performance will be way too slow for any image of a reasonable size over the web
You can say that again.
I've been working on some CD artwork for the last couple of weeks. My documents arent particularly large or complex - we're only talking roughly 1500 pixels square, 30 or 40 layers - I don't think any of my saved PSDs topped 120MB. The software was crawling like an absolute dog. Frankly it's a bit of a joke - I've got 2.4Ghz / 1GB RAM, and I can record 8 channels of 24bit/96khz audio whilst playing back another 30 channels of audio and a stack of VST instruments and DSP effects, no problem at all. But I open one lousy hundred meg psd and suddenly it takes 2 minutes to switch application? What gives with that? The audio stuff should be way more demanding than a small photoshop doc. Doing this over the web is possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard, if it takes my computer 20-30 seconds to fully refresh my view when I drag a layer as it is, imagine how long it would take by the time it's sending everything round the world and back again.
Good tip, but imho better than beatport is bleep.com.
The interface isn't built in flash, for starters, so you can actually do things like *gasp* link people directly to a certain release (gosh, who would have thought hyperlinking could be useful on the web *rollseyes*). When I went to beatport a few weeks ago for the first time since last year, I just got an error saying I don't have flash. (I do). bleep does use a small tasteful flash widget for track previewing - which works fine for me on exactly the same system - which is actually rather excellent once you get the hang of it, as it allows you to get a streaming preview of any point in any track, rather than selected short clips.
The fare is a 320kbps MP3s and/or FLACs. No DRM. There are nice touches such as when you purchase several tunes, it can make a zip of them for you to simplify the download, or give you a separate link to an mp3, whichever you choose.
The catalogue / target market doesn't exactly overlap, I suppose. Beatport seems very strong in house, trance, drum'n'bass and so forth - dj type material. Bleep is strong on the more leftfield fringes of 'bedroom listening' electronica (god I hate that word), with labels like Warp, Ninja Tune and Planet Mu.
Also, obligatory plug for my own band, keiretsu - live drum'n'bass and breakbeat fusion, combining electronic dance music with guitars, 3-piece horn section, electric violin and more. Naturally, we sell our last CD as DRM-free LAME 320s. (And we give away the CD before that - I think of it as the "id software model";-) ). This article is badly timed for me to do some plugging, since our new CD (and corresponding website overhaul) isn't out til next month, but nevermind.
On another note, check out The WBC. Nothing to do with me this time - they're from NZ. I happened to run across their alto sax player, I've just taken up the instrument and he gave me some advice on a musician's forum. I checked out his bands stuff and had to buy the full album in MP3s (the shipping and taxes were too high for the CD from NZ). They're sort of ska-rock territory - not an area of music I'm an expert in, to be honest, but FWIW I personally think these guys are pretty good.
I remember once being at some old ruined castle with my parents when I was, hmm, perhaps about 10 years old.
There was a small wooden fence around an area containing the moat and some potential dangerous ruined stonework.
I said: "what is the point of that fence, it's tiny, I could climb over it easily? it really doesn't do anything to stop me ending up in the moat"
They said: "well, the thing with fences is that they're not there to stop you getting somewhere. They're there to make you KNOW that you're not supposed to go somewhere. If you just fell into the moat, the castle owners are in trouble. If you climb over a fence and fall in the moat, the castle owners can say, 'well, come on, he climbed over the fence that clearly marked that area off limits. You can hardly blame us, and he can hardly claim he didn't realise he wasn't supposed to be going into that area'."
Likewise with your problem.
Yes, technical measures can always be defeated by the determined myspacer, such as via a proxy. However, I would say some technical measures are worth considering hand-in-hand with the AUP, as a sort of 'fence'. If myspace is banned by the AUP, but not blocked, then everyone will go there, and when they do, they can claim they didn't realise it was against the AUP, or they clicked a link which took them to myspace without realising that's where the link led, "honestly"... etc, etc.
If myspace is blocked, on the other hand, then you force people to "climb over the fence". Yes, they can still get to it via a proxy - but the fact they've gone to it via a proxy means it is explicitly, unarguably obvious that they knew they weren't supposed to be going there, and deliberately went out of their way to get around the rules. This, imho, means you will be able to enforce the AUP more stringently.
the security of the nation that keeps carbombs off my streets...
Patriotism isn't an archaic concept; it's a survivalist one.
This is a nitpick, and it's off topic, so I'll keep it brief, but I believe you are wrong. You're right with your point about security, but I would argue this is a function of the state, not of the nation. As such it cannot be a convincing justification for "patriotism", as I understand it.
(IMHO, it is no coincidence that the distinction between "nation" and "state" is frequently and deliberately blurred by "the powers that be", because <extreme-personal-bias> if you think about it for too long, you might just realise what a giant crock of shit nationalism really it </extreme-personal-bias>.)
To put it in a simpler way: you can desire that the concrete apparatus and institutions of the state provides it's population the function of security (police, army, etc), without actually having love/devotion/veneration for the far more abstract / nebulous concept of the "nation", which is what patriotism implies to me.
Certainly that describes myself - I'm happy that the state in which I reside offers some degree of security (in practice I have some pretty major reservations about the things our police and army get up to - you know, shooting innocent Brazilians, casually carpet-bombing vast swathes of the world who are populated by faintly Arabic looking types, and all that fun stuff - but that's beside the point - in principle I condone the security function of the state), but I'm definitely not "devoted" to my nation.
Similarly, VSO also need skilled professionals from the IT sector to live and work alongside colleagues in 30-odd of the poorest countries in the world. (I've linked you to the Canadian office, since I infer you're American, and they handle recruitment from the USA - there are also bases in the UK, Netherlands, Kenya and the Philippines. )
consumers are already conditioned to believe multiple discs are better than one.
Normally I'm pleased to see this sort of healthy cynicism regarding big corps flogging us shit with lies etc...
In this case though don't you think it would be fair to say multiple discs are better than one? I don't think it's a case of consumers being conditioned / brainwashed in this example - surely it's simple pragmatism. Scratch "The Two Towers" and at least the other movies are playable. Scratch your 100GB single-uber-disc-of-everything-ness, and you're shafted.
If you've got a ProTools HD rig then I'm obviously not telling you anything you don't already know, but for the benefit of anybody else...
Plugin Delay Compensation basically means offsetting tracks to adjust for how long the DSP's in your chain take. So, for a very crude example, if you've got a piano going through a cheapo EQ which adds no delay, and a guitar going through a demanding convolution plugin which adds 1ms of delay, without PDC, your guitar is going to come out 1ms late. PDC = automatically detects this, and sends the guitar signal to the convolution plugin 1ms "early".
Full PDC is where it does this across busses and groups as well. That is, even in complex routings, where the guitar is fed to another channel as a send effect, processed, grouped back with the original channel in a bus, etc - it still works out PDC across the board. This is important - arguably even more than simple PDC - because it allows parallel processing. In reality, the guitar being a tiny bit later than the piano may well not be noticed by human ears. However, if you parallel process something (a classic example being "New York compression"), and one signal is delayed, then you'll end up with phasing between the two, which is very noticable.
PDC in itself isn't very new, I think even my (relatively ancient) sequencer does it. But full PDC is something which has only really appeared across the board in the last few years, I believe.
Oh, and since I'm replying to myself already - I've just seen your reply to the sibling, where you actually said exactly the same as me about the Mac analogy *chuckle*. Should read the whole thread before restating something you've already said!;)
I believe full PDC* (plugin delay compensation) is now present on Cubase, not just Nuendo. Can't remember about Logic but I think the latest version at least has it too?
I don't have the latest version of any, so I couldn't give you my report as to it's effectiveness.
Low latency is pretty much a given with any (semi)pro audio interface, like a MOTU or whatever, again, not really a ProTools thing.
By the way, just to clarify: my previous post (and indeed this one) wasn't intended to detract from ProTools at all. To be honest, I've never used it! So I'd be a fool to bash it. I'm not trying to do it down; it's just the post I was replying to seemed to be kinda in the "I've heard that real professional uses ProTools because it does tons of stuff that no other solution can do" camp, which isn't a realistic appraisal of the pro-audio market in 2007.
I think your "just works" comment is revealing, taken in unison with your sibling post griping about Digidesign forcing you to use their hardware. Broadly, I guess you could say that Digidesign are going for the Apple model, where they control the entire stack, both hardware and software, in order to get that "just works" result. Nice if you can afford it, and you're prepared to go "in for a penny, in for a pound" with any single vendor - if not you can do a mix-and-match approach with Steinberg/Emagic + MOTU/Apogee/RME, etc.
Finale (and Sibelius) are essentially for "composing" scores (ie, traditional notated sheet music to print out and put in front of musicians).
I am interested to know what universe you live in where "music" isn't "music" unless sheet music is involved. I mean, whilst the "if it's made electronically and not played on 'real' instruments, it doesn't count as music" attitude is utterly ridiculous, it's at least... almost... nearly... sort of... possibly... barely... understandable.
But your definition would appear to rule out pretty much the entirety of jazz and rock as well as electronic stuff... Not to mention the vast swathes of the world's music which doesn't use the European-classical tradition of scoring / notation... *genuinely dumbfounded*
Is this why in 20 years I have never seen a tracker used on a commercial session? Alternatively this could be because bedroom studio techno-heads don't hire studios?
Well, it's the latter really. Plenty of commercially released and successful dance music (<pet-peeve> no, not all dance music is "techno", any more than all music made by bands with guitars is, say, "punk" </pet-peeve>) has been made with trackers - including many considered classics in their respective styles.
But you don't see them in "proper" hired studios, for the simple reason that they'd be rubbish at it. Why go to the expense of hiring a studio? It's not to program beats, which you can do quite happily at home... OK, whilst it would clearly be simplifying to say this is the only reason to get a real studio, it's probably fair to say the most compelling reason is to record vocals or instruments. After all - all those classic hardware EQs, compressors, reverbs and effects can be reproduced with software these days (especially now that convolution technology is making such strides) - but you can't download a well-designed acoustic environment;-)
And if you're recording long takes of audio from a vocalist or instrumentalist... you don't use a tracker. Because by and large they don't / can't do that all, and even if they can, they'll do it badly, compared to something designed for the task (ie, a DAW).
This isn't attempting to be an alternative to GarageBand or Logic. It's coming from a different ethos of music altogether. It's "family tree" consists of the likes of Octamed / Fasttracker / Buzz / Renoise, not Cubase / Logic. See my post here for a fuller explanation.
From what I've picked up reading slashdot and many music production forums, the closest OSS to what you're looking for is Rosegarden. I haven't tried it myself though - no point really, as I'm happily (yes, really) running XP (no, it doesn't bluescreen:rollseyes: )
You might be interested in this article, about a couple of Americans who run a studio entirely on Linux-based MIDI and audio software.
See my sibling post to yours. ProTools is not 'inherently' about manipulating audio on a note-by-note basis, in the manner described by the GP -- although it is favoured within the industry because the interface allows you to work with your audio recordings in that kind of way quite quickly and easily, from the arrange page.
Conceptually, it's probably best described a DAW, though I'll grant you "multi-track recorder" is a pretty close approximation for all intents and purposes;-)
These days, imho, ProTools is by no means far out in front of the competition, as it arguably was in the 90s. Rivals like Steinberg's Nuendo give you the same highly slick chop-up-your-audio-to-sample-accuracy-from-the-arr ange-page capabilities. Also, if you're doing any sort of even semi-professional audio, you're going to need a (semi-)professional audio interface (24 bit, 96khz minimum, probably multiple I/O) - this is one big chunk of what the ProTools hardware does, the other big chunk being DSP to run your plugins without straining the native CPU. Again, ProTools is no longer unique in this regard - TC's PowerCore is probably the best known similar product. Finally, as you say, there are plugins available for ProTools for things like autotuning, but again - this is very far from unique to ProTools these days. You can get Antares Autotune in TDM (the ProTools format) but also as native VST or DX (which basically means any serious music software under the sun can utilise it). There are a few plugins that are only sold as TDM, not in VST/DX/AU/RTAS, but there arent that many anymore, and you can bet there are roughly equivalent alternatives in the native (or powercore) formats.
This is not entirely on point. Since it's a rare day on slashdot where I actually halfway know what I'm talking about, I can't resist pitching in:)
Hm. Naming problem. Colloquially they're called 'module trackers' or 'midi/music sequencers', but essentially they're both the same thing: a program that places hardware/user-defined notes in user-designed spots in songs.
Although at the most simplified level I suppose this is correct, they're not really the same thing at the level beyond that.
Trackers are step-time. Commonly, each step equates to sixteenth notes (four steps per beat of the bar). Modern trackers may allow you to choose greater resolution, but in the past (and by "past" I'm talking turn of the century here, which was when I used them, not decades ago!) it was pretty common to simply work at double-bpm if you needed more resolution.
On the other hand, midi sequencers... well... clearly I can't claim they're continuous, as that's obviously a theoretical impossibility in a digital system. But they don't come across as step like. Resolution-wise, even at the same sort of period ('99), Cubase had an internal MIDI resolution of 15360 PPQN (pulses per quarter note). Most decent DAWs these days (Pro tools, Nuendo) will allow you to spot events to sample accuracy (ie, if you're working at cd quality, you've got a resolution of 44,100 per second) or locked to various types of timecode (for, eg, film scoring). Against, while it's possible modern trackers incorporate this (I haven't really used them for a few years), I would certainly say that older trackers (FT2, IT2, Modplug-as-I-knew-it, Buzz) do not allow you to put your notes on spots as defined by (eg) SMPTE timecode.
Also, the "note" in a trackers was traditionally triggering a sample loaded directly within the tracker software, whereas the notes in a midi sequencer drive hardware, or a software sampler/synth/instrument (the most common format being VSTi). Admittedly, these days many/most trackers can output midi and use software instruments too, so I admit the definition is pretty thoroughly blurred.
Still, it helps to realise the different backgrounds they've come from, because whilst it's blurred, you still can't really see them as identical.
To the talented, they are a good as a room full of fine musical instruments. To the less talented, they're much like a cat with a tether attached to its tail, labeled 'swing me'.
True!
There are also 'sound editors', like Sound Forge, that allow you to mess with the raw sound data, and Cakewalk and Audacity, which are excellent 'multitrack recorders' with SF-like functionality built in (Cakewalk's a MUCH better program, but as for Audacity, 'free' is a good selling point).
Cakewalk these days is known as Sonar. But even with the old Cakewalk branded versions, considering it a multitrack soundforge would be doing it a bit of a disservice. Like Cubase and Logic, it's essentially a hybrid DAW/Midi sequencer.
None of these could be considered 'music editors', which to me implies something that can take in raw PCM data and let you select out and remove, add, and modify notes. No such program exists to my knowledge.
Well, no, not really, because it's barely possible for computers to pull apart PCM data in that way... In fact as little as five years ago I'd have said impossible, but we are getting there. The closest there currently is would be melodyne. I haven't used it (because it's bloody expensive!) but reviews I've read suggest you can pretty much treat audio as midi - ie, select and alter individual notes from an audio file. Even then, it will struggle or outright fail if the source material is (eg) heavily effected with delays/reverbs/etc. And while it's ok for monophonic audio, you're not going to be able to (say) change the flute line from the midst of an orchestral recording.
Also a bit like Songs of Distant Earth. All the jokes about "during the 700 year voyage Earth invents FTL and beats them there" - well, that general gist crops up too.
I would have to agree, email is pretty much dead in my eyes.
I used to check my email several times a day - now I check it maybe once or twice a week. And with 500+ spam for every 1 or 2 legit emails, I barely know why I bother anyway. Sure, Thunderbird's Bayesian and whitelist filtering help somewhat, but it's too late - I'm past caring about email now anyway. I've moved on. Everyone who knows me, knows that they'll get a far faster response dropping me an IM, PM or SMS.
I think the standard argument here is that if a composer or musician can't or won't perform live, then they're not real musicians, and thus don't deserve the money. This is, of course, complete horseshit; my library is filled with lots of music by very talented people who, for whatever reason, rarely if ever go on tour.
Another common argument is that they'll send money to the artist (the other people who worked on the album and whose ongoing employment depends on the CDs success can go fuck themselves, I guess)
Since I've already posted in this discussion, and you're at +5 anyway, I will instead reply to say: bravo.
I like a lot of music which either can't be performed live, or at least, if it could, it would be terrible.
Seriously, I've no problem with slashdotters who primarily enjoy (for example) your common-or-garden four-piece "rock" line up, a format which has always been heavily about live shows and tours, who release your typical a-few-good-tracks-and-some-filler CDs, saying that they download the good ones and pay for concerts tickets from which the band will earn more than the CD anyway. That's grand in my book, honestly - I am, as it happens, in a band, and if you did that to my band (hell, many people have, and told me as much), I'd be chuffed.
But, really, not all music works like that.
I would continue to ramble but I have a pub to go to.
I'm paying $180 to see Prince in Vegas in March. We love seeing him play live. He made a good decision to go around Universal and the rest of the collusive monopolists in the distribution market -- he plays lives twice a week at his club. He sells it out.
Um... yes, good for Prince to ditch the evil majors. Of course, he wouldn't sell out two concerts a week at $180 a pop, if he wasn't already one of the single most famous popular musicians of the last century - a position he achieved very much WITH the help of the RIAA gang.
So, yeah, your post is very much +5 insightful on paper, but things are a bit trickier in practice.
If music were priced at its real cost plus the same small profit that all other manufacturing enjoys, it would cost $1.00 an album. After all, production costs have already been recouped for 99.9% of popular music, hundreds of times over for anything in the top 40.
LMAO. I'm going to take a wild guess and say you don't work or operate in the music industry at any level from the top 40 / big 4 end to the grassroots scene.
Thanks for the tip. How about another tab, rather than another window?
Shift-click corresponds to Firefox's own "in new window" shortcut. Firefox's corresponding "in new tab" shortcut is ctrl-click - that doesn't work in Gmail either.
I was only joking about firing people, of course;-) But the point is that if you follow best practice Google wouldn't need to "make" it work for middle-click as well, it already would. It's not exactly that it's a "huge problem" for me (like I said, I use it once a month if that), I am speaking on a point of principle really... I already know how my browser works, and that browser is my interface to the web. I know that middle clicking is open in new tab, I don't know about any shift-click shortcut that Google have provided unless you tell me on slashdot! Or I RTF Gmail M, which I really shouldn't have to - it seems to me if you're going to build a web app, you should play along with people's familiar interface to the web, and avoid the need for a manual that way.
I would have thought for this to be a perfect catch-22, you would have to be magically un-exposed to it as soon as you paid for it.
There is no catch-22 here. You found something only because you were able to download it free: that's great. Whether or not you THEN decide that because you enjoy it a great deal, it is fair for you to pay for it, or whether you decide you don't actually enjoy it that much, or you'll pay to see them live, or you'll buy their other album, or you'll tell all your friends about it, or for any other reason decide not to pay for what you downloaded, and just carry on listening free... that is a completely separate issue. That's decided purely by your sense of morality, state of your finances, etc. Now it may well be that your personal sense of morality is such that the answer is "no, I won't pay for it", and I won't get into an argument about that (very much a grey area imho), but I certainly don't see that it's inherently bound up with how you discovered it as a perfect catch-22.
It's great that you've looked beyond American pop and found the vast array of fantastic diverse music from around the world.
I'm a little bit confused, though, why you wouldn't pay for it? I'd be fairly confident in thinking Dutch trance producers, Indian bhangra musicians and so forth, need your money even more than Justin Timberlake does.
(Hmm, of course, you said you haven't bought a CD or a download, you didn't rule out buying vinyl, cassette or wax cylinders. Seems unlikely though.)
n other words, i do have a valid argument for music piracy, simply because i don't download lindsey lohan or justin timberlake, so before you rail at me for stealing form starving third world artists:
if it weren't for piracy, i would never have been exposed to the artists i am listening too in the first place
I don't really see how it's a catch-22 at all. You pirate it, you listen to it, you enjoy it... THEN you buy it? No?
NB: Not trying to be "holier than thou", just saying.
I only got a gmail account a couple of months ago. I've got several domain names, so I've got practically infinite email addresses, so I never really wanted or needed email. But I wanted a "secret identity" (ie not on my domains) so I figured if I was going to get any webmail, I might as well get "the best". Lack of middle click to open emails in new tabs = straightaway I file gmail under "thank f##k I don't have to use this more than once a month, fire the f##king web developers". Seriously - like you say - the correct way to do this would be to have the link as a regular href that will open in another tab or window if requested, and then javascript hooks which catch a left-click and do the ajax stuff instead. Why on earth do slashdot hold gmail up as a paradigm of perfect ajax when they fail to even meet these basics?
Also, isn't it a pretty sad day when "context sensitive ads" is listed as a good point?
Slashdot Mirror
performance will be way too slow for any image of a reasonable size over the web
You can say that again.
I've been working on some CD artwork for the last couple of weeks. My documents arent particularly large or complex - we're only talking roughly 1500 pixels square, 30 or 40 layers - I don't think any of my saved PSDs topped 120MB. The software was crawling like an absolute dog. Frankly it's a bit of a joke - I've got 2.4Ghz / 1GB RAM, and I can record 8 channels of 24bit/96khz audio whilst playing back another 30 channels of audio and a stack of VST instruments and DSP effects, no problem at all. But I open one lousy hundred meg psd and suddenly it takes 2 minutes to switch application? What gives with that? The audio stuff should be way more demanding than a small photoshop doc. Doing this over the web is possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard, if it takes my computer 20-30 seconds to fully refresh my view when I drag a layer as it is, imagine how long it would take by the time it's sending everything round the world and back again.
Good tip, but imho better than beatport is bleep.com.
;-) ). This article is badly timed for me to do some plugging, since our new CD (and corresponding website overhaul) isn't out til next month, but nevermind.
The interface isn't built in flash, for starters, so you can actually do things like *gasp* link people directly to a certain release (gosh, who would have thought hyperlinking could be useful on the web *rollseyes*). When I went to beatport a few weeks ago for the first time since last year, I just got an error saying I don't have flash. (I do). bleep does use a small tasteful flash widget for track previewing - which works fine for me on exactly the same system - which is actually rather excellent once you get the hang of it, as it allows you to get a streaming preview of any point in any track, rather than selected short clips.
The fare is a 320kbps MP3s and/or FLACs. No DRM. There are nice touches such as when you purchase several tunes, it can make a zip of them for you to simplify the download, or give you a separate link to an mp3, whichever you choose.
The catalogue / target market doesn't exactly overlap, I suppose. Beatport seems very strong in house, trance, drum'n'bass and so forth - dj type material. Bleep is strong on the more leftfield fringes of 'bedroom listening' electronica (god I hate that word), with labels like Warp, Ninja Tune and Planet Mu.
Also, obligatory plug for my own band, keiretsu - live drum'n'bass and breakbeat fusion, combining electronic dance music with guitars, 3-piece horn section, electric violin and more. Naturally, we sell our last CD as DRM-free LAME 320s. (And we give away the CD before that - I think of it as the "id software model"
On another note, check out The WBC. Nothing to do with me this time - they're from NZ. I happened to run across their alto sax player, I've just taken up the instrument and he gave me some advice on a musician's forum. I checked out his bands stuff and had to buy the full album in MP3s (the shipping and taxes were too high for the CD from NZ). They're sort of ska-rock territory - not an area of music I'm an expert in, to be honest, but FWIW I personally think these guys are pretty good.
I remember once being at some old ruined castle with my parents when I was, hmm, perhaps about 10 years old.
There was a small wooden fence around an area containing the moat and some potential dangerous ruined stonework.
I said: "what is the point of that fence, it's tiny, I could climb over it easily? it really doesn't do anything to stop me ending up in the moat"
They said: "well, the thing with fences is that they're not there to stop you getting somewhere. They're there to make you KNOW that you're not supposed to go somewhere. If you just fell into the moat, the castle owners are in trouble. If you climb over a fence and fall in the moat, the castle owners can say, 'well, come on, he climbed over the fence that clearly marked that area off limits. You can hardly blame us, and he can hardly claim he didn't realise he wasn't supposed to be going into that area'."
Likewise with your problem.
Yes, technical measures can always be defeated by the determined myspacer, such as via a proxy. However, I would say some technical measures are worth considering hand-in-hand with the AUP, as a sort of 'fence'. If myspace is banned by the AUP, but not blocked, then everyone will go there, and when they do, they can claim they didn't realise it was against the AUP, or they clicked a link which took them to myspace without realising that's where the link led, "honestly"... etc, etc.
If myspace is blocked, on the other hand, then you force people to "climb over the fence". Yes, they can still get to it via a proxy - but the fact they've gone to it via a proxy means it is explicitly, unarguably obvious that they knew they weren't supposed to be going there, and deliberately went out of their way to get around the rules. This, imho, means you will be able to enforce the AUP more stringently.
(IMHO, it is no coincidence that the distinction between "nation" and "state" is frequently and deliberately blurred by "the powers that be", because <extreme-personal-bias> if you think about it for too long, you might just realise what a giant crock of shit nationalism really it </extreme-personal-bias>.)
To put it in a simpler way: you can desire that the concrete apparatus and institutions of the state provides it's population the function of security (police, army, etc), without actually having love/devotion/veneration for the far more abstract / nebulous concept of the "nation", which is what patriotism implies to me.
Certainly that describes myself - I'm happy that the state in which I reside offers some degree of security (in practice I have some pretty major reservations about the things our police and army get up to - you know, shooting innocent Brazilians, casually carpet-bombing vast swathes of the world who are populated by faintly Arabic looking types, and all that fun stuff - but that's beside the point - in principle I condone the security function of the state), but I'm definitely not "devoted" to my nation.
Similarly, VSO also need skilled professionals from the IT sector to live and work alongside colleagues in 30-odd of the poorest countries in the world. (I've linked you to the Canadian office, since I infer you're American, and they handle recruitment from the USA - there are also bases in the UK, Netherlands, Kenya and the Philippines. )
Disclaimer: I work there.
In this case though don't you think it would be fair to say multiple discs are better than one? I don't think it's a case of consumers being conditioned / brainwashed in this example - surely it's simple pragmatism. Scratch "The Two Towers" and at least the other movies are playable. Scratch your 100GB single-uber-disc-of-everything-ness, and you're shafted.
Oops - I forgot to add the note for my *
;)
If you've got a ProTools HD rig then I'm obviously not telling you anything you don't already know, but for the benefit of anybody else...
Plugin Delay Compensation basically means offsetting tracks to adjust for how long the DSP's in your chain take. So, for a very crude example, if you've got a piano going through a cheapo EQ which adds no delay, and a guitar going through a demanding convolution plugin which adds 1ms of delay, without PDC, your guitar is going to come out 1ms late. PDC = automatically detects this, and sends the guitar signal to the convolution plugin 1ms "early".
Full PDC is where it does this across busses and groups as well. That is, even in complex routings, where the guitar is fed to another channel as a send effect, processed, grouped back with the original channel in a bus, etc - it still works out PDC across the board. This is important - arguably even more than simple PDC - because it allows parallel processing. In reality, the guitar being a tiny bit later than the piano may well not be noticed by human ears. However, if you parallel process something (a classic example being "New York compression"), and one signal is delayed, then you'll end up with phasing between the two, which is very noticable.
PDC in itself isn't very new, I think even my (relatively ancient) sequencer does it. But full PDC is something which has only really appeared across the board in the last few years, I believe.
Oh, and since I'm replying to myself already - I've just seen your reply to the sibling, where you actually said exactly the same as me about the Mac analogy *chuckle*. Should read the whole thread before restating something you've already said!
I believe full PDC* (plugin delay compensation) is now present on Cubase, not just Nuendo. Can't remember about Logic but I think the latest version at least has it too?
I don't have the latest version of any, so I couldn't give you my report as to it's effectiveness.
Low latency is pretty much a given with any (semi)pro audio interface, like a MOTU or whatever, again, not really a ProTools thing.
By the way, just to clarify: my previous post (and indeed this one) wasn't intended to detract from ProTools at all. To be honest, I've never used it! So I'd be a fool to bash it. I'm not trying to do it down; it's just the post I was replying to seemed to be kinda in the "I've heard that real professional uses ProTools because it does tons of stuff that no other solution can do" camp, which isn't a realistic appraisal of the pro-audio market in 2007.
I think your "just works" comment is revealing, taken in unison with your sibling post griping about Digidesign forcing you to use their hardware. Broadly, I guess you could say that Digidesign are going for the Apple model, where they control the entire stack, both hardware and software, in order to get that "just works" result. Nice if you can afford it, and you're prepared to go "in for a penny, in for a pound" with any single vendor - if not you can do a mix-and-match approach with Steinberg/Emagic + MOTU/Apogee/RME, etc.
Finale (and Sibelius) are essentially for "composing" scores (ie, traditional notated sheet music to print out and put in front of musicians).
I am interested to know what universe you live in where "music" isn't "music" unless sheet music is involved. I mean, whilst the "if it's made electronically and not played on 'real' instruments, it doesn't count as music" attitude is utterly ridiculous, it's at least... almost... nearly... sort of... possibly... barely... understandable.
But your definition would appear to rule out pretty much the entirety of jazz and rock as well as electronic stuff... Not to mention the vast swathes of the world's music which doesn't use the European-classical tradition of scoring / notation... *genuinely dumbfounded*
But you don't see them in "proper" hired studios, for the simple reason that they'd be rubbish at it. Why go to the expense of hiring a studio? It's not to program beats, which you can do quite happily at home... OK, whilst it would clearly be simplifying to say this is the only reason to get a real studio, it's probably fair to say the most compelling reason is to record vocals or instruments. After all - all those classic hardware EQs, compressors, reverbs and effects can be reproduced with software these days (especially now that convolution technology is making such strides) - but you can't download a well-designed acoustic environment
And if you're recording long takes of audio from a vocalist or instrumentalist... you don't use a tracker. Because by and large they don't / can't do that all, and even if they can, they'll do it badly, compared to something designed for the task (ie, a DAW).
This isn't attempting to be an alternative to GarageBand or Logic. It's coming from a different ethos of music altogether. It's "family tree" consists of the likes of Octamed / Fasttracker / Buzz / Renoise, not Cubase / Logic. See my post here for a fuller explanation.
:rollseyes: )
From what I've picked up reading slashdot and many music production forums, the closest OSS to what you're looking for is Rosegarden. I haven't tried it myself though - no point really, as I'm happily (yes, really) running XP (no, it doesn't bluescreen
You might be interested in this article, about a couple of Americans who run a studio entirely on Linux-based MIDI and audio software.
See my sibling post to yours. ProTools is not 'inherently' about manipulating audio on a note-by-note basis, in the manner described by the GP -- although it is favoured within the industry because the interface allows you to work with your audio recordings in that kind of way quite quickly and easily, from the arrange page.
;-)
r ange-page capabilities. Also, if you're doing any sort of even semi-professional audio, you're going to need a (semi-)professional audio interface (24 bit, 96khz minimum, probably multiple I/O) - this is one big chunk of what the ProTools hardware does, the other big chunk being DSP to run your plugins without straining the native CPU. Again, ProTools is no longer unique in this regard - TC's PowerCore is probably the best known similar product. Finally, as you say, there are plugins available for ProTools for things like autotuning, but again - this is very far from unique to ProTools these days. You can get Antares Autotune in TDM (the ProTools format) but also as native VST or DX (which basically means any serious music software under the sun can utilise it). There are a few plugins that are only sold as TDM, not in VST/DX/AU/RTAS, but there arent that many anymore, and you can bet there are roughly equivalent alternatives in the native (or powercore) formats.
Conceptually, it's probably best described a DAW, though I'll grant you "multi-track recorder" is a pretty close approximation for all intents and purposes
These days, imho, ProTools is by no means far out in front of the competition, as it arguably was in the 90s. Rivals like Steinberg's Nuendo give you the same highly slick chop-up-your-audio-to-sample-accuracy-from-the-ar
Also a bit like Songs of Distant Earth. All the jokes about "during the 700 year voyage Earth invents FTL and beats them there" - well, that general gist crops up too.
I would have to agree, email is pretty much dead in my eyes.
I used to check my email several times a day - now I check it maybe once or twice a week. And with 500+ spam for every 1 or 2 legit emails, I barely know why I bother anyway. Sure, Thunderbird's Bayesian and whitelist filtering help somewhat, but it's too late - I'm past caring about email now anyway. I've moved on. Everyone who knows me, knows that they'll get a far faster response dropping me an IM, PM or SMS.
Since I've already posted in this discussion, and you're at +5 anyway, I will instead reply to say: bravo.
I like a lot of music which either can't be performed live, or at least, if it could, it would be terrible.
Seriously, I've no problem with slashdotters who primarily enjoy (for example) your common-or-garden four-piece "rock" line up, a format which has always been heavily about live shows and tours, who release your typical a-few-good-tracks-and-some-filler CDs, saying that they download the good ones and pay for concerts tickets from which the band will earn more than the CD anyway. That's grand in my book, honestly - I am, as it happens, in a band, and if you did that to my band (hell, many people have, and told me as much), I'd be chuffed.
But, really, not all music works like that.
I would continue to ramble but I have a pub to go to.
I'm paying $180 to see Prince in Vegas in March. We love seeing him play live. He made a good decision to go around Universal and the rest of the collusive monopolists in the distribution market -- he plays lives twice a week at his club. He sells it out.
Um... yes, good for Prince to ditch the evil majors. Of course, he wouldn't sell out two concerts a week at $180 a pop, if he wasn't already one of the single most famous popular musicians of the last century - a position he achieved very much WITH the help of the RIAA gang.
So, yeah, your post is very much +5 insightful on paper, but things are a bit trickier in practice.
If music were priced at its real cost plus the same small profit that all other manufacturing enjoys, it would cost $1.00 an album. After all, production costs have already been recouped for 99.9% of popular music, hundreds of times over for anything in the top 40.
LMAO. I'm going to take a wild guess and say you don't work or operate in the music industry at any level from the top 40 / big 4 end to the grassroots scene.
I wish I had mod points. Nice post :)
Thanks for the tip. How about another tab, rather than another window?
;-) But the point is that if you follow best practice Google wouldn't need to "make" it work for middle-click as well, it already would. It's not exactly that it's a "huge problem" for me (like I said, I use it once a month if that), I am speaking on a point of principle really... I already know how my browser works, and that browser is my interface to the web. I know that middle clicking is open in new tab, I don't know about any shift-click shortcut that Google have provided unless you tell me on slashdot! Or I RTF Gmail M, which I really shouldn't have to - it seems to me if you're going to build a web app, you should play along with people's familiar interface to the web, and avoid the need for a manual that way.
Shift-click corresponds to Firefox's own "in new window" shortcut. Firefox's corresponding "in new tab" shortcut is ctrl-click - that doesn't work in Gmail either.
I was only joking about firing people, of course
Have you actually read catch-22 ?
I would have thought for this to be a perfect catch-22, you would have to be magically un-exposed to it as soon as you paid for it.
There is no catch-22 here. You found something only because you were able to download it free: that's great. Whether or not you THEN decide that because you enjoy it a great deal, it is fair for you to pay for it, or whether you decide you don't actually enjoy it that much, or you'll pay to see them live, or you'll buy their other album, or you'll tell all your friends about it, or for any other reason decide not to pay for what you downloaded, and just carry on listening free... that is a completely separate issue. That's decided purely by your sense of morality, state of your finances, etc. Now it may well be that your personal sense of morality is such that the answer is "no, I won't pay for it", and I won't get into an argument about that (very much a grey area imho), but I certainly don't see that it's inherently bound up with how you discovered it as a perfect catch-22.
I'm a little bit confused, though, why you wouldn't pay for it? I'd be fairly confident in thinking Dutch trance producers, Indian bhangra musicians and so forth, need your money even more than Justin Timberlake does.
(Hmm, of course, you said you haven't bought a CD or a download, you didn't rule out buying vinyl, cassette or wax cylinders. Seems unlikely though.)
I don't really see how it's a catch-22 at all. You pirate it, you listen to it, you enjoy it... THEN you buy it? No?
NB: Not trying to be "holier than thou", just saying.
I only got a gmail account a couple of months ago. I've got several domain names, so I've got practically infinite email addresses, so I never really wanted or needed email. But I wanted a "secret identity" (ie not on my domains) so I figured if I was going to get any webmail, I might as well get "the best". Lack of middle click to open emails in new tabs = straightaway I file gmail under "thank f##k I don't have to use this more than once a month, fire the f##king web developers". Seriously - like you say - the correct way to do this would be to have the link as a regular href that will open in another tab or window if requested, and then javascript hooks which catch a left-click and do the ajax stuff instead. Why on earth do slashdot hold gmail up as a paradigm of perfect ajax when they fail to even meet these basics?
Also, isn't it a pretty sad day when "context sensitive ads" is listed as a good point?
Fixed that for you