys with the intention of packaging them up as a product. How would you feel if the post office went after e-mail just because it cost them money? Were we happy when they proposed taxing e-mail? How is this any different?
Music is art, not profit.
Re:Kazaa participation level
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Shutting down Kazaa
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· Score: 4, Interesting
However, introduce just one upload from my computer, and I suddenly find that my HTTP requests take forever to get to webservers, and even Google's front page takes longer to load.
That's due to a technical quirk of TCP/IP that is more prevailent with asymetric links.
Every received TCP packet must be acknowledged with an ACK packet. If you allow something to use 100% of your upload bandwidth, you'll find your ACK packets from your downloads get queued to get sent back in the upstream. This hammers your internet connection because the servers won't send you any more packets until you have ACK'ed the already sent ones.
The solution is to limit uploads to around 90 - 95 % of your total upload capacity. Unfortunatly, while Kazaa has an in-build bandwidth throttle that you can set, you can only change it in powers of two. I prefer WinMX, which allows you to set any value you want.
This web page explains the problem and the solution in better detail than I have, with graphs etc.
If you are using a Linux NAT box or a good firewall, you may be able to set up traffic shaping to not allow p2p to max things out. This will also give priority to the ACK packets, and you can set it so that HTTP traffic also gets priority. It's pretty complex stuff though.
I'm only one person while a corporation is composed of hundreds or thousands of people.
Corporations are not people, they are a corporate entity. They do not have the same rights as people. When was the last time you saw Microsoft walking down to the polling booth to place their vote?
Of course they should get a bigger say, this is a democracy.
This has to be a troll, a) because they shouldn't have any say, and b) because we don't live in a democracy. Voting once every five years for one of two viable candidates based on information fed to you by publicications and media who have interests in one or the other is certainly not a democracy.
VAT is paid by everyone along the supply chain. Manufacturer buys raw materials, supplier pays VAT.
If you are talking about the UK (the only place I know of that calls it VAT), you are wrong. Only the final sale of the goods has VAT added. That's why if you get a supply catalogue aimed at business, or go to a cash and carry like Macro, you don't see VAT on the prices automatically.
Sales taxes vary by state too.
That explains the problem in the States for this kind of thing. The UK has a VAT rate of 17.5%, which is the same across all of the countries that make up the UK. Makes the taxing of internet goods pretty simple.
It also makes me import a lot. My hope is that the global free market will finally stop things like this, and put an end to Rip Off Britain
I am likely to pay 20% tax plus another 15% or so in tax-like handling charges on every single thing I mail order from the US
That's pretty unlucky. I've been importing DVDs etc for years, and I've only be taxed once or twice. Some things to know:
You are only taxed when the goods sum total is over a certain threshold
Big carriers like FedEx always charge tax because they have an agreement with customs on this. It enables them to get their packages through customs quicker
Keep your packages small, and take by-land delivery, and you will mostly be tax free.
you can't buy clothes here unless you're a dwarf who loves terrible clothes
Your placing US clothing above European? Wow. Never seen that done before. What on Earth do you like wearing?;-)
how is the tax gonna work for ppl in other countries?
Simple. We stop ordering things from the USA. and go elsewhere.
It's your econemy, do what you want!;-) I suggest you try to explain to your leaders how e-commerce works. It's of no relevance to me where I order things from.
I was told that I qualify for a $320K mortgage. That is nuts. If I took out a mortgage that big, the bank would own the house in a few years
I think that's the point!
We have a decent chunk to put down ~$45K
That's why you got offered so much. If you default on the payments and the bank takes the house, they also keep your deposit. It makes you a very safe bet either way.
I'm "over here" as well.;-) It just happened that the Canadian DVD of the movie was the only one with any special features (at the time I bought it). Plus it has a French alternate soundtrack, which is great if you can recite the English version from memory. Brilliant to watch for a laugh!
Pressing a CD and a DVD half is trivial, and all the infrastructure is there. The question remains why it hasn't been done more often.
Probably because people think they are getting "more" by having them on two separate disks, like in some of the DVD box sets that are around. They'll think "2 disks, much better". Probably.
Basically, an extremely large list of internet radio stations, most of which are non-profit and done by music lovers, not executives. Simply select a genre and then a station. Listen.
If you hear something you like, the artist and track name are shown in the media player. Go to Allmusic or a similar music database, and you usually get a complete listing of their work.
Download said band's material from p2p and serve. Remember, if you like their stuff, don't forget to buy merchandise and go to concerts.
If you insist on hearing new stuff on MTV and radio, you'll only get the "commercially viable" stuff. That is, Britany Spears.
How about a DVD and a (Red Book) CD sold together?
The Canadian DVD version of Trainspotting is a DVD on one side, and an audio CD on the other. In this case, the audio CD doesn't contain anything interesting (ambient train sounds?!?), but the idea is sound.
Simply put, $9 is worth more to someone in Asia than it is in the US. It buys more food, pays more rent and buys more entertainment.
Comparing prices across regions is stupid and pointless unless you take account of the relative wages vs. the relative cost of living.
So, in essence, there is a good chance that $9 in Asia is actually still a rip-off price. You could use The Big Mac Index, which is a silly but much more accurate way of looking at the costs in other countries. A Big Mac in China is half the US price, so it follows (loosely) that the same ratio will apply for other goods.
but look for any actual dead bodies. They will not show them
Just like the movies. Ever seen some vicious sword/gun play scene where there is little or no blood? Does that make sense? The news is remarkably the same.
If you wanted to cut down violence in society, show the consequences. So, when Arnie rams the knife into the baddy in the final scene, let's see him die painfully in a bloody mess, while Arnie spends the next week cleaning the blood of his hands. Cut to the baddies wife & children crying. It will be gory and make you feel sick, but that's what violence does. Stop glamourising it! War is not cool, even for the geek factor in the tech side of it.
As I said in an earlier post in this thread, TV news is entertainment. Nothing more. Stay tuned, we'll be right back after these important messages...
This and other media fluff about smart weaponry seems to be designed to present war as a videogame...
Yup. The news media can be explained simply in one word. Ratings.
People like smart weapons, so the media shows them. People like watching disasters and war, so the media shows them. Best personal analogy is slowing down to take a nosy at a car wreck.
If television news is your primary source of "news", then you simply don't have a clue.
In the United Kingdom, this is illegal under the Data Protection act.
No it's not. All the act perscribes is that:
Companies storing personal information must register with the Data Protection Register
Companies must give the subject of that data full and unrestricted access to it.
So, they can do it, if they wanted to. You do have the right to see all of your data, and you can check if there is anything like that in there. However, when was the last time you did this with your company? Never? Thought so...
Besides, as much as I respect and admire the law on this (I always tick the "opt out" box for "sharing" information), it's pretty unenforceable. A company could store certain kinds of information that you don't get to see, but without conducting a complete search of their data personally, you never know if you did in fact receive it all originally.
Perhaps Microsoft don't know that yet. If they ever need to get a lot of research done on anything, all they need to do is make up a rumour then check slashdot 2 days later. You'll get a complete comprehensive report on it's limitations and likelyhood of success, for free!
Somebody came out with a better product and won over the customers.
And, personally I think mp3 is superior in all respects.
The trade-off there is sound quality. More quantity, lower quality.
mp3 quality is much underestimated. Like any lossy compression, there is a fine art to setting the encoding options. I'll agree 128kbit is pretty poor, fine through computer speakers or headphones, but if you get a decent soundcard and wire it to a good sound system, you can really hear the difference.
However, if you use VBR with just the right settings, the sound is infinitely better. On almost all sound systems, indistingishable from CDs. Check out the r3mix website, where a lot of work has gone into discovering what these settings should be. They used professional blind listening tests in the process, and came up with something pretty damn good. The files can range from 128kbit/s for basic music, but if the music requires it (the encoder knows this), it will go right up to 260-270kbit/s. 256kbit/s has been proven to be completely indistingishable from CDs by the experiment referenced in the "Quality" page on the site. This involved 300 audiophiles, a pretty good sample group for this kind of test.
If you have the time, I'd really recommend trying it. The encoder I use is called CDex, completely free and in the quality settings, it actually has a predefined setting for the "r3mix preset". If you've seen the command line parameters to the encoder, you'd see why that's a very good thing!
I listen to music in lots of places. At work, in the car (or a plane or a train), in the kitchen, in the living room and at the computer at home. That last one is the sole mp3 friendly spot I have. And, it turns out that this place garners the lowest amount of music listening time.
That was my worry too. But it's easy to get over, for instance there are plenty of portable players you can get for either solid-state storage, or CD-R. They are the same price portable CD players were just 2 years ago. I've got a mp3 player in the car, it was pretty cheap as well, so that's covered. At home, I have a second sound card in my PC, that only winamp uses. The sound can easily be piped into other rooms, if you are up for a bit of DIY. I've hooked it up to the kitchen myself, and have a second, pretty old networked laptop in the bedroom for music there.
At work, I play the music through a web server, direct from my home machine. There is no way that CDs can compare to that. Give it two years, you'll be able to do it to your mobile phone.
And as a last resort, check out the RomeMP3 player, one of the most inspired ideas I've seen.
I don't see a big advantage to mp3s.
Are the type of person who likes to make compilation tapes, or your own CDs? If you just like listening to complete albums, then the random access nature of mp3s won't be of much use to you. I do like making up the odd mix up, especially when there are friends around. Just queue up a few songs with a easy to use interface (no searching through disks, missing/wrong/scratched disks) and you are set. Great for a party, as anyone can pop up and queue up a song of their own, especially if it has a web front-end, just about anyone can use a browser these days. But can your aunt or a drunk person eject and play a new CD in your home system without mass destruction?;-)
And if that person wants to hear a track you don't have, you can usually download it at faster than real time, and play it right there and then. That's a killer app.
I'd have to spend time converting everything to mp3, or looking around online for good quality rips. Then, I have to get the mp3s onto something the player will read.
Growing up, I'd always wanted a juke box, which then became a large multidisk CD changer, which I never did get round to getting, as they all were not very good in the audio quality department. I heard of mp3 about 4 years ago, and it sounded like the way to go to get that much wanted music system. So, I do have the fortune of already having my entire CD collection on a very large hard drive, and the desire to do so!
Encoding time for new stuff has never been an issue for me, besides, you don't need to baby sit the encoding process anyway. Most encoders check the CDDB database for the track titles etc, and some ever have a batch mode, where you put in one disk, wait for it to pop out, and put in another.
If you have friends also doing it, a set of CD-RWs becomes invaluable. And you can listen to them on the drive home.
Burning media for portable devices is almost disposable. If you lose or have the disks stolen, you haven't lost anything more than a few 15 cent disks. I have no worries about keeping around 100 albums in the car, provided they are out of view! Nothing more frustrating that paying to have your window fixed, all for nothing of saleable value whatsoever!
Give it 5-10 years, and most people will be using some form of compressed media for music. That format may or may not be mp3, but we shouldn't hold up any sentimental feelings for the format, ditto CDs. When I'm talking about what I think the future of media may involve, I'm not talking about a specific file format.
I'm not saying CD will die either. The number of working CD players in the market will keep the format around for a very long time. As these break, they will eventially be replaced with newer technologies, much like the migration from cassette to CDs. Remember when you only had one CD player?
Why would anyone keep a crappy mp3 on their computer for other people to download?
I've figured out a way this can happen and is happening on p2p just now. Here's the sequence:
Troll user or industry contractor downloads a common file that is genuine. LOTR on DivX for example.
File gets renamed to something else.
New user comes along, sees the fake and starts to download it. important note: the file on your machine is always named the same as the original you first selected to download
Each copy of the file (including the properly named ones) becomes a valid hash-compatible alternate source. So even if the fake-providing user goes off-line, there will still be sources.
Here's the key part: Your partial downloads are shared. Other users see you with the fake file, even though you don't even know it's fake yet. They start to download it from you, with the same fake name. If it's a popular fake name, the effect snowballs from there.
Unless everyone deletes the fake file at the same time, it's going to be there forever. This works best for large files, so you'll see a lot of mp3 singles that need overburning to fit on one disk. A lot of users don't know what to expect as a filesize, so they can and are caught out by this.
I've been aware of this for sometime now. I didn't want to post it anywhere, in case it gives someone any ideas. This thread has kinda mucked that up though, so it doesn't matter anymore.
Now, the question is, what to do to avoid this issue:
Use WinMX and it's "Search alternates" feature, which will look for files with the same hash. You should remove the first line of the search (the filename) and re-click on "find", so you are getting back all files of the same checksum. If most of the names don't match what you have, it's usually a fake. Kazaa doesn't allow anything like this unfortunatly.
Install a tool like sig2dat which gives your system a new net service available through web pages. You get a link like "sig2dat://......" which, when clicked on it will create an empty partial download for Kazaa. Restart Kazaa and it will begin looking for that particular file. If you trust the web page, then you are happy. FastTrackMovies springs to mind.
Pay attention to file sizes.
Block IPs that are "nasty"
What really floats my boat is the evential outcome of this. The industry is shooting itself in the foot in this arms race between them and the world, that they cannot possibly hope to win.
Think of it this way. Soon, no one will trust filenames in p2p and the searches will become redunant. One of two things will happen: People will start remortgaging their homes again to buy CDs. Or, people will create better systems that allow ratings of files, like the sig2dat system.
This is fantastic for the p2p user. Not only do you know that you are getting the right file; you'll also have reviews and comments on it's quality and listings of other files you wouldn't have normally thought of searching for. Entire albums can be queued in one click (the question is, will Amazon sue?!?;-)
What I envisage happening long term is p2p being more of a service on the PC, with little user interaction. To send someone a file, you send them a "link" to that file on the network, and your client seeks it out itself. Just like the birth of Napster, the record/movies industries choice of action (or inaction) will ultimately bite them. Evolution doesn't work well unless someone is hacking away at the weak links.
By the same logic, car drivers are stealing from the horse-drawn cart industry. Airoplane flyers are stealing from the train network. And e-mail is stealing from the post service. Why? Because the users of these services are not restricting themselves to the old technology.
Technology has moved on. Get over it. There is no need for "records" anymore, so there is no need for the record industry as it currently exists. Good riddance frankly, they were abusing their influence far too much.
When they said the internet would change everything, we all said "cool!!". Now it's happening, people are bitching left, right and center that it's costing them money. Well, duh! Adapt or die. The ethos of any successful business strategy in a changing market.
Just wait and see how the telcos are going to start bitching when voice-over-ip gets big. Will we be "stealing" telephone calls then?
I'll be damned before I'm going to allow human progress be held back by corporate greed. The internet and p2p is one of the best things to come out of the 20th century. Information and media available on any possible subject, at low or zero cost. I can download any song I like within minutes usually. Hear a song on an advert you like? Look it up and then download. And you want me to give that up?
Slashdot Mirror
The rest of the world really doesn't care about your seriously flawed legal system. Kazaa is not in the USA. The US legal system can do what the hell it wants, but it's all irrelevant if the Kazaa folks don't step off a plane in the USA. I doubt extridition will apply either, they choose countries that actually had a spine to host Kazaa's business.
It's not all that unusual for this kind of thing. There are lot's of people around the world who cannot go to certain countries because they face legal action. In fact, there are even some US officials who will be arrested for crimes against humanity and war crimes should they ever land in Europe!
In most places, the loser of a law suit pays the costs of the winner. Cuts down on cases just like this. If you are sure you'll win, you can spend all you want, it's the other guys money anyway. It's not perfect but it's better.
Things like Kazaa get passed around by word of mouth. I doubt losing their listing on download.com is going to make any difference. Becoming legally untouchable in the USA, homeland of the *AA will do a hell of a lot of difference to their circulation.
Also, iirc, they already tried to argue that they didn't do substantial business in the US, so they shouldn't be held accountable to US law.
Yes, this was on Slashdot at the time. It's a crazy idea, holding you accountable to the entire worlds laws. How would you feel if a country like China was to pursue you legally for saying Mao was misguided? It's on their law books, and Chinese people on the net could read your comment.
Sorry, but I'm not willing to stand for draconian laws banning new and revolutionary communication tools just so a bunch of executives can continue picking up pretty little girls and boys with the intention of packaging them up as a product. How would you feel if the post office went after e-mail just because it cost them money? Were we happy when they proposed taxing e-mail? How is this any different?
Music is art, not profit.
That's due to a technical quirk of TCP/IP that is more prevailent with asymetric links.
Every received TCP packet must be acknowledged with an ACK packet. If you allow something to use 100% of your upload bandwidth, you'll find your ACK packets from your downloads get queued to get sent back in the upstream. This hammers your internet connection because the servers won't send you any more packets until you have ACK'ed the already sent ones.
The solution is to limit uploads to around 90 - 95 % of your total upload capacity. Unfortunatly, while Kazaa has an in-build bandwidth throttle that you can set, you can only change it in powers of two. I prefer WinMX, which allows you to set any value you want.
This web page explains the problem and the solution in better detail than I have, with graphs etc.
If you are using a Linux NAT box or a good firewall, you may be able to set up traffic shaping to not allow p2p to max things out. This will also give priority to the ACK packets, and you can set it so that HTTP traffic also gets priority. It's pretty complex stuff though.
Corporations are not people, they are a corporate entity. They do not have the same rights as people. When was the last time you saw Microsoft walking down to the polling booth to place their vote?
Of course they should get a bigger say, this is a democracy.
This has to be a troll, a) because they shouldn't have any say, and b) because we don't live in a democracy. Voting once every five years for one of two viable candidates based on information fed to you by publicications and media who have interests in one or the other is certainly not a democracy.
"Will of the people" my arse!
You can blame all the tax return accountants for that. If it were simple, they'd be out of a job! ;-)
If you are talking about the UK (the only place I know of that calls it VAT), you are wrong. Only the final sale of the goods has VAT added. That's why if you get a supply catalogue aimed at business, or go to a cash and carry like Macro, you don't see VAT on the prices automatically.
Sales taxes vary by state too.
That explains the problem in the States for this kind of thing. The UK has a VAT rate of 17.5%, which is the same across all of the countries that make up the UK. Makes the taxing of internet goods pretty simple.
It also makes me import a lot. My hope is that the global free market will finally stop things like this, and put an end to Rip Off Britain
That's pretty unlucky. I've been importing DVDs etc for years, and I've only be taxed once or twice. Some things to know:
Keep your packages small, and take by-land delivery, and you will mostly be tax free.
you can't buy clothes here unless you're a dwarf who loves terrible clothes
Your placing US clothing above European? Wow. Never seen that done before. What on Earth do you like wearing? ;-)
Simple. We stop ordering things from the USA. and go elsewhere.
It's your econemy, do what you want! ;-) I suggest you try to explain to your leaders how e-commerce works. It's of no relevance to me where I order things from.
I think that's the point!
We have a decent chunk to put down ~$45K
That's why you got offered so much. If you default on the payments and the bank takes the house, they also keep your deposit. It makes you a very safe bet either way.
I'm "over here" as well. ;-) It just happened that the Canadian DVD of the movie was the only one with any special features (at the time I bought it). Plus it has a French alternate soundtrack, which is great if you can recite the English version from memory. Brilliant to watch for a laugh!
Pressing a CD and a DVD half is trivial, and all the infrastructure is there. The question remains why it hasn't been done more often.
Probably because people think they are getting "more" by having them on two separate disks, like in some of the DVD box sets that are around. They'll think "2 disks, much better". Probably.
Shoutcast
Basically, an extremely large list of internet radio stations, most of which are non-profit and done by music lovers, not executives. Simply select a genre and then a station. Listen.
If you hear something you like, the artist and track name are shown in the media player. Go to Allmusic or a similar music database, and you usually get a complete listing of their work.
Download said band's material from p2p and serve. Remember, if you like their stuff, don't forget to buy merchandise and go to concerts.
If you insist on hearing new stuff on MTV and radio, you'll only get the "commercially viable" stuff. That is, Britany Spears.
The Canadian DVD version of Trainspotting is a DVD on one side, and an audio CD on the other. In this case, the audio CD doesn't contain anything interesting (ambient train sounds?!?), but the idea is sound.
Simply put, $9 is worth more to someone in Asia than it is in the US. It buys more food, pays more rent and buys more entertainment.
Comparing prices across regions is stupid and pointless unless you take account of the relative wages vs. the relative cost of living.
So, in essence, there is a good chance that $9 in Asia is actually still a rip-off price. You could use The Big Mac Index, which is a silly but much more accurate way of looking at the costs in other countries. A Big Mac in China is half the US price, so it follows (loosely) that the same ratio will apply for other goods.
(Paraphrased from 1984)
LOL!!
The only people being subjected to "psychological warfare" and "disinformation on Iraq" are the American public.
Just like the movies. Ever seen some vicious sword/gun play scene where there is little or no blood? Does that make sense? The news is remarkably the same.
If you wanted to cut down violence in society, show the consequences. So, when Arnie rams the knife into the baddy in the final scene, let's see him die painfully in a bloody mess, while Arnie spends the next week cleaning the blood of his hands. Cut to the baddies wife & children crying. It will be gory and make you feel sick, but that's what violence does. Stop glamourising it! War is not cool, even for the geek factor in the tech side of it.
As I said in an earlier post in this thread, TV news is entertainment. Nothing more. Stay tuned, we'll be right back after these important messages...
Yup. The news media can be explained simply in one word. Ratings.
People like smart weapons, so the media shows them. People like watching disasters and war, so the media shows them. Best personal analogy is slowing down to take a nosy at a car wreck.
If television news is your primary source of "news", then you simply don't have a clue.
If they do, just send them to goatse instead. They won't ask you again.
No it's not. All the act perscribes is that:
So, they can do it, if they wanted to. You do have the right to see all of your data, and you can check if there is anything like that in there. However, when was the last time you did this with your company? Never? Thought so...
Besides, as much as I respect and admire the law on this (I always tick the "opt out" box for "sharing" information), it's pretty unenforceable. A company could store certain kinds of information that you don't get to see, but without conducting a complete search of their data personally, you never know if you did in fact receive it all originally.
Never, ever forget what happened at the Watergate.
(for those with no clue, it was when Nixon used systems just like this to listen to his opponents conversations)
Would you trust Bush & Pals with that kind of power? I think not...
Perhaps Microsoft don't know that yet. If they ever need to get a lot of research done on anything, all they need to do is make up a rumour then check slashdot 2 days later. You'll get a complete comprehensive report on it's limitations and likelyhood of success, for free!
And, personally I think mp3 is superior in all respects.
The trade-off there is sound quality. More quantity, lower quality.
mp3 quality is much underestimated. Like any lossy compression, there is a fine art to setting the encoding options. I'll agree 128kbit is pretty poor, fine through computer speakers or headphones, but if you get a decent soundcard and wire it to a good sound system, you can really hear the difference.
However, if you use VBR with just the right settings, the sound is infinitely better. On almost all sound systems, indistingishable from CDs. Check out the r3mix website, where a lot of work has gone into discovering what these settings should be. They used professional blind listening tests in the process, and came up with something pretty damn good. The files can range from 128kbit/s for basic music, but if the music requires it (the encoder knows this), it will go right up to 260-270kbit/s. 256kbit/s has been proven to be completely indistingishable from CDs by the experiment referenced in the "Quality" page on the site. This involved 300 audiophiles, a pretty good sample group for this kind of test.
If you have the time, I'd really recommend trying it. The encoder I use is called CDex, completely free and in the quality settings, it actually has a predefined setting for the "r3mix preset". If you've seen the command line parameters to the encoder, you'd see why that's a very good thing!
I listen to music in lots of places. At work, in the car (or a plane or a train), in the kitchen, in the living room and at the computer at home. That last one is the sole mp3 friendly spot I have. And, it turns out that this place garners the lowest amount of music listening time.
That was my worry too. But it's easy to get over, for instance there are plenty of portable players you can get for either solid-state storage, or CD-R. They are the same price portable CD players were just 2 years ago. I've got a mp3 player in the car, it was pretty cheap as well, so that's covered. At home, I have a second sound card in my PC, that only winamp uses. The sound can easily be piped into other rooms, if you are up for a bit of DIY. I've hooked it up to the kitchen myself, and have a second, pretty old networked laptop in the bedroom for music there.
At work, I play the music through a web server, direct from my home machine. There is no way that CDs can compare to that. Give it two years, you'll be able to do it to your mobile phone.
And as a last resort, check out the RomeMP3 player, one of the most inspired ideas I've seen.
I don't see a big advantage to mp3s.
Are the type of person who likes to make compilation tapes, or your own CDs? If you just like listening to complete albums, then the random access nature of mp3s won't be of much use to you. I do like making up the odd mix up, especially when there are friends around. Just queue up a few songs with a easy to use interface (no searching through disks, missing/wrong/scratched disks) and you are set. Great for a party, as anyone can pop up and queue up a song of their own, especially if it has a web front-end, just about anyone can use a browser these days. But can your aunt or a drunk person eject and play a new CD in your home system without mass destruction? ;-)
And if that person wants to hear a track you don't have, you can usually download it at faster than real time, and play it right there and then. That's a killer app.
I'd have to spend time converting everything to mp3, or looking around online for good quality rips. Then, I have to get the mp3s onto something the player will read.
Growing up, I'd always wanted a juke box, which then became a large multidisk CD changer, which I never did get round to getting, as they all were not very good in the audio quality department. I heard of mp3 about 4 years ago, and it sounded like the way to go to get that much wanted music system. So, I do have the fortune of already having my entire CD collection on a very large hard drive, and the desire to do so!
Encoding time for new stuff has never been an issue for me, besides, you don't need to baby sit the encoding process anyway. Most encoders check the CDDB database for the track titles etc, and some ever have a batch mode, where you put in one disk, wait for it to pop out, and put in another.
If you have friends also doing it, a set of CD-RWs becomes invaluable. And you can listen to them on the drive home.
Burning media for portable devices is almost disposable. If you lose or have the disks stolen, you haven't lost anything more than a few 15 cent disks. I have no worries about keeping around 100 albums in the car, provided they are out of view! Nothing more frustrating that paying to have your window fixed, all for nothing of saleable value whatsoever!
Give it 5-10 years, and most people will be using some form of compressed media for music. That format may or may not be mp3, but we shouldn't hold up any sentimental feelings for the format, ditto CDs. When I'm talking about what I think the future of media may involve, I'm not talking about a specific file format.
I'm not saying CD will die either. The number of working CD players in the market will keep the format around for a very long time. As these break, they will eventially be replaced with newer technologies, much like the migration from cassette to CDs. Remember when you only had one CD player?
I've figured out a way this can happen and is happening on p2p just now. Here's the sequence:
Unless everyone deletes the fake file at the same time, it's going to be there forever. This works best for large files, so you'll see a lot of mp3 singles that need overburning to fit on one disk. A lot of users don't know what to expect as a filesize, so they can and are caught out by this.
I've been aware of this for sometime now. I didn't want to post it anywhere, in case it gives someone any ideas. This thread has kinda mucked that up though, so it doesn't matter anymore.
Now, the question is, what to do to avoid this issue:
What really floats my boat is the evential outcome of this. The industry is shooting itself in the foot in this arms race between them and the world, that they cannot possibly hope to win.
Think of it this way. Soon, no one will trust filenames in p2p and the searches will become redunant. One of two things will happen: People will start remortgaging their homes again to buy CDs. Or, people will create better systems that allow ratings of files, like the sig2dat system.
This is fantastic for the p2p user. Not only do you know that you are getting the right file; you'll also have reviews and comments on it's quality and listings of other files you wouldn't have normally thought of searching for. Entire albums can be queued in one click (the question is, will Amazon sue?!? ;-)
What I envisage happening long term is p2p being more of a service on the PC, with little user interaction. To send someone a file, you send them a "link" to that file on the network, and your client seeks it out itself. Just like the birth of Napster, the record/movies industries choice of action (or inaction) will ultimately bite them. Evolution doesn't work well unless someone is hacking away at the weak links.
Technology has moved on. Get over it. There is no need for "records" anymore, so there is no need for the record industry as it currently exists. Good riddance frankly, they were abusing their influence far too much.
When they said the internet would change everything, we all said "cool!!". Now it's happening, people are bitching left, right and center that it's costing them money. Well, duh! Adapt or die. The ethos of any successful business strategy in a changing market.
Just wait and see how the telcos are going to start bitching when voice-over-ip gets big. Will we be "stealing" telephone calls then?
I'll be damned before I'm going to allow human progress be held back by corporate greed. The internet and p2p is one of the best things to come out of the 20th century. Information and media available on any possible subject, at low or zero cost. I can download any song I like within minutes usually. Hear a song on an advert you like? Look it up and then download. And you want me to give that up?