Dolmot

Er...my copy completely fails to read, on two different CD drives. Or at least CD1 does and I think CD2 wasn't much better when I tried. Is it just me?

New school goa is already quite varied and colourful, by no means just floating and formulaic. There's no particular reason to make it "darker".

Just plain absurd. I had faithfully watched the quarter finals which ended 2-1, 1-0, 1-0 and 0-0 with very few goals during the actual game. Tonight my stream crashed for ten minutes at 1-0 and when it recovered, it was 5-0. Simply put, by that point there was no game any more. It was effectively over and almost painful to watch. On the second half they didn't even bother celebrating the goals much. At 5-0, the local TV commentator looked around the stadium and said "Some of the players...excuse me, spectators have already left to fetch refreshments..." He could have been right already with the first version. Unbelievable.

What the hell is going on?

Remember to get the free Fluori Dolby EP too. Arguably some of the punchiest tracks were kindly donated as a promotional release earlier that year so they didn't end up on the album. If you feel the album didn't deliver completely, try considering it as a bundle deal with the free extras and maybe you'll feel a bit better.

I think he was doing pretty well when it comes to calls which really counted, including the scoring free kick and penalty kick, and equally the rejected goal which was an offside by about 20 cm IIRC. Try spotting stuff like that on the field without fifty HD cameras at your disposal. (I believe video evidence is still specially forbidden by FIFA, excluding goal line verification.) Also imagine the brouhaha if calls like that had gone wrong. Argentina-Belgium appeared a bit boring, although I admit spending a good part of it cooking, eating and multitasking many other things.

Recently... Ten Trips around the Sun Woob - Lost 1194 Etnica - Alien Protein LP Joujouka - Aoki Uru Witchcraft - Magic Frequencies a couple of MWNN 12"s Psysutra has been ordered, of course. Maybe raiding Psyshop for this year's update next.

Can't you all just list the colours of your leggings?

Bah. Like it or not, the Oriental/Indian/Goa connection has become so strong that it's one of the best established, even defining features of this scene, all the way to the name of a (sub)genre. For a comparison, take a look at metal and its different branches. Nobody probably denies that stuff like skulls, swords, spikes, blood, black shirts, near-illegible logos and grainy black-and-white forest scenes have been done to death (heh) already years ago. Nevertheless, those are recognisable features. Browse through a random pile of CDs and you can easily spot power metal from its chrome, folk metal from its medieval look, and black metal from its grain. Then you can dress similarly on a festival and connect with other people. Things like that form the scene and differentiate it from other genres. Inevitably, you'll also find a crapload of people who very cleverly spot these recurring themes and decide to think different. That's nice. I think what's really bugging you is cheap production, not its content per se. It's very possible to follow a theme yet to bring a new twist to it. The other option is to rip the first Shiva image found by Google search and a chant from a '95 sample CD, already appearing in dozens of tracks. Or mushrooms on fractals...sometimes it's hard to tell whether people are really trying or just being nostalgic / tongue in cheek. Like in metal. Full respect to people who try (and manage) to innovate, but it's not that terrible either to follow the established themes as long as there's something noteworthy in the overall product. Plain copy-paste definitely appears just lazy and pointless.

Germany-Algeria, what a game.

I've always counted it as a subgenre of house instead, mainly because it's 1) not psychedelic 2) not trance That didn't stop me from collecting it in my house years, though. I'd just hesitate recommending it when trance is requested.

In most 90s games the actual audio data was either in separate files or bundled into larger lump files. There were ripping programs that detected and extracted them. In fact, sometimes you could just load a whole data file to an audio editor and spot the audio segments. It was almost always plain PCM data until compressed formats like mp3 started to arise. With those tricks you can get the exact source wave. However, the audio was regularly stored as something like 8-22 kHz so it won't become hi-fi even with these fancy direct extraction tricks. Digital or even reasonable analogue sampling from the gameplay output shouldn't introduce any significant error compared to the original resolution. The only real benefit I can imagine is choosing your interpolation algorithm in upsampling, but sometimes the original rough playback is actually preferable as that's how we remember it. Also try googling. Often people have already extracted the sample banks and they're floating around...

I was posting it but your reply appeared when I was previewing. And your switching was indeed unnecessary. I also went through my lists and noticed that strangely many releases there are free downloads, sold out, or only available directly. There's not much on Psyshop I can genuinely recommend as "best of" anything. Well, there are loads of Suntrip worth getting but everyone knows that already, right? (Meanwhile, I'm just placing my own order and I'd like to ask if there's something I've missed this year, but that might already count as thread hijacking...)

It wouldn't surprise me much that new school labels and artists are better represented and more active on Spotify than old school ones.

The player of marimba

Holy carp. England is out too? I know they're regularly a butt of many jokes but already after two games? Oh well, what should you expect after losing two games in a row, Uruguay included...

Wow.

Twilight, of course.

Anyone want to guess Cologne, Germany?

It's punchy and crunchy and airy and cool, just like in the 90s.

I've been listening to Vibrasphere's Selected Downbeats 1 and 2. They remind me of what a difference there can be between a properly designed downtempo track and just slowing down stompy trance to 100 bpm.

Did you copy-paste this from some forum that uses #beddf7 on #004173?

I can bring one to the winner of the karaoke battle!

Avi + Lior Making a full album!

Heh, samples tuned at the Amiga default of 8363 Hz. And channel doubling for extra volume when 63 wasn't enough. A bit wasteful but IT was able to handle fairly many channels on mid-90s hardware, being written in Asm and all. Comprehensive centre panning too. I hadn't paid attention to that before... I used another colour scheme but that's the thing, alright. I think my fingers still remember half of the keyboard shortcuts. Mouse was something only those FT2 nancy boys used. And I dare to say most DOS-era games since the introduction of sample-capable SBs/GUSs used module music until CD audio and mp3 became truly viable. Often it was just there in its own dir. Sometimes you had to rip them from a bundle file. The same thing with demos. Grab it, open it, check the composer's every trick. That's how you learnt the trade. Quite fascinating that you didn't need a pile of hardware synths and sequencers to make a legendary track back then (either). Trackers had their limitations but boy it was fast to write your instant techno. Steal a kick sample, set row skip to 4, and push Q until the pattern is full. Repeat with hats. No wonder a lot of mods sounded like that too. Good times. I should check whether the collection CDs I bought from Maz still read.