09 Nov 2006
Appears to work by dragging down everything a great deal. I presume this is to prevent anything clipping (down is better than up, use system wave and master faders to make it loud again if you must) but don’t really understand how it gauged the best performance point: it levelled volume way too quickly to have indexed levels in the entire library. Maybe it’s a progressive thing, or maybe the data was kept even before the feature was enabled (if, in fact, that is the way this is being performed).
I would be interested to know, because regardless as to how it works exactly, their levelling kind of sucks. I’ll admit I haven’t used a library programme to manage my music for a while, but seem to recall things on Linux being that much more consistent. That was before I tottered off to CD land several months back (long story, involving a missing road case and a messy office… things still aren’t quite back to normal, that’s one of my summer projects), where you’re expected to flip the volume control backwards and forwards with alarming regularity. I don’t know if this problem would be any less prevalent if I didn’t have such a smattered collection of tracks from different genres… one would think that, in the same way all pop is mixed to sound identical, surely it would be mastered in a similarly stereotypical fashion. Or perhaps not.
09 Nov 2006
It has this way of forgetting stupid mistakes that indexed, online things cannot. Or, can, but do not. Or something. You can’t convincingly scrunch up and get rid of a file, but things that make you cringe on a piece of dead tree are far more readily disposed of. Electronically, there’s always this sense of “what if getting rid of this breaks something else that refers to it?” — paper has no concrete chronology, which is wonderful. I never understood people dating their letters, unless they fully anticipate getting the letters of [name] published and/or are trying to pretend that something only arrived late because of the postal service. We place far too much emphasis on intervals at times.
07 Nov 2006
I was on a blog I (used to) run that uses WordPress 2.x today, and noticed the 2.0.5 release announcement.
Opening copy runs like this:
It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes.
I skim read it, as I tend to skim-read things on the Internet or when sitting reading with someone (do you do that? reading as a competitive sport? When I’m in those scenarios I read things by making multiple passes over the content and developing what I actually comprehend each time, just so I’ve read it all if they have… stupid, yeah), and on second pass saw “vulnerable” in the first line.
It might have been the “upgrade or get haxx0red” warning at the end of the second sentence (which, incidentally, has an absurd number of clauses in it for product release text) that made my glance at the word “venerable” distort somewhat, or maybe not. Maybe some signs are just a little to close to other signs to be safely used as signifiers in certain contexts. This, I would suggest, is one such context.
(There we go, a little bit of Saussure to brighten up your evenings, if not my day. Death to functional grammar and pseudo-linguistics courses engaged in guerrilla warfare within English departments. We need a Third Force.)
07 Nov 2006
I said yesterday that I’m a fan of what Microsoft have been doing of late and Slashdotters are idiots. One reason for that is IE7, as that post discussed, but in terms of what other things Microsoft have been doing I didn’t really mention anything. Well, one new Microsoft product that does immensely sensible things is Live Messenger 8.1 Beta (see, I didn’t call it MSN anymore!) which finally lets you appear offline and continue conversations without having to close windows… it’s a polish release, and feels good.
More significantly, though, is Windows Media Player 11. It’s got a new interface, plenty of usability tweaks, a bunch of music store enhancements (eugh, sorry, I can’t be positive about this one) — notably URGE — and probably more DRM to go along with it, and an even-better-than-version-10 CD-ripping interface.
It’s designed as a one-click process, but makes selection of format, bitrate, etc. completely quick, easy, and painless.
It’s great.
My only qualm is that it’s impossible to select any other format than the ones originally presented. Sure, this is a Microsoft product and it’s targeted at computer-illiterate types the world over and having an “add your own command-line encoding option” option probably isn’t great from a usability for all perspective, but what’s wrong with having the option there? I’m not going to rip my music in a DRM format, ever.1 It’s just not going to happen. I’ll sooner be stuck listening to CDs and scratching them to death and then buying new ones. You already give me the option to rip an MP3, so why not other formats you can’t control?
The only reason I can come up with is that other, competing, formats are technically superior. You feel threatened by FLAC (were it to become widely adopted) as it is superior to WM Lossless… probably because it lacks DRM. Justifiably, you don’t feel so threatened by MP3 as it is, in general, inferior in every way (except it lacks DRM) — even though it has massive penetration.
Even that penetration is slipping because people don’t change defaults and are ripping their music using Windows Media Player or iTunes. So, you know, there’s less to be lost by letting the geeks play with their zany open source formats. The proles will never actually know or care enough to embrace them, you keep your control, and an underclass (or silent ruling class?) benefits and is endeared towards your brand. And, of course, geeks are vocal about products: I love Windows Media Player 11, but this little thing really gets to me. If you give me that, then I will be so happy with it I’ll be constantly trying to convert iTunes users — admittedly, I’ll probably fail because their collections are under proprietary lock and key and their hardware has bound them to it, but in a couple of years when their iPod batteries die they’ll see the error of their ways.
Geeks will too readily prostitute themselves and become product evangelists — but, beware, we are notoriously given to infidelity.
1. I will, however, rip my music in non-rights manage formats and let software convert it as necessary for playback on retarded hardware devices. I haven’t required hardware that has such draconian requirements yet, but if I ever do, this will be the closest I get to compromising.
07 Nov 2006
They’re trying to raise a bit over half a million dollars from listener (member) contributions. It’s probably not the way I’d do things but then… well, I’m trying to get money for web properties instead, and don’t have a reach of 200,000 people a week like they do (yet :-)). Their other fundraising models (fee-for-promo) are great — though probably very common in commercial radio, only FBi are open about it and have to count it as part of their four-minutes-per-hour commercial content under their broadcast license — and I’ve appropriated it for use in other contexts… funny how MSM and Internet media can overlap.