Or, instead of (or perhaps in addition to) being a dick, it's the fact that I can get a higher quality rip for less than $80, and they don't give me an option to not get a bunch of junk that I don't want but pay more for decent quality.
I suppose I'll have to stop frothing at the mouth now, but I still don't see what is so great about this. I mean, yeah, downloading is illegal, and unlike damn near everybody these days I actually support the artists I enjoy by both buying their albums and going to live shows, and usually getting the t-shirt too, but how, how, how does this beat the fact that I can go to Oink and get a lossless rip from the Vinyl, for free, and before they choose to let my cheap ass buy their album for $15 three months later? Whether it's moral or not, that's what they really have to compete with.
What I want is an instant download after purchase of properly tagged, properly mastered, lossless, DRM-free media. What they're offering for my money is a consistent high production value and ease of use instead of the crap you have to go through to try and find a decent rip online, not to mention maybe a notification of when they'll be doing a live show within 100 mi... for some reason it's almost impossible to get those notifications before tickets go on sale and you have to go to some auction site. At around $10 per album, I think they'd be offering a good value there, enough to make me never steal if I had the option to buy that. For people who like to have things, well, they already have you at their online store. They can sell actual CDs, LPs, SACDs, t-shirts, making of videos, etc., etc., etc.
Right, I'm pretentious because I claim that MP3s are an inferior format. I don't know what kind of weird jealousy or other emotions lead to you becoming hostile because I say that MP3 isn't as good as lossless, high dynamic range is better than next to no dynamic range, and unclipped is better than clipped, but I have a hunch that it's the fact that you don't hear any difference. Well, to make you feel better, I'm sure that you could hear the difference if you knew what to listen for and listened for it. In fact, you can even say that it's your choice to not listen for it, and try to turn that into some justification for why you're better than me instead of arguing the merits of a given distribution method or format.
Sure, I'm the troll, I'm the pretentious one, and the guy that turns his inability to take any criticism of his preferred format into a personal attack on me, yeah, he's the insightful one. This is ridiculous. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills that on Slashdot, of all fucking places, I'm being basically mobbed for not falling for bullshit, preferring the objectively better format, and yes, maybe being a little pretentious.
So sorry for paying attention to the music I listen to. I'm sure the band will be glad to hear that you tune them out so much while you're playing it that you don't even notice the glaring fucking flaws in production.
The music being good or not isn't the problem--I'm fairly certain I'll like it, and finding a preview is easy. The problem is the loudness war, and unfortunately it's almost impossible to find a CD that isn't a combatant, short of classical and jazz.
Number one, it isn't two CDs and two LPs, it's one album on CD, that exact same album on vinyl, and a CD of "extra songs". For the superfan that's great, and I like their music, but those songs usually turn out to be crap except for one or maybe two good ones. Certainly not enough to call it 2 CDs as if it had just as much value as the album you're actually trying to buy.
Number two, the digital download, unless it's vastly different than any other digital download, is next to worthless. MP3 even at its highest quality leaves audible artifacts and reduces bandwidth. I find it difficult to get excited about a format that sounds worse as my equipment gets better.
Three, saying that it's asinine to complain about the production quality of an album is, if not asinine, at least foolish. Perhaps you can't tell the difference between a great song mastered like shit and a great song mastered well, but I can, and I'm sick of the fact that people play through nothing but computer multimedia speakers with huge frequency gaps and overstated bass, or hundred-dollar iPod speaker packs that should cost $15 makes every album pressed these days into an over-compressed turdsicle sound when we have the technology to make it sound better than it ever has. Fact: They aren't compressing the shit out of their albums and clipping them because they like the sound. No-fucking-one likes that sound, no one on Earth, it's just not possible. They're doing it to make it sound "louder". That's it, and it's stupid and it makes great songs sound like shit.
Four, both you and the AC that replied to my other comment missed the fact that I do like their music. This alternative distribution, however, and possibly your fandom, has blinded you to the fact that they are not giving you any more value for what you're paying. They aren't giving you the ability to choose what to pay for your digital download, you've had that since Napster, and whether it's legal or not there's just too many people doing it to ever change the fact that the prices are out of their hands now. This box set is great for the superfan, but like any other box set it isn't worth nearly what you're paying for it. In making the digital download available and the box set, they've taken away the already existing option of a $15 just-plain-CD that there has long been an agreement is overpriced. At least overpriced at $15 is only $15, though.
Somehow I missed the details link. So, it comes with the 10-track album on CD and vinyl, a bonus disc of I guess b-sides/rarities/live, some artwork, and lyrics. So, other than what we usually expect, we get an extra CD with digital photographs.
Maybe for a "fan" thing, but speaking as at least somewhat of a fan, this is just insulting. But... less insulting than the usual RIAA crap, I guess. If there's a way to leave feedback I'll let them know I found a FLAC of the CD somewhere on the Internet and donated $10. Maybe I'll do $15 if I can find a good FLAC of the vinyl. Feh.
wtf? Radiohead being one of the bands whose albums I consistently listen to all the way through I was all about this, especially given that there would almost certainly be a higher-quality master on vinyl (due to its inability to participate in the loudness war), but $80 is crazy. If I knew for a fact that it was a fantastic master, with lots of dynamic range and absolutely no clipping I'd be willing to pay $40 for one of the two formats, but with no such guarantee--or any information at all for that matter--I can't imagine what makes this worth that price. Although I applaud basically giving away MP3s (because they're worthless), you can hardly call charging more than double price for a given media and then forcing us to buy two together getting it right.
If you get a "closed" response, that means something is answering for that IP. The ISP is unlikely to do this in the event of a takedown, they'll just cut access. Even if they didn't completely cut access and only disallow inbound, they still would more than likely drop the packet instead of returning ICMP port unreachable responses. SYN scans these days are rarely any more penetrating than a regular TCP connect(). If I had a remote box, I'd do my best to make sure it had some kind of connectivity even in single-user mode.
What about that makes you think the ISP closed it off? I don't see a comparison of TTLs from when it worked to when it didn't, and 99% of the ISPs out there, if they're going to close something off, aren't going to send icmp-port-unreachable, they're just going to drop the packet. If I were the non-alarmist type that was also willing to make completely unfounded guesses, I'd say it looks like the box had some problems and came up in a single-user style mode with TCP connectivity.
Not sure what's up with the clicking noise, although you can probably correct that with a pre-amp adjustment (pretty sure I saw that option). The nowhere near as pretty is from using the un-themed version--mine looks very pretty indeed, and I can change it when the mood strikes me.
As for the rest of it, hopefully it improves someday soon. And yes, that would be incredible for a manufacturer to do, and they'd get my money over and over again.
As soon as they call a cease-fire in the loudness war, I'll start buying mainstream media again. Until then, I'm stuck paying twice as much for the rare releases on SACD/DVD-A/vinyl. Even then you have to be careful because sometimes you'll end up with basically a rip from a CD onto a hi-def format. And I still regularly buy CDs that were mixed pre-2000. Even a -9 dB RMS isn't horrible, as long as it's not clipped.
Beyond that, I'll never buy a lossy format now that lossless exists. We have the bandwidth, we have the space. That shit should be give-aways. If I have to spend a couple hours to get the track into a somewhat tenable state, I'm not paying. Until they offer something I'm willing to pay for, I'm going to keep stealing, as much as possible, while still supporting my preferred formats. I hope they're right about MP3s killing CD sales. The idea of the recording industry eating itself amuses me to no end, after they nearly convinced me that I don't like music anymore with their fatiguing, over-compressed, horribly clipped masters. That said, I'll gladly pay for well-mastered music. Provided I actually like it of course. Nothing against indie bands, but I generally prefer more polished music, and the few places you can find lossless DRM-free downloads is, well, just not the music I'm looking for.
Get something that's well-supported by Rockbox. I converted my 1st gen Nano over a week ago and I'm never going back. No question, even with the reduced battery life (on the Nano--they haven't optimized battery life there yet, but generally end up beating the OEM--sometimes up to twice as much) it's head and shoulders above any MP3 player on the market in terms of ease of use, formats supported, "extras", and even sound quality (the crossfeed option is amazing). There are even simulators so you can "try before you buy".
Projects like this are why I'm an open-source zealot. You will never see anything like Rockbox in the closed world.
Agreed, as nice as it is that it moves quickly, it looks like it's sparse because not a lot of effort was put into it, i.e. illegitimate somehow. Also, I'd like to browse through their catalog by artist, but it's just a random jumble with no option to sort the list. I'll pass.
It's pretty much inevitable at this point. Lead developer looks like an ass because of an overblown headline on a site with over 100,000 visitors a day who are known for not reading the article, which is the only thing that shows that it's Slashdot that's screwed up. Somebody is going to fork it. Later, they'll realize they overreacted to an overreaction, but have a lame justification for their position and continue anyway, before eventually falling dead after pulling a few developers away from WP.
It's very interesting, because whenever I run unit tests, even more important than randomized testing is the edge cases. In this case, the numbers they should be running through all their functions would be (for short) -65536 -65535 -257 -256 -255 -2 -1 0 1 254 255 256 65534 65535. That right there catches 95% of the errors for the standard operations (+,-,*,/). I couldn't imagine not running those tests for a numeric library. It's just.... stupid.
To go from 65535 to 100000... I dunno. Maybe a weird string conversion error? I can't see it be a casting error of any sort, 100000 just isn't a number that's naturally represented on a computer in any way.
Actually, if I had to guess, I'd say rounding error combined with overflow, or maybe negative numbers. abs(-65536 * -1) = 1. Substitute * for/, or 100000 for 0.000001... who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, instead of (or perhaps in addition to) being a dick, it's the fact that I can get a higher quality rip for less than $80, and they don't give me an option to not get a bunch of junk that I don't want but pay more for decent quality.
Well. That's better.
I suppose I'll have to stop frothing at the mouth now, but I still don't see what is so great about this. I mean, yeah, downloading is illegal, and unlike damn near everybody these days I actually support the artists I enjoy by both buying their albums and going to live shows, and usually getting the t-shirt too, but how, how, how does this beat the fact that I can go to Oink and get a lossless rip from the Vinyl, for free, and before they choose to let my cheap ass buy their album for $15 three months later? Whether it's moral or not, that's what they really have to compete with.
What I want is an instant download after purchase of properly tagged, properly mastered, lossless, DRM-free media. What they're offering for my money is a consistent high production value and ease of use instead of the crap you have to go through to try and find a decent rip online, not to mention maybe a notification of when they'll be doing a live show within 100 mi... for some reason it's almost impossible to get those notifications before tickets go on sale and you have to go to some auction site. At around $10 per album, I think they'd be offering a good value there, enough to make me never steal if I had the option to buy that. For people who like to have things, well, they already have you at their online store. They can sell actual CDs, LPs, SACDs, t-shirts, making of videos, etc., etc., etc.
Right, I'm pretentious because I claim that MP3s are an inferior format. I don't know what kind of weird jealousy or other emotions lead to you becoming hostile because I say that MP3 isn't as good as lossless, high dynamic range is better than next to no dynamic range, and unclipped is better than clipped, but I have a hunch that it's the fact that you don't hear any difference. Well, to make you feel better, I'm sure that you could hear the difference if you knew what to listen for and listened for it. In fact, you can even say that it's your choice to not listen for it, and try to turn that into some justification for why you're better than me instead of arguing the merits of a given distribution method or format.
Sure, I'm the troll, I'm the pretentious one, and the guy that turns his inability to take any criticism of his preferred format into a personal attack on me, yeah, he's the insightful one. This is ridiculous. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills that on Slashdot, of all fucking places, I'm being basically mobbed for not falling for bullshit, preferring the objectively better format, and yes, maybe being a little pretentious.
So sorry for paying attention to the music I listen to. I'm sure the band will be glad to hear that you tune them out so much while you're playing it that you don't even notice the glaring fucking flaws in production.
The music being good or not isn't the problem--I'm fairly certain I'll like it, and finding a preview is easy. The problem is the loudness war, and unfortunately it's almost impossible to find a CD that isn't a combatant, short of classical and jazz.
Number one, it isn't two CDs and two LPs, it's one album on CD, that exact same album on vinyl, and a CD of "extra songs". For the superfan that's great, and I like their music, but those songs usually turn out to be crap except for one or maybe two good ones. Certainly not enough to call it 2 CDs as if it had just as much value as the album you're actually trying to buy.
Number two, the digital download, unless it's vastly different than any other digital download, is next to worthless. MP3 even at its highest quality leaves audible artifacts and reduces bandwidth. I find it difficult to get excited about a format that sounds worse as my equipment gets better.
Three, saying that it's asinine to complain about the production quality of an album is, if not asinine, at least foolish. Perhaps you can't tell the difference between a great song mastered like shit and a great song mastered well, but I can, and I'm sick of the fact that people play through nothing but computer multimedia speakers with huge frequency gaps and overstated bass, or hundred-dollar iPod speaker packs that should cost $15 makes every album pressed these days into an over-compressed turdsicle sound when we have the technology to make it sound better than it ever has. Fact: They aren't compressing the shit out of their albums and clipping them because they like the sound. No-fucking-one likes that sound, no one on Earth, it's just not possible. They're doing it to make it sound "louder". That's it, and it's stupid and it makes great songs sound like shit.
Four, both you and the AC that replied to my other comment missed the fact that I do like their music. This alternative distribution, however, and possibly your fandom, has blinded you to the fact that they are not giving you any more value for what you're paying. They aren't giving you the ability to choose what to pay for your digital download, you've had that since Napster, and whether it's legal or not there's just too many people doing it to ever change the fact that the prices are out of their hands now. This box set is great for the superfan, but like any other box set it isn't worth nearly what you're paying for it. In making the digital download available and the box set, they've taken away the already existing option of a $15 just-plain-CD that there has long been an agreement is overpriced. At least overpriced at $15 is only $15, though.
Ahahahahaha! Ahaha! HAHAHAHAHA!
*snicker* ... *snort*
BUAHAHAHAHAHAAAAaaaaaahhhhh! Oh God ... ahahahaha.
haha... ha... phwew... Hoo, boy, that was a good one. *wipes tear*
TH#EE CHEE## F## #HE L##DNE## #A#!
(*i am yelling you stupid lameness filter*)
Somehow I missed the details link. So, it comes with the 10-track album on CD and vinyl, a bonus disc of I guess b-sides/rarities/live, some artwork, and lyrics. So, other than what we usually expect, we get an extra CD with digital photographs.
Maybe for a "fan" thing, but speaking as at least somewhat of a fan, this is just insulting. But... less insulting than the usual RIAA crap, I guess. If there's a way to leave feedback I'll let them know I found a FLAC of the CD somewhere on the Internet and donated $10. Maybe I'll do $15 if I can find a good FLAC of the vinyl. Feh.
wtf? Radiohead being one of the bands whose albums I consistently listen to all the way through I was all about this, especially given that there would almost certainly be a higher-quality master on vinyl (due to its inability to participate in the loudness war), but $80 is crazy. If I knew for a fact that it was a fantastic master, with lots of dynamic range and absolutely no clipping I'd be willing to pay $40 for one of the two formats, but with no such guarantee--or any information at all for that matter--I can't imagine what makes this worth that price. Although I applaud basically giving away MP3s (because they're worthless), you can hardly call charging more than double price for a given media and then forcing us to buy two together getting it right.
Yup. This is going to be a debacle, provided they actually have someone socially skilled enough to make it happen.
They don't call 'em sorostitutes for nothing.
Yes, but then if you end up as a couple, your meeting story is that you met at a fucking Richard Marx concert.
If you get a "closed" response, that means something is answering for that IP. The ISP is unlikely to do this in the event of a takedown, they'll just cut access. Even if they didn't completely cut access and only disallow inbound, they still would more than likely drop the packet instead of returning ICMP port unreachable responses. SYN scans these days are rarely any more penetrating than a regular TCP connect(). If I had a remote box, I'd do my best to make sure it had some kind of connectivity even in single-user mode.
What about that makes you think the ISP closed it off? I don't see a comparison of TTLs from when it worked to when it didn't, and 99% of the ISPs out there, if they're going to close something off, aren't going to send icmp-port-unreachable, they're just going to drop the packet. If I were the non-alarmist type that was also willing to make completely unfounded guesses, I'd say it looks like the box had some problems and came up in a single-user style mode with TCP connectivity.
Not sure what's up with the clicking noise, although you can probably correct that with a pre-amp adjustment (pretty sure I saw that option). The nowhere near as pretty is from using the un-themed version--mine looks very pretty indeed, and I can change it when the mood strikes me.
As for the rest of it, hopefully it improves someday soon. And yes, that would be incredible for a manufacturer to do, and they'd get my money over and over again.
I bet.
As soon as they call a cease-fire in the loudness war, I'll start buying mainstream media again. Until then, I'm stuck paying twice as much for the rare releases on SACD/DVD-A/vinyl. Even then you have to be careful because sometimes you'll end up with basically a rip from a CD onto a hi-def format. And I still regularly buy CDs that were mixed pre-2000. Even a -9 dB RMS isn't horrible, as long as it's not clipped.
Beyond that, I'll never buy a lossy format now that lossless exists. We have the bandwidth, we have the space. That shit should be give-aways. If I have to spend a couple hours to get the track into a somewhat tenable state, I'm not paying. Until they offer something I'm willing to pay for, I'm going to keep stealing, as much as possible, while still supporting my preferred formats. I hope they're right about MP3s killing CD sales. The idea of the recording industry eating itself amuses me to no end, after they nearly convinced me that I don't like music anymore with their fatiguing, over-compressed, horribly clipped masters. That said, I'll gladly pay for well-mastered music. Provided I actually like it of course. Nothing against indie bands, but I generally prefer more polished music, and the few places you can find lossless DRM-free downloads is, well, just not the music I'm looking for.
Get something that's well-supported by Rockbox. I converted my 1st gen Nano over a week ago and I'm never going back. No question, even with the reduced battery life (on the Nano--they haven't optimized battery life there yet, but generally end up beating the OEM--sometimes up to twice as much) it's head and shoulders above any MP3 player on the market in terms of ease of use, formats supported, "extras", and even sound quality (the crossfeed option is amazing). There are even simulators so you can "try before you buy".
Projects like this are why I'm an open-source zealot. You will never see anything like Rockbox in the closed world.
Agreed, as nice as it is that it moves quickly, it looks like it's sparse because not a lot of effort was put into it, i.e. illegitimate somehow. Also, I'd like to browse through their catalog by artist, but it's just a random jumble with no option to sort the list. I'll pass.
It's pretty much inevitable at this point. Lead developer looks like an ass because of an overblown headline on a site with over 100,000 visitors a day who are known for not reading the article, which is the only thing that shows that it's Slashdot that's screwed up. Somebody is going to fork it. Later, they'll realize they overreacted to an overreaction, but have a lame justification for their position and continue anyway, before eventually falling dead after pulling a few developers away from WP.
Anything for the ability for me to pilot Ryu Hayabusa through a killing spree over a few MMORPGs.
Yeah! And can't a crackhead just admire your car stereo?
It's very interesting, because whenever I run unit tests, even more important than randomized testing is the edge cases. In this case, the numbers they should be running through all their functions would be (for short) -65536 -65535 -257 -256 -255 -2 -1 0 1 254 255 256 65534 65535. That right there catches 95% of the errors for the standard operations (+,-,*,/). I couldn't imagine not running those tests for a numeric library. It's just .... stupid.
To go from 65535 to 100000 ... I dunno. Maybe a weird string conversion error? I can't see it be a casting error of any sort, 100000 just isn't a number that's naturally represented on a computer in any way.
Actually, if I had to guess, I'd say rounding error combined with overflow, or maybe negative numbers. abs(-65536 * -1) = 1. Substitute * for /, or 100000 for 0.000001... who knows.