The Little Things that P*** You Off

[Opus106]

Yes Dad!

Hm... I remember sometime ago it was revealed that MN Dave was Knight's son. Now he has another son named David!

[Gurn Blanston]

Hm... I remember sometime ago it was revealed that MN Dave was Knight's son. Now he has another son named David!

If you only knew the sordid truth, you would be stunned!   Alas, I cannot reveal things which I have personal knowledge of, else I would shock the world with this irony!   

[greg]

Yes, you would, Uncle Gurn.

[Gurn Blanston]

OK, my contribution to the 'piss me off' thread:

I suppose by now everyone knows that I collect Beethoven 9th symphony recordings. At least, if you don't, you haven't been paying attention.

Anyway, if you go to eBay to check out recordings, the 9ths are, at least 90% of the time, listed like this:

Beethoven: Symphonie No. 9 by Anna Tomowa-Sintow

Now seriously, does that tell you anything? No conductor, no orchestra, if there is a picture of the cover it is nearly always too small to read anyway. Occasionally under "Contributing artists" they will list the other 3 soloists.   WTF?  Don't they actually want to sell these items? The odd thing to me is that nearly all the eBay stores do this, not just any one that I can point my finger at. 

[Daverz]

Beethoven: Symphonie No. 9 by Anna Tomowa-Sintow

Now seriously, does that tell you anything? No conductor, no orchestra

They give you the name of the band and the song.  What more do you need to know?

[Gurn Blanston]

They give you the name of the band and the song.  What more do you need to know?

  Yeah, that's about it.... well, the lead singer anyway! 

[knight66]

This reminds me of when I wanted to buy an iPod. The salesman kept telling me how many 'song' each one could take. I asked how much time they were supposed to be able to absorb; but no, it was all about the number of songs and the company advertises the machine in that way. Since some of my 'songs' last 20 minutes and others last two minutes, it is meaningless to anyone who listens other than what I loosely term 'pop'.

Mike

Oh yes; seasons greetings to all my sons. That old bike is knackered now!

[DavidW]

Hm... I remember sometime ago it was revealed that MN Dave was Knight's son. Now he has another son named David!

He has many sons named David, perhaps he's catholic.  Likes to have a large family--

[DavidW]

This reminds me of when I wanted to buy an iPod. The salesman kept telling me how many 'song' each one could take. I asked how much time they were supposed to be able to absorb; but no, it was all about the number of songs and the company advertises the machine in that way. Since some of my 'songs' last 20 minutes and others last two minutes, it is meaningless to anyone who listens other than what I loosely term 'pop'.

Mike

Oh yes; seasons greetings to all my sons. That old bike is knackered now!

And what's really funny is that it is dependent on bit rate, and the song # (based on 3 minutes per song) is for 128k rate, but the itunes store uses 256 now!

They should just give the capacity, and if the customer is too stupid to figure out how much music that is, then they can't do arithmetic and you can inflate the price and they won't be any the wiser.

I also like how the battery life is reported assuming all features are off, 128 bit rate song is playing and the lcd backlight is at a minimum and set to auto dim and shut off within seconds.  What's worse is that video life is reported assuming the backlight is at min as well!

[karlhenning]

And what's really funny is that it is dependent on bit rate, and the song # (based on 3 minutes per song) is for 128k rate, but the itunes store uses 256 now!

They should just give the capacity, and if the customer is too stupid to figure out how much music that is, then they can't do arithmetic and you can inflate the price and they won't be any the wiser.

Well, at least capacity is a fixed reference.  I know that when I first bought my Sansa Fuze, I had no idea how much of my music I should be able to fit in 8Gb, but at least it was a reliable frame of reference. "1600 songs" (as Mike observes) is worthless unless your principal listening is Dean Martin, David Bowie & Donovan ; )

[Scarpia]

This reminds me of when I wanted to buy an iPod. The salesman kept telling me how many 'song' each one could take. I asked how much time they were supposed to be able to absorb; but no, it was all about the number of songs and the company advertises the machine in that way. Since some of my 'songs' last 20 minutes and others last two minutes, it is meaningless to anyone who listens other than what I loosely term 'pop'.

Mike

Oh yes; seasons greetings to all my sons. That old bike is knackered now!

A pop song is 3 minutes on average, so you can roughly convert songs to minutes by multiplying by 3. 

[Gurn Blanston]

A pop song is 3 minutes on average, so you can roughly convert songs to minutes by multiplying by 3.

And yet, that doesn't account for bitrate and thus file size. I don't think I am being too harsh when I say that most pop music is adequately recorded at 128. But most classical is AT LEAST 192. My high-end VBR files are around 230, but a lot of people I know use only 320 CBR. So there's that...

[DavidW]

And yet, that doesn't account for bitrate and thus file size. I don't think I am being too harsh when I say that most pop music is adequately recorded at 128. But most classical is AT LEAST 192. My high-end VBR files are around 230, but a lot of people I know use only 320 CBR. So there's that...

It's the other way around.  Classical music is easier to compress because it doesn't have synthesized deep bass, nor the treble extension offered in electric guitars to name a few instruments.  One of the things lost in 128 bit compression is lack of extension in treble and bass which is not a big loss for mid-centric classical but plays hell with pop music.

[Gurn Blanston]

It's the other way around.  Classical music is easier to compress because it doesn't have synthesized deep bass, nor the treble extension offered in electric guitars to name a few instruments.  One of the things lost in 128 bit compression is lack of extension in treble and bass which is not a big loss for mid-centric classical but plays hell with pop music.

De facto, pop music is virtually always compressed way more than classical, whether it hurts it or not.

[Satzaroo]

All too often my arms and legs bump into things that leave me with large red blotchy marks stemming from, my doctor tells me, the blood thinner I have to take for ever and because I am getting old. What a bummer!

[DavidW]

De facto, pop music is virtually always compressed way more than classical, whether it hurts it or not.

Dynamic range compression != bitrate.  In fact that's a pet peeve of mine (and you knew it too! ) is when people confuse dynamic range compression, frequency compression and bitrate compression!!

Anyway that's another reason that pop music is harder to compress.  An mp3 encoder can't remove sounds that you can't really hear (excepting high and low frequency information) in pop as readily as classical because in pop everything is the same loudness due to the complete lack of dynamic range.

I'd have to check the book that I have, but I think that the engineers at Fraunhofer were using classical music and pop music that used acoustic instruments with a reasonable dynamic range when they were designing their compression algorithms.

[Lethevich]

This:



I love this Firefox skin but that pixel cluster is infuriating. Since I noticed it, it has always remained in the corner of my eye, watching me unblinkingly, undressing my soul.

[Satzaroo]

My wife bites her nails down to the nubs and then some. What's left is a discolored mess. I wish she'd mutilate herself in private, but no such luck.

[knight66]

Perhaps she is signalling something to you.

Mike

[Lethevich]

Time for some hardcore pent-up rage:

Journalists who use incorrect terminology for internet-related things, such as describing denial of service attacks as "hacking" and the solo people who carry them out as "hackers", consequently totally misleading the reader about the level of expertise and creativity involved in these events and granting "insider" interviews to completely inconsequential figures who can offer very little insight (this happens all the time with Anonymous "scoops").

Vegemite (surely the condiment equivelent of somebody who dresses differently for attention but only succeeds in looking worse than the people wearing classics).

"Literaly".

Straight friends of gay people who decide "I want to see what that is like" and make a move out of the blue with no prior warning, assuming that the gay person is some kind of magnanimous swinger who will be totally up for it. This is a bizarrely common occurance.

Children ending statements with a high scoop in their voice making them sound either intentionally or unintentionally sarcastic - they can no longer control which of those they express.

The evil and lack of pride in software developers who go beyond simply bloating their products, increasingly adding functionalities that harm the performance of the downloader's computer. A lot of mainstream apps have flirted with malware, but even those that don't are guilty of things that should be completely unacceptable: tricking people into accepting a bundled "helper bar" for their browser either by making it difficult to know how to decline it by deceptive phrasing, or simply by lying, and when you choose no it installs it anyway. Worse is how so many popular applications also now include a (they say) "quick launch" startup process which as more programs are installed, the sheer amount of needless background processes running at any one time can harm the stability and performance of an average speed PC, or cripple a slow one. These tactics suck so much because they're not even helpful - if a person needs the app they will open it themselves via the start menu, they don't need all this garbage in their system tray or taskbar. A person with some experience can easily disable these processes, but it's newbies who it ruins the experience of. I can no longer see much of a difference between these people and the scum who trick the naive into opening exe attachments in their emails.

The angel emoticon not being a part of this forum's set

Retagging classical music (or I should say 'tagging', as I have yet to ever encounter a logically presented suggestion from any tags database so no longer even look and do it manually).

Facebook's "friends" list, which to make sense should be renamed to "acquaintances", then perhaps with a more exclusive "friends" list as an additional option.

Butt-licking folksy advertising. There is a chain of frozen food supermarkets in the UK called Iceland which is currently running a nausiating "mums are heroes" campaign. I find it hard to match the supposedly heroic domestic struggle of the mother doing everything possible for their child with somebody who stuffs them with constipating frozen readymeals. A stolen observation from a great comedian (Stewart Lee): a mobile phone store called the Carphone Warehouse felt the need to issue a disclaimer after a racism scandal on the Big Brother TV show that it sponsored in which it states how racism is completely against "the values of the carphone warehouse", as if such a manifesto even exists, and that it would contain anything other than the words "sell more phones".

Related to the previous bit: the seemingly endless dreadful stream of female singer songwriter music used to accompany banking, gadget and automobile adverts, usually with a soft "heee heee so naive and pure" voice singing a mauled sea-shanty, folksong or yodel bent into a pop framework and sparse "heee heee how impish, clean, irreverent and contemporary this is" beats or strumming. Perhaps the worst thing about these is that I think that this is actual music that people buy albums of rather than cynical commissioned jingles. These are fine examples as any:

http://www.youtube.com/v/FGAWSCb8GhU http://www.youtube.com/v/R8GpHifZO3M http://www.youtube.com/v/b3xe9dSY7zM

It's like being imprisoned in the basement of an Oompa-Loompa.