Mhmm, definately. You can synthesize sounds using either electricity (mmm, modulars) or maths. If you use the latter, then you can write simple programs that produce electronic timbres. I've gone from mucking around with Amiga.mods to using rackmounts to programming very simple instruments in Python. It's much easier to work out how the sound works with electronics or maths than it is to try and make or customise acoustic instruments.
Haven't there been several advances made in recording technologies since then?
From what I remember of looking at the site before it was Slashdotted, it doesn't cover recording technologies so much as sound generating technologies: the instruments themselves.
I think the major advance there, incidentally, is acoustic modelling (patented by Stanford University and implemented by Yamaha, just like FM synthesis of the eighties).
...wouldn't an automated test that just compared the output of a compressed audio track to the original be more accurate? Or is there more truth than I think to certain frequencies being worthless and inaudible by human ears?
The whole idea behind lossy audio codecs is that the human brain and ear aren't that good at what they do:) As was pointed out on the Ogg Vorbis mailing list a looong time ago, technical tests like you're proposing would only tell you what computers would find more pleasant to listen to, not what humans would. So yeah, there's more to certain frequencies being inaudible to human ears:)
As for midi, try being moved by a synthisized speech of any good written work.
OK, just to make sure everyone gets this: MIDI, the Musical Instrument's Digital Interface, is a protocol for telling an instrument which notes to play, when to play them, when to stop playing them, the velocity to play them at and so on. It is not just the sound an old sound card makes while you're playing Doom. Yamaha have even made an acoustic piano that responds to MIDI. It sounds no more synthetic than punchcards used by old pianos in westerns.
And Agrajag is a fine name. But nothing can hold a candle to "Slartibartfast."
OK, I've been listening to the audiobooks rather than reading the actual books, so forgive me if I'm spelling them wrong... but what about Broomfondle and Magic Thighs?
Hollywood seems to have latched onto Mr Dick's style of science fiction with a death grip. Is this at the expense of all of the other authors?
Good point. Although PKD has written some amazing stories, there are lots of good authors who are getting ignored. I know if I was a millionaire I'd get some of Greg Egan's better work turned into films or animé.:)
It's a shame this means Charlie Kaufman's A Scanner Darkly script won't ever be turned into a film now, as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were all great. Hopefully this will be good in its own right though.
I think the OGG video stuff will have an easier go of it than OGG the music format.
When it comes to preserving old camcorder footage then yes, this probably has more of a chance than Ogg Vorbis had of preserving any speeches/songs/whatever you made.
But when it comes to backing up media you've bought, copying CDs to Ogg Vorbis format doesn't involve transcoding, whereas backing up DVDs, VideoCDs, D-VHS or any other digital video format already available does. I don't know how much that affects the final quality of the Theora file, but it can't help. Then again, backing up old VHS, Betamax and LaserDisc videos should be OK.
At any rate, I really hope this and (one day) Tarkin take off.
How many people is [Ogg Vorbis] a good choice for? Why?
I encode the music that I write and buy exclusively in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC now. I chose the format for political reasons: it's free (libre). The fact that it sounds much better to my ears at low bitrates doesn't hurt: I used to encode mp3s at 256kbps as that was about as low as I could go before the hi-hats sounded wrong, but now I encode at Ogg Vorbis quality 3, which is usually around 112kbps, meaning I can fit many more songs into the same amount of space.
And as soon as a solid state player comes out that can support Vorbis (assuming I can afford it), I'll be able to listen to it anywhere - but until then I stick with MiniDiscs because ATRAC also sounds a lot better than mp3 to my ears.
Whatever happened to my decentralized net with no single point of failure?
Oddly enough I've just read the part of Weaving the Web that points out how, for all the Internet's and web's decentralised methods, they still used DNS which is essentially a heirarchy pointing to very few computers, which can cause problems later, being the Internet's Achille's Heel. It mentions the biggest fear not being technical failure but human maliciousness.
...but in oc-s.mpg, when the sphere is in front of the person demonstrating it, presumably with the light sensors also in front of the individual, why does eir face disappear?
There are NO new audio formats that will replace CD
That's a very bold statement... maybe in fifty years' time the majority of people will decide that this new fangled twenty or sixty chanel system with speakers all around the listener is finally worth replacing CDs with, though where they'll hide all the speakers I have no idea. Or maybe most people won't notice that 128kbps mp3's make hi-hats sound like bicycle pumps and will start downloading those from P2P clients or even paying for them at legitimate web sites. Oh, wait, that's already happened...
Well that's a good point: every physical medium eventually corrupts to the point where it's unplayable. I guess the only way to truly ensure your record collection lasts is to buy it in any digital medium that can easily be ripped, then copy it onto a computer, compress it (lossless compression like with FLAC would be ideal) and keep an off-site backup (this shouldn't be too difficult these days; copy your hard drive onto another hard drive, and ask a friend to keep it and let you borrow it again every few months to update it). That way, come time, theft or fire, you'll still have all your albums.
We American have never fought a war with UK so that why I don't know where it's at.
OK, I don't know much history. It's really not my subject. So feel free to correct me. But wasn't the American Revolutionary War a war between the UK and US?
Re:Archive.org
on
TechTV.com RIP
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Archive.org also has episodes of another computer show, Computer Chronicles. It's much older (mainly eighties episodes), but they don't do things by halves: for the online database episode they interview people from Q-Link (later renamed AOL) and Compuserve, and in their music episode they interview John Chowning, who invented FM synthesis.
From the article: Gender is a non-issue...
If there's one thing [Raven] hates, it's being type-cast as a "chick hacker".
What a fantastic way to start off an interview: with something the interviewee doesn't consider in any way important! Do these people actually objectively read what they write?
Obligatory Python reference: "And did you write this music in the sheds?"
Slashdot Mirror
To me, electronic music is the geekiest kind.
Mhmm, definately. You can synthesize sounds using either electricity (mmm, modulars) or maths. If you use the latter, then you can write simple programs that produce electronic timbres. I've gone from mucking around with Amiga .mods to using rackmounts to programming very simple instruments in Python. It's much easier to work out how the sound works with electronics or maths than it is to try and make or customise acoustic instruments.
So, who else then? Any links to music?
Shameless plug: my music, my synthesizer encyclopedia. Feel free to download and copy them :)
Haven't there been several advances made in recording technologies since then?
From what I remember of looking at the site before it was Slashdotted, it doesn't cover recording technologies so much as sound generating technologies: the instruments themselves.
I think the major advance there, incidentally, is acoustic modelling (patented by Stanford University and implemented by Yamaha, just like FM synthesis of the eighties).
Doesn't Freenet already do this within its own network?
The whole idea behind lossy audio codecs is that the human brain and ear aren't that good at what they do :) As was pointed out on the Ogg Vorbis mailing list a looong time ago, technical tests like you're proposing would only tell you what computers would find more pleasant to listen to, not what humans would. So yeah, there's more to certain frequencies being inaudible to human ears :)
But can it play SID files?
As for midi, try being moved by a synthisized speech of any good written work.
OK, just to make sure everyone gets this: MIDI, the Musical Instrument's Digital Interface, is a protocol for telling an instrument which notes to play, when to play them, when to stop playing them, the velocity to play them at and so on. It is not just the sound an old sound card makes while you're playing Doom. Yamaha have even made an acoustic piano that responds to MIDI. It sounds no more synthetic than punchcards used by old pianos in westerns.
No pictures of Woz on IMDb
If you want to know what Woz looks like, you can always download this interview.
And Agrajag is a fine name. But nothing can hold a candle to "Slartibartfast."
OK, I've been listening to the audiobooks rather than reading the actual books, so forgive me if I'm spelling them wrong... but what about Broomfondle and Magic Thighs?
Hollywood seems to have latched onto Mr Dick's style of science fiction with a death grip. Is this at the expense of all of the other authors?
Good point. Although PKD has written some amazing stories, there are lots of good authors who are getting ignored. I know if I was a millionaire I'd get some of Greg Egan's better work turned into films or animé. :)
It's a shame this means Charlie Kaufman's A Scanner Darkly script won't ever be turned into a film now, as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were all great. Hopefully this will be good in its own right though.
I think the OGG video stuff will have an easier go of it than OGG the music format.
When it comes to preserving old camcorder footage then yes, this probably has more of a chance than Ogg Vorbis had of preserving any speeches/songs/whatever you made.
But when it comes to backing up media you've bought, copying CDs to Ogg Vorbis format doesn't involve transcoding, whereas backing up DVDs, VideoCDs, D-VHS or any other digital video format already available does. I don't know how much that affects the final quality of the Theora file, but it can't help. Then again, backing up old VHS, Betamax and LaserDisc videos should be OK.
At any rate, I really hope this and (one day) Tarkin take off.
How many people is [Ogg Vorbis] a good choice for? Why?
I encode the music that I write and buy exclusively in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC now. I chose the format for political reasons: it's free (libre). The fact that it sounds much better to my ears at low bitrates doesn't hurt: I used to encode mp3s at 256kbps as that was about as low as I could go before the hi-hats sounded wrong, but now I encode at Ogg Vorbis quality 3, which is usually around 112kbps, meaning I can fit many more songs into the same amount of space.
And as soon as a solid state player comes out that can support Vorbis (assuming I can afford it), I'll be able to listen to it anywhere - but until then I stick with MiniDiscs because ATRAC also sounds a lot better than mp3 to my ears.
Whatever happened to my decentralized net with no single point of failure?
Oddly enough I've just read the part of Weaving the Web that points out how, for all the Internet's and web's decentralised methods, they still used DNS which is essentially a heirarchy pointing to very few computers, which can cause problems later, being the Internet's Achille's Heel. It mentions the biggest fear not being technical failure but human maliciousness.
...but in oc-s.mpg, when the sphere is in front of the person demonstrating it, presumably with the light sensors also in front of the individual, why does eir face disappear?
There are NO new audio formats that will replace CD
That's a very bold statement... maybe in fifty years' time the majority of people will decide that this new fangled twenty or sixty chanel system with speakers all around the listener is finally worth replacing CDs with, though where they'll hide all the speakers I have no idea. Or maybe most people won't notice that 128kbps mp3's make hi-hats sound like bicycle pumps and will start downloading those from P2P clients or even paying for them at legitimate web sites. Oh, wait, that's already happened...
Well that's a good point: every physical medium eventually corrupts to the point where it's unplayable. I guess the only way to truly ensure your record collection lasts is to buy it in any digital medium that can easily be ripped, then copy it onto a computer, compress it (lossless compression like with FLAC would be ideal) and keep an off-site backup (this shouldn't be too difficult these days; copy your hard drive onto another hard drive, and ask a friend to keep it and let you borrow it again every few months to update it). That way, come time, theft or fire, you'll still have all your albums.
We American have never fought a war with UK so that why I don't know where it's at.
OK, I don't know much history. It's really not my subject. So feel free to correct me. But wasn't the American Revolutionary War a war between the UK and US?
Archive.org also has episodes of another computer show, Computer Chronicles. It's much older (mainly eighties episodes), but they don't do things by halves: for the online database episode they interview people from Q-Link (later renamed AOL) and Compuserve, and in their music episode they interview John Chowning, who invented FM synthesis.
Now you guys please be careful not to /. Cisco :)
As opposed to NetGear, who slashdot other people...
Light years are a measurement of space, not time.
Quad sound probably isn't as good as you're thinking.
Oh and also lose the name Raven (assuming that's a nickname). Is there something wrong or disturbing or embarrasing about your *shock* real name?
That's a very good point, Anonymous.
From the article: Gender is a non-issue... If there's one thing [Raven] hates, it's being type-cast as a "chick hacker".
What a fantastic way to start off an interview: with something the interviewee doesn't consider in any way important! Do these people actually objectively read what they write?
Obligatory Python reference: "And did you write this music in the sheds?"
You're getting shocked by immature comments on slashdot? Is this your first time here?
Did you actually read the article that Raven wrote and linked to? It was quite insightful...