Stripey

OMG WTF!

hollywood releases massively hyped film based on boring, played out 1940s comic book franchise in an attempt to squeeze every last fucking penny out of it in lieu of actually funding creative, original, interesting films, and millions of sheeple obligingly flock to the cinemas to pay to watch it.

nothing to see here folks, run along now but mind you don't step on the corpses of the tossers who went to see Ironman and died of coke and popcorn poisoning on your way out.

another good quote

Please excuse the rant, one of my disparate jobs is that I am Dizzee Rascal's production manager.

For those of you who aren't familiar with him, he is a UK hip-hop star whose most recent release is presently at No.1 in the singles charts, where it has been since its release at the beginning of the month. We entered the charts on download sales alone (physical unit sales are dead). It is fair to assume that a trend in retail purchases of media will be shadowed by a similar trend in illegal downloading of the same media. It is accurate to say that, so far this month, more people in the UK are buying Dizzee's record than any other. Therefore I can infer that there are a significant number of illegal downloads of the song taking place - it's not unreasonable to suggest perhaps more than any other chart single.

Dizzee is a self-made artist by anyone's definition. He has not had major label backing at any point in his career and this release is on his own label (Dirtee Stank Recordings).

He is creating wealth, jobs, tax revenue and all the other things beloved of the government when making speeches about "small British businesses".

He is also the most visible UK artist in the hip-hop genre, traditionally highly US-centric, raising the profile of British music around the world.

How much would we see of this "immunity to prosecution" levy?

NOT ONE PENNY.

That's right, the proposed measures would do nothing for a British citizen, running a British business (no fancy off-shored tax evasion here), with the Number 1 record in the UK this summer. We're not part of the cabal whom these measures would benefit. Why should anyone trust a major label to do the right thing by the artists when they've been screwing them for 93.5% of their revenue for years. I believe we have demonstrated that a label is not required to build an artist from scratch - this is not Radiohead or NIN turning on their labels and capitalising on pre-existing brand awareness - Dizzee came from nowhere, and if you have heard of him it is because he works so damn hard.

Everyone on this forum recognises the naivety of any claim to end file-sharing. In fact this kind of agreement is more likely to "stamp-out" our successful business.

If I authorise our fans to seed torrents of show bootlegs, or recruit them to promote up-coming artists from the label by sharing album previews on P2P networks, am I placing them at risk of punitive measures from their ISPs, or potential criminal prosecution? Perhaps the only safe thing to do is leave USB sticks in club toilets.

No doubt soon this will also be targeted by labels as a promotion channel outside their control that can lead to independent artists mucking with projected chart positions.

Yes, we kept McFly off the top spot this week. Yes, somebody may lose their job over it - that's the way major labels work when you don't meet expectations. No, I'm not sorry.

We learned our lesson years ago, after being flown first class to Argentina, being put up in 5-Star hotels with a few days each side of the show to see the country, going on stage in front of 30,000 people who knew the words to all the songs, and coming home with money in our pockets.

We don't have distribution in Argentina.

We have never sold a copy of any of Dizzee's albums in Argentina, as the records aren't available (excusing imports, which we don't see the markup on).

That's a lot of downloads.

I suppose we should display our gratitude by suing the Argentinians.

Stupidist comment ever, hasn't he heard of ripping CDs?

have you heard of DRM?

They will simply warn the heavy downloaders

I've heard it suggested that these ISP's (who already throttle and limit their heavier users) are agreeing with this because it gives them a straightforward excuse to give them the boot. I find the argument that just a small percentage of heavy downloaders are "a problem" really offensive, because you've paid for a service and you have the right to utilise it. What they really want is customers who pay 20-30 quid a month and do nothing more than check their email once a week because thats where the profit is.

There isn't really anything the ISP's could do to technically defeat filesharing beyond taking measures which would cripple the service so badly and have such horrendous privacy implications that their customers would leave in a flash.

Deep packet inspection that identifies filesharing traffic is easily defeated by using properly implemented encryption, and basically what you would have on your hands is a technological "arms race" which ISP's will lose.

What the BPI are doing is basically looking for torrents which contain their copyrighted material (infact I believe they are outsourcing this to 3rd party firms), then downloading the content and making a list of all the IP's in the swarm. Encyption doesn't help here but this kind of traffic analysis can be defeated relatively easily by using proxies or something like TOR Tor: anonymity online.

Interestingly, the nature of bittorrent means that you're never sharing the whole file, your computer is only uploading fragments of the file, so the data from a single IP will mostly likely result in an unplayable file. It would be interesting to see someone force the BPI into court to test their position.

I saw an interesting comment about this

Apple tell me of their 80GB ipod classic:

"Holds up to 20,000 songs in 128-Kbps AAC format"

Using itunes to fill this would cost me 15,800.

If this isn't an admission that the industry knows full well which way the wind is blowing, I don't know what is.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Net firms in music pirates deal

BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse have all signed up.

try going down to catterline, I was there the other day and saw loads of puffins among the usual guillemots, razorbills, gannets and seagulls. There was also hundreds of sand martins living in the cliffs that were getting chased by a pair of sparrowhawks. It's a nicer place than fowlsheugh to spot birds.

you may have noticed the price at the pump has dropped since the americans decided to open talks with the iranians. It may go down further given recent statements by former high ranking american foreign policy advisors (scowcroft, brzezinski) ( US/IRAN: Scowcroft, Brzezinski Urge Bush to Drop Precondition ) urging the american government to start *unconditional talks* with iran that don't stipulate suspension of uranium enrichment (which the iranians are perfectly entitled to do as signatories of the nuclear non proliferation treaty) as a precondiction to any kind of diplomatic discussion.

lydon became a characture of himself long ago, I fail to see how anyone can take him seriously and the whole lovey "dont you know who i am act" just makes me think he's even more of a prick. As someone pointed out, he was on that fucking desert island programme.

In 30 years time "scary spice" will be on those shows, whoring her girl power fuck the system credentials, leering at the camera and being obnoxious, they are the same thing, and she will be playing to the same 2nd generation naive audience that lydon plays to now.

wierdly, i just re-watched this film last night Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) and finally realised what it means.

The picture that shames Italy - Europe, World - The Independent

this story from a couple of days ago went largely unreported here too.

things are looking good up here really, one of the few citys in the country not to be heavily effected by the credit crunch, trump should hopefuly get his golf course, nicholas has his coming in stonehaven, they will bring good tourism, the dandy dons should get their community stadium which again will be good for the city. i fail to see really why you would be unhappy up here. you can do alomst anything you want with your life if your motavated.

this $95 million oceanfront mansion once owned by Donald Trump was just bought by a Russian fertilizer mogul" -- who may tear it down to build something else. "Wow," Black exclaimed. "Trump's design esthetic is even tacky to a guy who sells shit for a living!"

"It's a little sad that Americans don't come through and buy things like this," was Trump's own comment on the sale.

The Raw Story | Lewis Black: It's the End of an Empire sale and everything must go

the only people happy about mcdonalds presence in aberdeen are the hopeless droids that work and eat there, and the same goes for donald trumps "development".

I'm just glad that someone's set up a small business that caters for the homeless/sexoffender/junkie image.

fixed...

Ok. But if you value a balanced mind don't get HD25s. Most nights I leave my computer feeling as though I've entered an alternate reality of pain and hearing loss. It doesn't help that I have a kind of boob-job syndrome whereby, as soon as I settle on a level, it ceases to seem enough, and I continually increase. I generally only use them out of necessity, as opposed to using them like a second opinion on the sound, which is what I'm led to believe is the good and proper way.

yeah I used to mostly use headphones to mix and monitor out of necessity, it is really really easy to just keep turning it up to the point that your ears are ringing by the time you call it a day and those mixes rarely sound acceptable on any other speakers. As you turn it up the headphones start to distort and kill the dynamics, which sounds seductive at the time but becomes incredibly fatiguing and lies to you about what the mix actually sounds like.

My advice would be, don't get closed back headphones.

Jan-Deal:

You need closed-back headphones when recording (particularly in a less than ideal environment), because they're designed to prevent sound leakage and attenuate ambient external sound. They can be uncomfortable to wear for long periods because they are meant to grip your head tightly.

I had some really comfy openbacked sennheisers, they sounded great and I could wear them for hours but utterly useless in any kind of recording context, imagine that annoying twat on the bus with his headphones amplified 100x and you will see why they aren't any good if you're trying to record a guitar part or a vocal while listening to the clicktrack or whatever.

Tough.

it looks like the old site with darker blues, a dark grey border and a worse logo.

at 1680x1050 there is a huge empty space between the logo and the status/pm box on the right which looks really odd. It looks less legible with the darker blue titlebars/black underlined active links.

tbh i do think it's quite an ugly skin, and I second the notion that the logo is wrong.

what's actually changed, new version of vbulletin and a reskin?

Sennheiser HD25 headphones, which hurt quickly

part of the reason i want to ditch my sennheisers is that they are the most uncomfortable headphones i've ever had

neil you pisshead, your schedule has gone to pot

What's with sponsored music events right now? T in the Park, Itunes Festival, Smirnoff experience with Mark Ronson and Duran Duran? All on tv at the same time over the past two days.

Oh and the itunes coverage was the worst - generic unfunny T4 guy and Peaches Geldof

But all the best music is to be heard at corporate entertainment events such as glastonborey and t in the park!

stuff that gets used on a regular basis:

intel core2duo e8400 3.0ghz with 2 gigs ram running xp pro

single core laptop running xp pro

both running flstudio/ableton/cubase sx3/adobe audition

alesis photon x25 audio interface/midi controller

soundcraft compact 10 mixer

korg padkontrol

casio cps-300 electric piano as master keyboard

alesis m1 active 520 active monitors

pair of cheapo decks and mixer

sennheiser hd200 closed back headphones, which are due to be replaced with something that doesn't sound as gash

cheapo stereo condensor mic + minidv camera for rough outdoor sampling/recording

It's all to do with the producer/engineer rather than the DAW

spot on, the audio engines in most host software are all very similar and high quality, it's what you do with it that counts. I've seen phase inversion tests of a handful of the most common software that proves there is literally no difference between some of the audio engines. Don't let the "pro" in protools mislead you into thinking it's any better than cubase, logic or nuendo.

the rest of it is on there if you follow the links

............