"I'm not arguing that it's not the best of its class. I'm just aruging that it's not really a 64K demo."
You just have to make the switch and see the available system api's as hardware that you program against. And then the whole trickbox approach becomes valid again. Because you can do DX calls the 'normal' way or you can optimize the shit out of them and put more usefull code in the same space. So while the actual things that you tinker with now are software interfaces for the perifferals as opposed to hardware you still get to be smart-ass and do cool stuff with the limitation.
For me, it is not so much about tickling hardware as it is about doing as much as possible in as little as possible space. I mean, even a VGA interface is 'cheating' when compared to programming for the 2600's stella, and the 2600 needed serious tricks every time you wanted to show anything on screen, not just demos.
Every generation has to deal with a different set of platformity and each generation has to figure out what the challenge is for the available platforms. Since 3D hardware is ubiquitous but highly complex and depending on drivers to actually work (the drivers are a big part of the actual design of those components) it's just natural to use the provided interface (the driver as opposed to the bus) to do your tricks on.
Because running a Java app always reminds me that a similar program woud run just as well on a 5 year older computer when written in a native language? I sometimes do things in Java , but there is always this nagging feeling in the back of my head that i'm somehow wasting a lot of energy and resources when running the code. I will propably live in this limbo untill Java cpu's are common.
". Those requirements are *not* there when using skype or similar."
And quite frankly, most of the time there is no reason to have these requirements. Besides, the available bandwidth on packet switched networks these days is much bigger then required for having a voice communication. Telephone bitrate is somewhere around 64kbps which is insignificant in modern networks. You could have about 16 simultaneous phone conversations with a symmetrical 1mbps connection. Voice is trivial in most situations.
"They just gave you an Android smartphone for signing up"
They don't give you anything. You pay more than retail price for that device through your monthly subscription. All they do is provide very expensive credit that you can pay off over the contracts period.
", but if a God did create something to look 14 billion years old, then that's how old it would look despite our best testing."
But that would make the god a very childish one, for wanting to fool us this way. And besides, we are then nothing but puppets for its ammusement, aren't we? I mean, he had absolute power to design us like he wanted and yet he gives us black death and cancer and aids. I mean, why all the needless suffering?
Funny thing. My version of google update does run in the background as a service. I had to manually disable it. Only to find out that running a google application would agressively reintroduce the service. Untill i removed that too.
"Those obsolete components cost a lot more than newer ones. "
But to use the new ones you would need a brand new machine that you would have to pay for. So what is cheaper, 1x obsolete expensive component or 1x new pc (includes the new component)?
Mind you, today's PC's are embarrassingly overpowered for office work. There are generally very little tasks in an office that need faster computers. I mean, doesn't anyone realize that flash adds in webpages have been the one of the bigger drivers of PC hardware sales in the past decade?
Yeah, and i think this is exactly why 3D will not become what manufacturers and conctent creators want it to become anytime soon. You see, there are technical issues that are inherent to 3D scening. I'm saying this because i created several 3D CG clips a month ago. This experience tells me that 3D will prevent certain visual storytelling elements from existing, bringing down the whole medium. Ultimately, 3D will always produce tangible aquariums where it is more difficult to imagine them representing big spaces because your spatial relation to the picture is very much defined. With 2D you have to mentaly re-map the picture into a space and there a sense of scale is produced. With 3D the scale depends on and is imposed by technical stuffs like screen size and prespective relations to the viewer. So a movie designed for the theatre will impose a completely different spatial relation when viewed on a small screen. That is less of a problem with CG as you can re-render the home version, but for real life movies this is, and will be, a problem.
Most JRPG games originated from the home computer scene in the middle 80s. And when most PC users were blown away by the amazing color spectrum of CGA i was already enjoying paletted 15 bit colors. These 'better than pc' graphics (don't worry, almost anything had better graphics than pc in those days) helped develop the style that would flourish in the SNES days. Konami, Compile, Falcom, Square and Enix all were producing great and defining jrpg's in the 80s and some series continue untill this day.
So yeah, for an article claiming to be about/computer/ games it seems to be ignoring a big part of history.
Nah, don't worry about those things. None of those ever stopped anyone from making good music. And in a lot of ways you seem to overreact. You don't have to downsample your 24 bit track, you can upsample the 16 bit track. I mean, a lot of pop and electronic music is basicly made up of 16 or even 8 bit samples layered, often first going through analog and then back to digital conversion. And guess what, noone is whyning about that. In the end you will have to make it sound good, not the bit-depth.
As for effects, you don't need the material to be in 24 bits to enjoy better resolution plugins. Altho 24 bits does give you more headroom which makes recording and mixing easier. And of course all tools have at least a 32bit floating point internal bus so you always get the maximum quality out of any bitdepth material. For compressor plugins samplerate can be important. Since the plugin operates on the samples and the samples near nyquist rate don't acurately describe the waveform they become less precise for higher frequency trancients. But then you're talking very high end and noone will expect that from a home studio. And besides, if you use material from cd then the last thing you propably want is more compression.
Point is you propably have much much better tools and a much better possibility for a good sound then ever before. Use it.
"As a personal example, I had a friend named Xu. He kept complaining that I mispronounced his name."
I, for one, am able to perceive such small intonation differences in foreign languages due to a bug in my brain. All this is besides the auditory system and is much more related to understanding the intent of the sound. In your example, you are simply not looking for the right king of difference. If you were to take a recording of your pronounciation and compare that to a recording of your friends voice you would find numerous differences. There is a difference of pitch, there is a difference in how the sound resonates in your mouths etc,etc,etc. Now there is a slight difference somewhere and your friend puts some significance to that difference. You hear the same difference, you even perceive it but you do not understand that there is some significance to it.
So this is completely about putting significance in sounds and is not about perceiving sound as such. It is about understanding speech.
Since the body of ABX tests that shows people do not hear any difference between present and filtered ultrasound in music is much much larger that the body of theses guys we can safely assume that ultrasound frequencies, albeit maybe perceptable, have no significance whatsoever on listening to music.
Well, since there are loads of ABX tests available which show people do not hear a difference you can conclude that whatever this research tested for is not present in the music tested with in the ABX tests. So whatever they found is not related to music and should be considered off topic.
"Amateur musicians would like as high-sample rate audio as possibly, so that any down-mixing artefacts don't accumulate."
This is not a real problem.
Say you have 2 sources from cd.
The cd sampling system 16/44.1 has a noise floor of -96dbfs.
But to make these two sources fit the final bandwidth you would need to decrease levels on both files by about 6db.
This means that the noise floor of both files also gets reduced by 6db.
When mixed the noise floor/errors will indeed accumulate, but bcause both signals are lower in level the resulting noise floor will be around -96db again.
Same goes for mixing more sources.
There is no spoon.
"As the whole point of the article goes right over your head! You do not need any anti-aliasing."
That is not how a DA converter works.
What you hear comming out of a converter (in relation to audio reproduction) is per definition the anti-aliasing filter.
It is also called the reconstruction filter and it is an integral part of the conversion.
The filter is what actually 'draws' the waveform. Before that there are only guide-points for the filter, the samples.
The samples are thus NOT the actual waveform, they represent energy levels that, when filtered, result in the waveform.
At lower frquency signals you see a resemblence to the actual waveform in the samples but for frequencies nearer the niquist frequency you see that the samples start to look more erratic.
Still they are the exact perfect values to drive the filter into a periodic swing at the expected frequency and thus reproduce the samplig bandwith perfectly.
You cannot, as you say, forget about the filter when you sample at a higher frequency.
Aliases reflect off of the niquist frequency and back into the hearable spectrum so you're screwed.
You need to filter the input of a AD converter to make the signal fit the sampling rate and you need to filter the data as it is output from the converter to reconstruct the original signal.
That is how sampling works.
"The higher the sampling rate smoother the signal."
In fact, quit the opposite!
And in any normal DA converter the signal that is output is always smooth. There are never 'steps' or something like that. It is just not how DA conversion works.
The higher frequencies make the signal less smooth because you have more details.
But it doesn't matter since your ears will throw all that extra information away and you will hear the same smooth 15~20k range that all humans hear.
Also, an uncompressed version @192kHz would be more than 2x larger than a version @96kHz, so wth are you talking about it being indistinguishable?
Also(2), you have no way of knowing, as do all humans, wether you are deceiving yourself at listening unless you take precautions and do proper blind testing.
Our auditory system is wired directly to our expectaion center and when we try to perceive quality our expectations are a big driving force in perception. That is why we have all those audiophyle quacks. It is just some anatomical joke that has been played on us.
And if you want to compare it to 2D pictures this is how you should do it:
Take a picture or screen and put it at a distance where you no longer see individual pixels and everything is smooth (like retina display or something similar).
Consider this 44.1 or 48kHz in audio terms.
Then double the resolution in the picture or screen.
That would be equivalent to 96kHz.
Now try again at explainging why the second situation is somehow better.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, you and your fancy VGA's... :P
Demos are at least 10 years older than 1995.
"I'm not arguing that it's not the best of its class. I'm just aruging that it's not really a 64K demo."
You just have to make the switch and see the available system api's as hardware that you program against.
And then the whole trickbox approach becomes valid again.
Because you can do DX calls the 'normal' way or you can optimize the shit out of them and put more usefull code in the same space.
So while the actual things that you tinker with now are software interfaces for the perifferals as opposed to hardware you still get to be smart-ass and do cool stuff with the limitation.
For me, it is not so much about tickling hardware as it is about doing as much as possible in as little as possible space.
I mean, even a VGA interface is 'cheating' when compared to programming for the 2600's stella, and the 2600 needed serious tricks every time you wanted to show anything on screen, not just demos.
Every generation has to deal with a different set of platformity and each generation has to figure out what the challenge is for the available platforms.
Since 3D hardware is ubiquitous but highly complex and depending on drivers to actually work (the drivers are a big part of the actual design of those components) it's just natural to use the provided interface (the driver as opposed to the bus) to do your tricks on.
Apple is just agnostic about the whole deal.
MACs may and/or may not be PC's, period.
"Why the Java hate?"
Because running a Java app always reminds me that a similar program woud run just as well on a 5 year older computer when written in a native language?
I sometimes do things in Java , but there is always this nagging feeling in the back of my head that i'm somehow wasting a lot of energy and resources when running the code.
I will propably live in this limbo untill Java cpu's are common.
". Those requirements are *not* there when using skype or similar."
And quite frankly, most of the time there is no reason to have these requirements.
Besides, the available bandwidth on packet switched networks these days is much bigger then required for having a voice communication.
Telephone bitrate is somewhere around 64kbps which is insignificant in modern networks.
You could have about 16 simultaneous phone conversations with a symmetrical 1mbps connection.
Voice is trivial in most situations.
"They just gave you an Android smartphone for signing up"
They don't give you anything.
You pay more than retail price for that device through your monthly subscription.
All they do is provide very expensive credit that you can pay off over the contracts period.
", but if a God did create something to look 14 billion years old, then that's how old it would look despite our best testing."
But that would make the god a very childish one, for wanting to fool us this way.
And besides, we are then nothing but puppets for its ammusement, aren't we?
I mean, he had absolute power to design us like he wanted and yet he gives us black death and cancer and aids.
I mean, why all the needless suffering?
In DDR Germany the system tells you it is done well, and you don't need support...
"It doesn't even include a study of productivity."
We are talking about government here..
Funny thing. My version of google update does run in the background as a service.
I had to manually disable it.
Only to find out that running a google application would agressively reintroduce the service.
Untill i removed that too.
"Those obsolete components cost a lot more than newer ones. "
But to use the new ones you would need a brand new machine that you would have to pay for.
So what is cheaper, 1x obsolete expensive component or 1x new pc (includes the new component)?
Mind you, today's PC's are embarrassingly overpowered for office work.
There are generally very little tasks in an office that need faster computers.
I mean, doesn't anyone realize that flash adds in webpages have been the one of the bigger drivers of PC hardware sales in the past decade?
Obligatory reading:
https://xkcd.com/936/
"YMMV."
Yeah, and i think this is exactly why 3D will not become what manufacturers and conctent creators want it to become anytime soon.
You see, there are technical issues that are inherent to 3D scening.
I'm saying this because i created several 3D CG clips a month ago.
This experience tells me that 3D will prevent certain visual storytelling elements from existing, bringing down the whole medium.
Ultimately, 3D will always produce tangible aquariums where it is more difficult to imagine them representing big spaces because your spatial relation to the picture is very much defined.
With 2D you have to mentaly re-map the picture into a space and there a sense of scale is produced.
With 3D the scale depends on and is imposed by technical stuffs like screen size and prespective relations to the viewer.
So a movie designed for the theatre will impose a completely different spatial relation when viewed on a small screen.
That is less of a problem with CG as you can re-render the home version, but for real life movies this is, and will be, a problem.
"What is the obsession with 3D"
It's a realy realy neat trick..
"Just because you're antisocial and do not care about being on a social network..."
Wait, people who don't do social networks are anti-social?
Dang, that's a stupid thing to say... for various reasons.
Most JRPG games originated from the home computer scene in the middle 80s.
And when most PC users were blown away by the amazing color spectrum of CGA i was already enjoying paletted 15 bit colors.
These 'better than pc' graphics (don't worry, almost anything had better graphics than pc in those days) helped develop the style that would flourish in the SNES days.
Konami, Compile, Falcom, Square and Enix all were producing great and defining jrpg's in the 80s and some series continue untill this day.
So yeah, for an article claiming to be about /computer/ games it seems to be ignoring a big part of history.
Nah, don't worry about those things.
None of those ever stopped anyone from making good music.
And in a lot of ways you seem to overreact.
You don't have to downsample your 24 bit track, you can upsample the 16 bit track.
I mean, a lot of pop and electronic music is basicly made up of 16 or even 8 bit samples layered, often first going through analog and then back to digital conversion.
And guess what, noone is whyning about that.
In the end you will have to make it sound good, not the bit-depth.
As for effects, you don't need the material to be in 24 bits to enjoy better resolution plugins.
Altho 24 bits does give you more headroom which makes recording and mixing easier.
And of course all tools have at least a 32bit floating point internal bus so you always get the maximum quality out of any bitdepth material.
For compressor plugins samplerate can be important.
Since the plugin operates on the samples and the samples near nyquist rate don't acurately describe the waveform they become less precise for higher frequency trancients.
But then you're talking very high end and noone will expect that from a home studio.
And besides, if you use material from cd then the last thing you propably want is more compression.
Point is you propably have much much better tools and a much better possibility for a good sound then ever before.
Use it.
"As a personal example, I had a friend named Xu. He kept complaining that I mispronounced his name."
I, for one, am able to perceive such small intonation differences in foreign languages due to a bug in my brain.
All this is besides the auditory system and is much more related to understanding the intent of the sound.
In your example, you are simply not looking for the right king of difference.
If you were to take a recording of your pronounciation and compare that to a recording of your friends voice you would find numerous differences.
There is a difference of pitch, there is a difference in how the sound resonates in your mouths etc,etc,etc.
Now there is a slight difference somewhere and your friend puts some significance to that difference.
You hear the same difference, you even perceive it but you do not understand that there is some significance to it.
So this is completely about putting significance in sounds and is not about perceiving sound as such.
It is about understanding speech.
"Blind tests show that we perceive ultrasound: http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full [physiology.org] "
Since the body of ABX tests that shows people do not hear any difference between present and filtered ultrasound in music is much much larger that the body of theses guys we can safely assume that ultrasound frequencies, albeit maybe perceptable, have no significance whatsoever on listening to music.
Yes, diameter is king.
Well, since there are loads of ABX tests available which show people do not hear a difference you can conclude that whatever this research tested for is not present in the music tested with in the ABX tests.
So whatever they found is not related to music and should be considered off topic.
"Amateur musicians would like as high-sample rate audio as possibly, so that any down-mixing artefacts don't accumulate." This is not a real problem. Say you have 2 sources from cd. The cd sampling system 16/44.1 has a noise floor of -96dbfs. But to make these two sources fit the final bandwidth you would need to decrease levels on both files by about 6db. This means that the noise floor of both files also gets reduced by 6db. When mixed the noise floor/errors will indeed accumulate, but bcause both signals are lower in level the resulting noise floor will be around -96db again. Same goes for mixing more sources. There is no spoon.
Let's talk about the 24 bits. In audio terms that means a dynamic range of 140db or so. How it this even remotely usefull?
"As the whole point of the article goes right over your head! You do not need any anti-aliasing." That is not how a DA converter works. What you hear comming out of a converter (in relation to audio reproduction) is per definition the anti-aliasing filter. It is also called the reconstruction filter and it is an integral part of the conversion. The filter is what actually 'draws' the waveform. Before that there are only guide-points for the filter, the samples. The samples are thus NOT the actual waveform, they represent energy levels that, when filtered, result in the waveform. At lower frquency signals you see a resemblence to the actual waveform in the samples but for frequencies nearer the niquist frequency you see that the samples start to look more erratic. Still they are the exact perfect values to drive the filter into a periodic swing at the expected frequency and thus reproduce the samplig bandwith perfectly. You cannot, as you say, forget about the filter when you sample at a higher frequency. Aliases reflect off of the niquist frequency and back into the hearable spectrum so you're screwed. You need to filter the input of a AD converter to make the signal fit the sampling rate and you need to filter the data as it is output from the converter to reconstruct the original signal. That is how sampling works.
"The higher the sampling rate smoother the signal." In fact, quit the opposite! And in any normal DA converter the signal that is output is always smooth. There are never 'steps' or something like that. It is just not how DA conversion works. The higher frequencies make the signal less smooth because you have more details. But it doesn't matter since your ears will throw all that extra information away and you will hear the same smooth 15~20k range that all humans hear. Also, an uncompressed version @192kHz would be more than 2x larger than a version @96kHz, so wth are you talking about it being indistinguishable? Also(2), you have no way of knowing, as do all humans, wether you are deceiving yourself at listening unless you take precautions and do proper blind testing. Our auditory system is wired directly to our expectaion center and when we try to perceive quality our expectations are a big driving force in perception. That is why we have all those audiophyle quacks. It is just some anatomical joke that has been played on us. And if you want to compare it to 2D pictures this is how you should do it: Take a picture or screen and put it at a distance where you no longer see individual pixels and everything is smooth (like retina display or something similar). Consider this 44.1 or 48kHz in audio terms. Then double the resolution in the picture or screen. That would be equivalent to 96kHz. Now try again at explainging why the second situation is somehow better.