Heck, I'd be happy if Mario Kart Wii got a patch so the steering wheel would be as accurate/responsive as the nunchuck for steering.
Boy do I second that. My wife took a week to stop playing with the wheel (she didn't believe me at first that it was significantly more sluggish than the nunchuck). I think she would be happy to go back to using it as the novelty was part of the fun for her.
It isn't the soundcards that do this per se, it's the drivers that do it because the cards often only have a single fixed clockrate & bit-depth at the dac. AC/97 started that trend with the 48khz & src (samplerate conversion) algorithm being fixed in by the spec, though most onboard Azalia/Realtek chips have moved beyond that iirc.
I have some issues running synergy on a machine with more than 1 core/cpu. Sure would be nice if it was tuned & recompiled for the modern era. Otherwise I happen to agree on that particular app, I use it daily (even with the copy buffer desynch issue and the occasional other bugs).
The copies that you 'found' somewhere have travelled long & far from where they would have been pushed via mainstream "music industry" backed means, meaning that as a promotional mechanism new frontiers have been found. You now know about "Radio One" and might google it and tune in via the internet, you might also search out more mixes by those D&B artists or even search out some of the individual tracks in the mixes. You might not also, but getting those files to you from the 'copy of the broadcast" cost Radio One and the artists represented nothing once it was recorded by the end user. Certainly they gained nothing *yet* at that point either, but since there was no cost *to Radio One* to get the music to you it's still balanced in theory.
In practice the interests that dominate the industry perceive every digital copy as a 'loss' in the same way that allowing the public to have access to analog recording means was once considered a loss by them. And meanwhile terrestrial radio is stagnating to the point of being 'muzak' that you will replace with what you are 'really into' any chance you're given. Incidental to this is the fact that Radio One also still broadcasts online in a lower bitrate crappy realaudio stream for most of these programs, even as the BBC is attempting to pioneer broadband television.
Now let's discuss the 'no loss' in an mp3 recorded from that FM broadcast on Radio One 10 years ago (I'm not sure if they had DAB yet then, more on that in a second).. Certainly any FM transmission is not 'pure' but subject to some level of interference, crosstalk and distortion from EMF fluctions around it and flaws in the transmission & recieving devices. Then it must be 'digitized' which is quite often done with $0.50 ADC and crappy op amp, hideously innaccurate digital clock run into a cheap soundcard which is cpu bound and has 0 shielding on its line input. Some of the even cheaper computers double up the Line In and Mic In and simply attentuate the signal with a switch when you choose Line In. Hardly the paragon of transparent recording devices, and yes this includes almost all of the computer soundcards shipping to the non-pro audio sector back then. Turtle Beach and the AWE64 Gold were a bit better but still nothing that could be called 'perfect' or better than your Boom Box's tape deck.
That was 10 years ago... These days Radio One is broadcast via digital radio in the UK called "DAB" and most of the sets I've seen 'floating around' online are ripped directly from this. DAB is encoded into AAC I believe, 128Kbit or so. I could be wrong as I only know of it through people I know in the UK. However here the industry again waves the 'perfect copy' flag, much like it does (did?) with Satellite radio here in the US. However consider that 128Kbit AAC isn't "perfect" to begin with, and has introduced loss of quality and distortions into the original recording.
Did I mention that DAB devices exhibit dropouts and digital 'glitching' on occasion and so the transmission & decoding process isn't 'perfect' either?
Now your mp3 version is a 'reencode' and that means that the audio was converted from AAC to mp3, and I suspect not in a single step. Many of the applications that inexperienced users would have would convert from the 32bit AAC format to a PCM encoded format (WAV or AIFF) which may truncate things to 16bit, with or without dither (even with it's probably only TPDF which is used during the mixing stage and is NOT a 'mastering' quality and weighted dither). Then it gets encoded back mp3 to reach you. Users who don't know about Replaygain may even accidentally clip the data if it was already normalized to 0dBf before encoding to AAC. For Radio One over DAB it's more likely to be normalized to -0.3dBf after being heavily squashed dynamically (see the discussion on dynamics compression yesterday) and so a bit less likely, but it still happens.
In any case assume an ideal transcode from AAC to mp3 by an experienced user with a decent app
CDs are heavily filtered above 16KHz-18KHz to avoid digital aliasing and this affects the sound. It's why musicians say that vinyl sounds better.
Actually most vinyl masters are typically filtered above 12-16KHz (depending on the mastering engineer and the cutting depth, the number to be run from each master plate, etc) as well. In fact Vinyl's low end is also 'rolled off', and then put through a filtering process twice (known as the RIAA curve) to insure that the low frequencies are attenuated on the vinyl plate then restored on playback.
I would say that vinyl and analogue recording mediums in general tend to 'gel' the sounds together into a cohesive whole, while digital mixing and reproduction systems (CD for instance) tend to retain the separation between sounds and in some cases even increase this separation. Part of this is the drastically reduced noisefloor in digital systems (the higher noisefloor in vinyl playback would be considered to have a "masking effect" on things the ear might otherwise hear for instance) and part of it is due to the way Tape and analogue circuitry tends to have a compression effect on the dynamics of the overall waveform. Compression in this case means reduction of transients rather than loss of 'bit' data.
There are other aspects to this discussion that the article completely ignores as well, such as the rediculous overuse of dynamic compression & limiting in modern commercial music, the fact that Pro Tools and modern systems are often used to simply 'fix' poor performance which (imo) still translates into a more lackluster product than one where the artist(s) got it 'right' in a single or a few takes, with little or no need for editing. Also note that Wav & Aiff are simply two different ways to store audio, one popularized by Windoze the other by Mac. Either format is perfectly suited to storing whatever data you have present in a variety of encodings, samplerates and bit-depths.
The RIAA was lawyers back then as well. The reason that the phono preamp filter/eq has the name 'RIAA curve' is because they PATENTED it and used it to control who had access to recording technology able to cut vinyl using their patent. There were several successful recording studios in Texas and Louisiana who recorded some well known Jazz artists due to the 'Hollywood effect'. Ie, they were far enough away from the upper East Coast that they were able to avoid the long arm of the RIAA and so artists would go there to get recorded when they couldn't in NYC or surrounding areas.
Sounds like an apt forerunner of the RIAA we know today...
Everyone knows that pbrush.exe is not secure at all and using it will eventually lead to your home being covered by all kinds of unwanted tagging. If you're not skilled at coding the necessary painting routines in Python (which is more elegant because it will generate all paint on the fly) then you really should be using the Gimp for your everyday painting needs.
There is freeware for imaging on Windows as well. All the tools you need are actually included on your install disk for XP (or 2k3) but unless you have an msdn subscription you'll have to use something like BartPE to create the bootable diagnostic CD for you. I prefer BartPE anyway, and used in conjunction with DriveImage XL you have a completely free solution to image, repair & administrate any Windows XP or 2003 machine. DriveImage XL can even backup & restore files that are in use I believe. I would expect Vista support to come eventually as well for both tools.
I still use Acronis sometimes in situations where I don't need as robust a solution (ie, something quick & easy) but I highly recommend the above tools to anyone who needs them.
For slipstreaming custom install scripts & configurations for Windows Xp (going beyond just updates & service pack rollups) you've got a nice little tool called NLite.
Also the makers of DriveImage XL have GetDataBack which is a wonderful little tool (the NTFS version is expecially successful at recovering from accidental formats etc), although non-free.
I suspect every major OS with a decent userbase & enough developers has plenty of comparable tools. Your familiarity with the tools is probably just proportional to your familiarity with your OS's.
It doesn't cost a cd if you burn to an image then mount the image & rip from that, and the overall process is a LOT faster than cdr/dvdr speeds.
However something that people are failing to mention (or perhaps aren't concerned about) is that even digital -> digital copies here will be lossy. Not because of any flaw in the digital copyies, but because iTunes quality AAC is still already lossy, and converting to pcm audio or red book audio then to another 'lossy' format (mp3) gives you more loss. Now the amount of additional aliasing & 'ringing' etc. may not be audible to most people as an above post alludes to (used to 128k rips? Have those bad*ss 'multimedia surround sound' speakers you spent $45 on?) but that doesn't mean it doesn't occur.
That's adjusting only for inflation. Adjust for the fact that these technologies would have been extreme fringe R&D projects back then and I suspect you'll find the PS3 would have been cost-effective only for black budget pentagon uses and Bill Gate's wall art.
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Heck, I'd be happy if Mario Kart Wii got a patch so the steering wheel would be as accurate/responsive as the nunchuck for steering.
Boy do I second that. My wife took a week to stop playing with the wheel (she didn't believe me at first that it was significantly more sluggish than the nunchuck). I think she would be happy to go back to using it as the novelty was part of the fun for her.
It isn't the soundcards that do this per se, it's the drivers that do it because the cards often only have a single fixed clockrate & bit-depth at the dac. AC/97 started that trend with the 48khz & src (samplerate conversion) algorithm being fixed in by the spec, though most onboard Azalia/Realtek chips have moved beyond that iirc.
I have some issues running synergy on a machine with more than 1 core/cpu. Sure would be nice if it was tuned & recompiled for the modern era. Otherwise I happen to agree on that particular app, I use it daily (even with the copy buffer desynch issue and the occasional other bugs).
The copies that you 'found' somewhere have travelled long & far from where they would have been pushed via mainstream "music industry" backed means, meaning that as a promotional mechanism new frontiers have been found. You now know about "Radio One" and might google it and tune in via the internet, you might also search out more mixes by those D&B artists or even search out some of the individual tracks in the mixes. You might not also, but getting those files to you from the 'copy of the broadcast" cost Radio One and the artists represented nothing once it was recorded by the end user. Certainly they gained nothing *yet* at that point either, but since there was no cost *to Radio One* to get the music to you it's still balanced in theory. In practice the interests that dominate the industry perceive every digital copy as a 'loss' in the same way that allowing the public to have access to analog recording means was once considered a loss by them. And meanwhile terrestrial radio is stagnating to the point of being 'muzak' that you will replace with what you are 'really into' any chance you're given. Incidental to this is the fact that Radio One also still broadcasts online in a lower bitrate crappy realaudio stream for most of these programs, even as the BBC is attempting to pioneer broadband television.
Now let's discuss the 'no loss' in an mp3 recorded from that FM broadcast on Radio One 10 years ago (I'm not sure if they had DAB yet then, more on that in a second).. Certainly any FM transmission is not 'pure' but subject to some level of interference, crosstalk and distortion from EMF fluctions around it and flaws in the transmission & recieving devices. Then it must be 'digitized' which is quite often done with $0.50 ADC and crappy op amp, hideously innaccurate digital clock run into a cheap soundcard which is cpu bound and has 0 shielding on its line input. Some of the even cheaper computers double up the Line In and Mic In and simply attentuate the signal with a switch when you choose Line In. Hardly the paragon of transparent recording devices, and yes this includes almost all of the computer soundcards shipping to the non-pro audio sector back then. Turtle Beach and the AWE64 Gold were a bit better but still nothing that could be called 'perfect' or better than your Boom Box's tape deck.
That was 10 years ago... These days Radio One is broadcast via digital radio in the UK called "DAB" and most of the sets I've seen 'floating around' online are ripped directly from this. DAB is encoded into AAC I believe, 128Kbit or so. I could be wrong as I only know of it through people I know in the UK. However here the industry again waves the 'perfect copy' flag, much like it does (did?) with Satellite radio here in the US. However consider that 128Kbit AAC isn't "perfect" to begin with, and has introduced loss of quality and distortions into the original recording.
Did I mention that DAB devices exhibit dropouts and digital 'glitching' on occasion and so the transmission & decoding process isn't 'perfect' either?
Now your mp3 version is a 'reencode' and that means that the audio was converted from AAC to mp3, and I suspect not in a single step. Many of the applications that inexperienced users would have would convert from the 32bit AAC format to a PCM encoded format (WAV or AIFF) which may truncate things to 16bit, with or without dither (even with it's probably only TPDF which is used during the mixing stage and is NOT a 'mastering' quality and weighted dither). Then it gets encoded back mp3 to reach you. Users who don't know about Replaygain may even accidentally clip the data if it was already normalized to 0dBf before encoding to AAC. For Radio One over DAB it's more likely to be normalized to -0.3dBf after being heavily squashed dynamically (see the discussion on dynamics compression yesterday) and so a bit less likely, but it still happens.
In any case assume an ideal transcode from AAC to mp3 by an experienced user with a decent app
The RIAA was lawyers back then as well. The reason that the phono preamp filter/eq has the name 'RIAA curve' is because they PATENTED it and used it to control who had access to recording technology able to cut vinyl using their patent. There were several successful recording studios in Texas and Louisiana who recorded some well known Jazz artists due to the 'Hollywood effect'. Ie, they were far enough away from the upper East Coast that they were able to avoid the long arm of the RIAA and so artists would go there to get recorded when they couldn't in NYC or surrounding areas.
Sounds like an apt forerunner of the RIAA we know today...
Everyone knows that pbrush.exe is not secure at all and using it will eventually lead to your home being covered by all kinds of unwanted tagging. If you're not skilled at coding the necessary painting routines in Python (which is more elegant because it will generate all paint on the fly) then you really should be using the Gimp for your everyday painting needs.
There is freeware for imaging on Windows as well. All the tools you need are actually included on your install disk for XP (or 2k3) but unless you have an msdn subscription you'll have to use something like BartPE to create the bootable diagnostic CD for you. I prefer BartPE anyway, and used in conjunction with DriveImage XL you have a completely free solution to image, repair & administrate any Windows XP or 2003 machine. DriveImage XL can even backup & restore files that are in use I believe. I would expect Vista support to come eventually as well for both tools. I still use Acronis sometimes in situations where I don't need as robust a solution (ie, something quick & easy) but I highly recommend the above tools to anyone who needs them. For slipstreaming custom install scripts & configurations for Windows Xp (going beyond just updates & service pack rollups) you've got a nice little tool called NLite. Also the makers of DriveImage XL have GetDataBack which is a wonderful little tool (the NTFS version is expecially successful at recovering from accidental formats etc), although non-free. I suspect every major OS with a decent userbase & enough developers has plenty of comparable tools. Your familiarity with the tools is probably just proportional to your familiarity with your OS's.
It doesn't cost a cd if you burn to an image then mount the image & rip from that, and the overall process is a LOT faster than cdr/dvdr speeds. However something that people are failing to mention (or perhaps aren't concerned about) is that even digital -> digital copies here will be lossy. Not because of any flaw in the digital copyies, but because iTunes quality AAC is still already lossy, and converting to pcm audio or red book audio then to another 'lossy' format (mp3) gives you more loss. Now the amount of additional aliasing & 'ringing' etc. may not be audible to most people as an above post alludes to (used to 128k rips? Have those bad*ss 'multimedia surround sound' speakers you spent $45 on?) but that doesn't mean it doesn't occur.
That's adjusting only for inflation. Adjust for the fact that these technologies would have been extreme fringe R&D projects back then and I suspect you'll find the PS3 would have been cost-effective only for black budget pentagon uses and Bill Gate's wall art.