Dolmot

Once I loaded Distance to Goa 3 mix CD which starts with X-Dream's "The Second Room". I had some other, more melodic CD in my mind and I thought the player was totally borked...

Is it? See various '95 versions of the single here http://www.discogs.com/Underworld-Born-Slippy/master/47693 such as http://www.discogs.com/Underworld-Born-Slippy/release/79870 . I believe it was Trainspotting which made the .NUXX version so popular that most single versions since 1996 only featured that one or its remixes, rather than the original ~8:30 breakbeat mix.

Vote and find out.

I see a pattern here and I concur. Those tracks are neat. Beyond them, I can't even recall which of the 00s albums was which. Already going through shop samples is an experience I prefer forgetting. However, I have two strange anecdotes from that period. 1: Once in the late 00s, I loaded over 500 samples from Juno's psy catalogue to a playlist. It was depressing. Craploads of copy-paste full-on without a single memorable feature, until I spotted one track with at least a bit of groove. It was a compilation track picked from Seven Sisters. Could have been Starbase 11. So even though the album is considered weak on the Pleiadians scale, it had its moments on the general full-on/tech scale. 2: Roughly the same thing on a festival. The schedule was somehow totally screwed up, artist being swapped between nights without proper announcements. Among uncountable hours of pointless full-on, I suddenly noticed that something passable was playing. After getting closer to the stage I found out it was actually Etnica playing their new stuff. Nothing particularly recognisable in the melody department, but it was groovy compared to the rest. All tonal content left the building for good after (or during) Equator, but something remained. Unfortunately it hasn't been enough to make me buy any of those later releases for home listening.

Do we even rate stuff? I can't recall ever posting a top 10 list of artists anywhere. Meanwhile, take a look at https://www.google.com/search?q=underrated+site%3Apsynews.org I'm puzzled by these topics. There are thousands of artists in this scene. Many of the legends moved on to other styles or completely out of music production over a decade ago. What can we do? Repeat the same "yeah, that was good in 1997" discussions every month or the artist becomes "underrated"? We only have a small handful of such discussions in the first place. If "rating" means repeated appearance in ongoing topics, pretty much everyone apart from Etnica and Boris Blenn is underrated. (Or maybe just Etnica?) I think Toï Doï is actually among, let's say, top 20 of most discussed old school artists here. Releasing a new album and a bunch of free stuff definitely helps. Certain tracks from Technologic still appear regularly in mixes, even though it's not strictly from the most celebrated golden era or classic style. Ubar Tmar's 3CD is among the most actively traded and sought after recent releases here. Seriously, I have no idea where this rating officially happens. Please point it out to me first. Then we can discuss what's missing. Or if you want to bring attention to someone, post something insightful. Find new curious details. Make a mix. Anything. I find it pointless just to name-drop stuff every month without actual content only to keep artists from being "underrated". It's even worse to expect others to do that for you. A huge bunch of old releases were good and they still are, but absolutely nothing has changed in their status. Is there anything to discuss? Also, there are only so many slots in a top 10. No matter what you do, >99% of artists will remain underrated in those... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMOCr9x_R58

But probably cheap as they could shoot it on location without any CGI or set-building.

Well, maybe they like exactly the same things?

Something like this...

Blacklight Moments Koan - When the Silence Is re-released Zen Baboon - Suber

I don't know, maybe something to do with being on the mountain?

Yep. I was supposed to have proper holidays, but a wide variety of things seeped all over the season from both directions. Another example of things that shouldn't happen but they did anyway. Now I just hope that the latest distractions will eventually pay off. Well alright, I visited a couple of local events and had good time there. I'm also visiting a few different continents on work travels so I get to see places. Just not as extensively as on a holiday trip. Still, no chance of even a one-week festival was given this year, let alone weeks of roaming. "Maybe next year", he said, just like last year...

It may be my favourite release this year, no less.

All branches of the Ominus family tend to feature ruthless basslines that slowly but surely level rooms and their inhabitants. Ominus - Toxic Brainwaves Psychlopedia - The Gurning Point Æternum - Chainsaw More recent picks include e.g. Portamento - Sugar Shock Radical Distortion - Amorphia To me, full-on sounds like music which first and foremost tries to avoid upsetting people too much with anything that resembles a proper bass wavefront... Those are the heavy picks. Otherwise cool and interesting ones are another story.

Only if they have laser beams attached to their heads... But seriously, with 100 million killed every year, they have a better reason to be scared of us. http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/01/100-million-sharks-killed-every-year-study-shows-on-eve-of-international-conference-on-shark-protection/ Fin soup? WTF? It's like hunting American bison for its skin or rhino for its horn due to superstition or sheer idiocy. Couldn't these morons just eat each other and snort fingernail clippings for their keratin fix?

Well, I think the point was something like this. Let's start with the basics. The following three operations are supposed to be equivalent: - Doubling the magnitude (sample values) - Multiplying the signal energy by four - Increasing its power by 6 dB (OK, 10*log10(4) = 6.0206... but we can call it six.) And the same in reverse (half magnitude, quarter energy, -6 dB). Let's simplify the matter and assume that you're recording a 16-bit CD to a 24-bit wave 100% digitally in the same sample rate and at quarter magnitude so that its peaks are at 0.25 level (-12 dB). For further simplification, we'll assume that signals are stored as a sign bit and N-1 magnitude bits. The bit pattern would look like this, with the sign and the most significant bits on the left. S..XXXXX XXXXXXX XX...... After the sign bit, the leftmost two bits are hard zeros. Then you have 15 bits of magnitude information. The rightmost six could be empty, but in your case they would probably contain something from sample rate conversion and other DSP. Not any real low-energy information of the music, though, because that didn't exist in the source. But if you mix in another CD at 1/4 magnitude compared to the first one, its bits would look like this in the 24-bit recording S....YYY YYYYYYYY YYYY.... for the same reasons. Because the recorded signal is the sum of both, you'd have genuine audio content in sign and bits 4-20 (so 18 bits). S..XXZZZ ZZZZZZZZ ZZYY.... However, the bits 19-20 of the first signal are effectively quantisation noise or otherwise meaningless so they'd largely mask anything happening in the second signal. Besides, bits 4-18 and sign already contain ~96 dB of dynamic range which is enough for human hearing, and you're supposed to keep only those for a 16-bit output. The lowest bits of the second signal are masked, meaningless, and eventually discarded. This is all largely theoretical. As stated earlier, you have interpolation noise from pitching and sample rate conversions so what you get is no longer even fully accurate 16-bit information. And CDs today go through so much compression, soft-clipping and reshaping that there isn't 96 dB of actual dynamics to begin with. It can be awfully distorted by excessive processing and loudness war. You won't really get any improvement by saving the final output at over 16 bits in this kind of scenario. For intermediate work copies it may be a good idea to save at 24, though. The end result stands. There's sufficient extra at both ends. Don't worry about things happening below the first (meaningful) 16 bits. If you want perfect replication with absolutely no clipping or signal modification, normalise the peak to max sample value. Sometimes it's a good idea to shave a few odd peaks to get the "actual" signal to the full range of sample values. Some prefer even more compression or levelling to compensate incidental level variation between tracks. DC shouldn't exist in digital recordings. Use DC removal only if you have a reason to suspect it being present. It's just a mix tape. While I store my bought music in CD-quality lossless, I can happily listen to mixes recorded from worn cassettes or 112 kbps 1st generation mp3s if the content is right...

One spec page I found says "Built into the Xone:DB2 is a fantastic-sounding 24-bit/48kHz USB 2.0 audio interface, which lets you send and receive up to four stereo channels to and from your computer" which would imply that it's 24-bit fixed point you're receiving. If you use that as the recording format, in theory it's an exact match to the data transmitted via USB. 32-bit float should be just fine too. If your data is at -12 dB peak, to my best knowledge it means that approximately the highest two bits are empty but you still have 22 bits of information. In other words, if you ultimately distribute in a 16-bit format, you still shave about six bits (36 dB) of information in the final output stage. The content of those is debatable if the input was a mixture of 16-bit CDs. Of course, if one CD was playing at another -12 dB compared to the overall level, its lowest bits would produce genuine information to the lower bits of the 24-bit recording. Effects complicate the matter further. On the other hand, it's eventually lost in the output, and there's very little proof of anyone being able to hear dynamics beyond 16 bits anyway. If it all goes as intended, you have plenty of extra for processing, and the digital chain giving you potentially 22 bits is probably far better than most home mix recordings ever produced. It exceeds the source, the target, and human hearing. No reason to worry about the two-bit headroom. I'd say that at that point the real error is introduced by sample rate conversions (pitch changes, 44.1 -> 48, possibly back again) which cannot be done 100% perfectly by any means. Peak normalisation in Audacity can be done with "Amplify" too. See http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Amplify_and_Normalize for some documentation.

All Uni is cool. They had some very fresh ideas, diverging nicely from the streamlined full-on craze of the early 00s without getting stuck in the past either. If only my latest purchase would finally arrive...

What do you use to connect the CDs to the mixer and the mixer to the computer?

In reality we're just using it as a cover story. 80s already have a certain retro-cool aspect so it's OK to confess liking it. Meanwhile, we're really ashamed of that massive Britney Spears collection and definitely won't admit that one.

Speaking of 80s and classic synths... Yes, I have the 12". And I totally can't dance.

That's very nice...but quite late. I seriously tried to find proper samples to make an informed decision. Eventually I ended up downloading a warez copy just to hear what I'm buying. Then I "pre-ordered" both the CD and the vinyl. So a friendly message to Twisted (and anyone else releasing music while worrying about piracy): if you want to reduce the grey download count, how about giving good options to legit buyers? I may be a fan but not a "shell out 30e without hearing first" fan. Seriously, the only thing I need for buying is long, easily playable samples. Not 30 second clips. Not a tiny, ugly, crashing flash player hidden somewhere. Not two pages of marketing blurb about how totally awesome the release is. Just the samples, first and foremost. Thank you. The album is great, BTW.

Yes. (Gotta go now. May comment later.)

Dubmood - Lost Floppies 1 & 2.

Posting the very definition of toneless mess doesn't count as debunking, sorry, no matter how many time you do it. (Moving forward in tight circles. I don't know why. I actually have plenty of other things to do right now but...)

Where's the "I live in it" option?