Promise and Quality DJ Competition...

Re: Re: Re: Re: The number is...

quality are you still sending your cds out? my mate tranced asked if you cud send me a 1, i think he did anyways lol

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The number is...

ah its you!! yea i am mate, sending out the rest this week, just need to copy some more!! He gave me ur address!!

The end of the world...

MP3's will be the death of many producers and artists; you can argue, but it is happening.
MP3 exchange can never be accurately policed; even sites that charge for a monthly download subscription have no way of preventing the downloaded files being put straight into the public domain for free.

For those who ‘big up’ MP3's consider this:

You and your super knowledgeable chums spend a year in the studio writing a 10 track album. You spend in the region of £100,000 in pre and post production. You post several copies to the major lables and magazines for press and review angles.

Oh dear, the very next day it’s on the internet for a rather cheap 'nothing' pounds. It was such a good album that everyone is downloading it like mad.

Sales are terrible and you are forced to work in a burger bar to make ends meet. How cool is downloading MP3's now?

Also, consider the technical aspects of MP3’s; the following is from a small piece I wrote last year on MP3 format.

Introduction

MPEG, Moving Picture Experts Group, audio layer 3. Layer 3 is one of three coding schemes (layer 1, layer 2 and layer 3) for the compression of audio signals. Reducing file size with compression usually means reducing quality as well. This is where the MP3 format shines. When converting audio to the MP3 format, the file size to sound quality ratio is adjustable. Layer 3 uses perceptual audio coding and psycho acoustic compression to remove all superfluous information, more specifically, the redundant and irrelevant parts of a sound signal, the frequencies the human ear doesn't hear. It also adds a MDCT (Modified Discrete Cosine Transform) that implements a filter bank, increasing the frequency resolution 18 times higher than that of layer 2.

The result in real terms is layer 3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD, with a bitrate of 1411.2 kilobits per one second of stereo music, by a factor of 12, down to 112-128kbps, without sacrificing sound quality. The bitrate denotes the average number of bits that one second of audio data will consume. Because MP3 files are small, they can easily be transferred across the Internet.

Such a reduction in file size facilitates fast, easy transfer of music while maintaining sound quality. One of the reasons that MP3 files have grown so popular is the ability for users to share them over the Internet. At just 1MB per minute of music, MP3s are easy to swap over fast connections and take just a bit of patience to trade over slower ones. Transferring MP3s from computer, to laptop, to portable audio device, to car MP3 player to home audio mp3/CD player/burner or for that matter, any MP3 enabled audio device is incredibly easy.
MP3s are fast and easy to share, don't fade and can't be scratched. Freeware MP3 players and other software are widely available.

Disadvantages do exist however. A professional, in a recording studio, recorded the tracks on audio CDs. Many MP3s available on file sharing networks are ripped and encoded by amateurs using much cheaper systems. MP3s that are cut off, encoded incorrectly, encoded using too low a bit rate, or named improperly, amongst others, are all too common.

When programmers created software that allowed users to share MP3 files with each other, the result was the biggest thing to hit the Internet since the World Wide Web.

Compression

Without any sort of compression, it would take 1.4 megabytes to represent just one second of CD quality music in WAV format, the de facto standard for sound on PCs. But by using MPEG audio coding, the size can be shrunk down, by a factor of twelve, without losing any of the sound quality.

Though MP3 compression is considered ‘lossy’ because some data cannot be recovered after compression, the MPEG algorithm can achieve transparent, or perceptually ‘lossless’, compression.
MP3 compression is so successful for imitating CD quality music, because it utilises the concept of auditory masking. Basically, this type of masking occurs when the presence of a strong audio signal makes weaker audio signals in the proximity imperceptible.

This non-linear and adaptive threshold of hearing (the level below which a sound is not heard) varies with frequency and between individuals. Whether a person hears a sound or not, depends on the frequency of the sound, and whether the amplitude is above or below that persons hearing threshold at that particular frequency. For example, in the vicinity of a loud noise such as an airplane passing overhead, it is impossible to hear ordinary conversations due to the distortions present at the hearing thresholds of the individuals. Sounds that are inaudible due to dynamic adaptation of the hearing threshold are said to be ‘masked’

This effect is particularly relevant to music. A loud orchestra easily masks the sounds of some individual instruments playing softly. Similarly, when this orchestra is recorded, the masked instruments will not be audible to the listener. A recording, in order to achieve efficiency, should discard the inaudible data and instead use that space to store other audible data. Drawing a parallel to digital audio compression, in order to achieve efficiency, an MP3 should drop the inaudible areas of data and, in that form of compression, save space.

When sounds are digitised, the computer grabs all the sound and stores it as binary data. Even if parts of the sound are beyond the range of human hearing, they're digitised anyway. MP3 compresses the file by removing any numbers representing sounds beyond the range of human hearing.

In a nutshell, it strips away unused space and sideband harmonics, reducing the overall feel of the sound. It’s horrible acoustically.

Only...

7 or 8.

Cool avatar by the way, the Guyver rocks!

Re: Only...

Last time i watched Guyver was 6 years ago! When the series was released on Manga video.. I collected the whole lot

Pity they didnt make any more...

Cheers Lee!

Was gettin fed up with the Tidy Trax logo! the guyver gives me a bit more Pinash(or however u spell it)guyver does well and truely rock!!

Chris.

When will we find out if we go through or not?

Jim

What he said!

Hope Mark got my CD in time. Didn't post it till thursday Morning!

CD listening bonanza...

I've listened through 7 CD's so far.

A few have been very good.

A few have been put together quite well, yet lack polish.

One was very impressive.

*puts Jimmy's into CD player*

Re: CD listening bonanza...

lol - stop teasin him lee

20...fukk, wish i has done i better mix now...

Re: CD listening bonanza...

he'll never fit

feedback

I dunno if anyone has mentioned this already. But will we be receiving some feed back on our mix cd's even if some ppl dont get through?

Cheers! Chris

Re: feedback

Yeah.

Lee has said feedback will be available...

Either via a pm if u dont want others to see or on here i think

hope this help

Re: Re: feedback

For the hard house ones too?

Re: Re: Re: feedback

thats down to marky a guess as lee is only dealin with the trance ones.

i dont see marky havin a problem with givin feedback to ppl tho.

drop him a pm and ask maybe....Mark Maitland - Quality

best of luck mate!

Re: Re: Re: Re: feedback

Thanks mate

Thanx for the info matey! most appreciated!

Cheers! Chris

Re: CD listening bonanza...

Let me know what u think

Jimmy

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The number is...

yeh thats me i came over to you at quality n said i got your other 2 cds from last year lol