Gears Of War Online, buying CDs you already have, realising you'r

I decided to try some Gears of War online last night. Was pretty fun. Ok, I sucked pretty badly, but it was still fun. The group I was playing with were pretty friendly and cool about my suckage and the team did pretty well, I even took a couple of rounds for us and assisted on more than a few kills. Only issue I had was that the Games For Windows Live client wasn't too keen on the mic for my headset, I had to turn the sensitivity up full and talk really loudly in order for it to pick up and transmit, even though I could hear myself clearly through the headphones. Annoying, particularly as online gaming was the main purpose for buying a headset. Buggeration basically. I have found myself in possession of a doubler CD for the first time in my life so far. I bought My Vitriols Finelines single disc edition waaaaaaaay back in 2000, they later released a double disc edition, the 2nd disc of which I bought on mp3 via the HMV digital store in 2006, and if you read my blog on digital music the other day you'll know why that's not acceptable for me. So I decided to buy the double disc edition off eBay. Arrived today, immaculate condition for used CDs, which is awesome, so I'm pretty happy with that. Turns out the first disc was remastered for the double disc edition, so I'm pretty excited to find out how the whole thing sounds. I'm using this somewhat short and pointless blog as a test subject for the google docs "Publish to blog" feature. I tried using it before and it totally fucked up the formatting with extra spaces shoved in everywhere, I fucked about with some of the settings in the blogger dashboard and hopefully that has sorted it out. This experience has resulted in inspiration for a future blog about my life as a google whore. Look for that one next week, ought to be informative at the very least:p freedoms_stain, out. edit: ok, so publishing via docs worked with all the correct formatting this time, but when I edited it inside blogger all the formatting disappeared, very strange. This time I'm just going to edit to put tags in, see what happens... edit2: I unfucked some of the settings I fucked with first time and everything seems to be cool now... I hope.

Digital Music, Worth It?

I don't think so, lets find out why >>>>>>>

The age of digital music is very much upon us and, for the moment, co-existing with the world of physical media. Digital delivery of music (and indeed most forms of media) has enjoyed a massive boom over the last few years, most of the success owing to Apples tying of their Ipod to Itunes and its associated store. Portable digital players are now widely available and in price brackets to suit all pockets and the allure of carrying hundreds and thousands of tracks in a device smaller than the volume of a single CD case is rather formidable. So with most people inevitably transferring their music from their physical CDs to their computer hard-drives for transfer to their portable devices many are attracted to the simplification of cutting out the need to buy and rip CDs in favour of a quick download Factor in the fact that increasing numbers of people now even forgo a traditional stereo system in exchange for a speaker dock for their portable device and the (apparent) logistics of owning a physical CD are further reduced.

Digital delivery has does have its advantages over CD

1. It's almost instantaneous; you can sit at home, decide you want a particular album and have it purchased and available to you within minutes (even seconds!) of that initial decision. Consider the alternatives: You travel to a store, which depending on your location and situation could take minutes, hours or even days (if you work during the day for example). Or, you purchase from an online store which is going to take a minimum of a day (assuming you get next day delivery) So it's clear digital delivery wins this round

2. Cost. Now this is a point of contention, a new release RRP CD is pretty much guaranteed to be more expensive than an equivalent digital download, however many (probably a majority in actual fact) CDs are sold well below RRP value and can in a significant number of cases be cheaper than the cost of the digital download. I'll say that for brand new releases digital delivery wins, but it isn't a win in all situations.

3. Physical space. My CD collection, the entirety of which I have stored on my computer (In duplicate I might add, mp3 and Ogg Vorbis formats) takes up more volume (including cases) than my computer itself (which is a mid tower and not a small one at that), and about two CD boxes would engulf the volume of my 60 GB mp3 player (which also holds my entire CD collection) So it's clear that digital music wins the space round.

4. Backup. Most digital delivery services will allow you to re-download your purchases multiple times (some an infinite number of times) should you ever lose the files for whatever reason. Break a CD and it's gone, you need to buy it again. So in this case, which I suppose comes under durability or archiving, digital once again wins.

Now we come to the disadvantages and issues with digital delivery, and these are the crux of the matter.

Lossy Formats

All the major digital download platforms sell their music almost exclusively in "lossy" compression formats usually encoded at 192 kbs VBR 320 kbs. For most lossy formats music at this bitrate exceeds the bitrate considered "transparent” (Transparency being the audio quality where the compressed file is indistinguishable from the source material on the same listening equipment). Transparency is very subjective and many individuals will experience transparency at lower bitrates and others at higher. So the 320 kbs files are "CD Quality" in terms of actual listening quality, but some (probably most) people won’t be able to tell the difference between a 192 kbs mp3 and a 320 kbs mp3, so the question of the value of the actual file size must be brought up. A 320kbs mp3 library takes up over a third more space than a 192 kbs library while offering no better quality (to most), a happier medium would probably be 256 kbs which even the most golden eared of listener would probably have trouble telling apart from the source. 320 kbs seems a bit wasteful, especially in light of the fact that most audiophiles, those who care most about quality, will want to own the CD and choose their own rippers and encoders for “optimum” quality.

The question of file size though is aside from the main problem I see with purchasing lossy format music: you're stuck with that format. Transcoding Lossy formats to other lossy formats or bitrates is possible but comes at the expense of quality, so although you can do it, you can't at the same time, which is kind of a shitty situation to be in.

But why should you care if you're stuck in one format or another, you'll just use that forever, it'll be around forever, right?

Maybe, but then again maybe not. Basically by subscribing to a particular lossy format you're gambling on that format surviving the test of time, that it'll continue to be supported by software and hardware in the future and that no better format will come along that will allow for better compression (smaller file size with equal or greater quality). Most of today's common formats will probably survive for a good long while, but are we confident they will never be superseded? Given the relentless march of technology, it is almost certain that they will be, or (and possibly more likely) as mass storage gets smaller and more affordable, it may become more practical to store ones music collection in a lossless format.

Digital music is most widely available in mp3 format because mp3 is the most widely supported format for portable players, but is it the best format? The answer is… no.

Mp3 exhibits inferior performance to or lacks features of several of the other lossy formats available, since I’m not an audio tech I’ll just link in the wiki for the really technical shit. Aside from that there’s the issue of quality versus size, most other lossy formats can produce the same quality as mp3 at a lower bitrate (or better quality for the same size), and mp3 performs poorly at lower bitrates (below 96 kbs) than other formats.

The initial design on mp3 didn’t make provisions for parameters such as gapless playback or volume normalization (replaygain) which have since been shoe-horned in through ID3 tag specifications. The ID3 tag itself is a weakness of the mp3 format since the tag must support a given field in order for information to be held whereas other tagging systems such as vorbis comments allows the addition of any field to the metadata.

Mp3 is also encumbered by patents which means anyone who sells music in mp3 format has to pay up for every x number of units sold, most other audio formats are bound in a similar manner although the Ogg Vorbis codec which was developed open source is not while performing better or comparibly to most other formats (in particular better than mp3)

Lossless Formats

So what's a lossless format? Lossless formats compress the audio data without losing any while lossy formats compress the audio data by cutting out data that is (supposed to be) outside the range of human hearing. The major advantage of lossless formats in todays landscape is that they can be transcoded to any lossy format you please. Therefore by archiving your music collection in a lossless format you can take advantage of the best lossy formats available at any given time for your portable player or mobile phone. Unfortunately in order to be lossless these formats must be of significantly larger size than lossy (as much as 10x), so lossless comes with the benefit of flexibility, but at the cost of size. Given that you can buy a brand new good quality 1TB hard-drive for less than £100 these days the size cost is considered less of a problem to the audiophiles of today.

One of the best lossless formats is flac (free lossless audio codec) developed by the XIPH foundation, the same folks behind Ogg Vorbis. Flac has garnered a lot of support because it outperforms most of its peers on most scores including compression, encoding, decoding and quality while being completely patent free.

Value For Money?

We must also consider here value for money, we already discussed how digital delivery is often and usually cheaper than CD, but is it good value for money? I think not.

In order to illustrate my point I decided to do some research. I chose an arbitrary album high in the Amazon.co.uk best selling chart and compared the price of the physical CD and the digital download on a variety of online stores (that was available and not pre-order) this happened to be Lady Gaga - The Fame. What I found was this:

Store	CD	Download	Bitrate	Format
Amazon.co.uk	£8.98	£6.49	256 kbs VBR	MP3
HMV.com	£8.99	£6.99	320 kbs*	MP3
7digital	/	£7.99	320 kbs**	MP3
play.com	£7.99	£6.99	320 kbs**	MP3

* HMV don't tell you what bitrate the file is in on the item description, in their help section it claims "depending on the supplier most are provided at 320kbps" which means you could be getting anything, and there is no mention of CBR or VBR

** play and 7digital both tell you the files are 320kbs in the description, but neither indicate whether this is CBR or VBR, even in their help sections.

Amazon offered the album at the cheapest download price and with the most information available, play offer the album at the best CD price while offering the best quality mp3 at an equal price to HMV. 7digital proved to be the poorest value offering downloads for the same price as play will sell you the CD (shipped) at £1 more than the same quality file elsewhere.

So consider the value of the mp3 here. For a saving of £1 you get your music faster but in a less flexible form. And it may not even prove to be a saving if you have to buy the exact same music in another format in a few years time, while your CD can be ripped over and over in any format you choose.

When you consider that lossy digital music isn't as "valuable" as a CD why is the cost not much lower? Is it overheads? Does hosting the content cost almost as much as running a warehouse?

Lets look at another digital distribution system: Steam. Steam sell PC games via digital delivery. A brand new major developer title costs on average about £29.99 on Steam (this is comparable to retail price in the UK, bear in mind that in the US Steam downloads are usually cheaper than retail, thus we are effectively getting shafted by Steam in the UK, BEAR THAT IN MIND) and in terms of size weighs in anywhere between 4 and 15GB (depending). If we take the last game I bought, The Last Remnant, £29.99 on Steam, around a 12GB download I believe, that's about £1 for 400MB of data. Compare this to a digital music download that costs you £7 for less than 100MB of data! So Steam, who are shafting their UK market are managing to host and deliver digital content, cover the costs of overheads, make profit for themselves and make profit for the games publishers and developers for 28 times LESS cost to the consumer than the digital music providers.

Something is seriously fucked up here, and I'm pretty sure it can be summed up in one word: Greed. Someone on the music side is being unreasonable and greedy bastards. They're charging an inflated price for an inferior product because someone is lumping additional costs onto the cost of that product and it's pretty to work out who it is: LICENSE HOLDERS.

There are two license holders who're lumping additional charges onto the cost of your music

1. The licensee of the music: the record companies

2. The owners of the intellectual property governing your digital technology format: MP3!

The record companies you probably could have predicted, but I bet most of you were not aware prior that MP3 is licensed technology, and if you want to sell music in that format you have to pay, and that adds cost to the consumer, you and me bub. But that alone can't account for why music is 28 times more expensive than games, the MP3 license charge simply isn't big enough, the remainder has to come from either the digital distributor or the record companies, and given all the knickers getting in knots over royalties from services including Pandora, YouTube, MYspace and even Itunes I'm going to have to slap my wager on the record companies being the problem.

>Rant

What really grabs my goat about this is that all these services can be run at a profit for all parties in the States but the license holders in the UK (and Europe) are demanding such high royalties as to make the running of these services unfeasible. Pandora no longer service anywhere outside of North America and YouTube have been forced to whore out the site to commercialism in order to turn a profit, yet satisfactory arrangements can be made in the US. Who the fuck is being unreasonable here? Someone, and maybe even several people need to wake up and smell the shit, because the state of the commercial world smells like shit, and it is going to drive more and more people towards piracy (which smells good in this analagy). People WANT to support the bands they love, but we all know now that it's the record companies who are not only taking the biggest slice of the pie, they're taking the whole thing and trying to steal other peoples, then they cry when anybody fights back, and it's really hard to care.

/rant.

Of course one way digital distribution platforms could enhance their value is by promising to replace all music purchased from them with files in newer better formats for free as they become available, but I think that’s somewhat unlikely unless the cost of bandwidth falls to zero between now and then.

So that’s about it really. I don’t think digital music is worth the cost, in fact I think we’re probably being ripped off to a not inconsiderable degree.

Next blog (in this vein) will carry some recommendations on good software to get the best out of your digital collection. Watch this space.

freedoms_stain, out.

Gaming: The first person perspective...

I rather seem to be losing interest in FPS games of late. And by "of late" I really mean "since HL2 ep2". I did quite enjoy the short amount of Bioshock I've got through, but whenever the opportunity to play something in 3rd person, particularly if it features some kind of swordplay or other melee combat I jump on that and leave FPS games I've had much longer gathering dust. It must have something to do with the general gameplay mechanics of FPS games, I enjoyed Gears of War (which is practically an FPS in many ways) enormously, but the gameplay mechanics offer something different, something perhaps a bit more challenging and exciting and new, whereas most FPS games play almost identically, the only major variations being setting, enemies and weaponry. You can almost have identical control schemes mapped on your keyboard for every game. I guess I have just fallen out of love with the FPS genre. At least for now. You can bet your sweet ass I'll have HL2 Ep3 preloaded as soon as Steam have it up, but tonight when I go home and I have the choice of continuing Bioshock or FEAR (another game I've had for ages and barely touched) or playing The Last Remnant or Lost Planet, I know the latter have more chance of winning out that the former.

Assassins Creed and Gears of War - Completed!

I got Assassins Creed in the Ubisoft Steam sale last month (or whenever it was) and finally finished it this week. Pretty disappointing game all in all. It looks stunning and it has a lot of great ideas, it's just unfortunate that all those ideas were executed in the worst ways possible. The problem is that it's boring, starts out fairly easy, and the upgrades to your weapons and abilities vastly outstrip the increase of difficulty, so the net effect is that the game gets easier as you go along. By the end you can (and are indeed forced to) reasonably easily take out groups of 8 or more soldiers without much danger of losing. The free running aspect was a good idea, unfortunately it amounts to holding down a couple of buttons and pointing Altair in the right direction, you don't need to time jumps or anything, it's all done automatically, you just run and point. Not my idea of fun really. The idea of investigating your target before you go off to assassinate him was good too, however every single one of the 9 investigations is near identical and far too easy. The ending also stank of sequel, which of course is in the works. Hopefully they'll iron out all the things that made the original stale and produce a nice well rounded piece. They've no excuse not to really, all the problems have been pointed out for them by the press, they shouldn't be making the same mistake twice (like insta-death for touching water, I mean seriously what the fuck? Highly trained assassin can't swim?) I completed Gears of War (Windows version) today too. Picked this up for £15 from HMV a month or so ago. I first played this on my mates 360, and although I sucked enormously at the time I found the gameplay mechanics interesting. It's basically a shooter that revolves around a duck'n'cover style of play. You spend most of your time hunkered down behind random bits of (oddly convenient) debris and walls and such, popping out to fire at exposed enemies and attempting to out flank them. It's insanely fun in my humble opinion. The game is co-op based, you always have at least one computer controlled friendly tagging along, although sometimes I wonder if the friendly A.I. was purposefully made a bit retarded, some enemies in the game require specific strategies to take out, yet the A.I. is pretty happy to go for an all-out frontal assault, and once they're down said enemies will then devote all their killing attention on you. I think this is a game best played with a human co-op partner. The game has on-line play via Windows Live (both co-op and various versus modes), I've yet to check that out, I might do soon though to gain some of the online achievements. Online play is often quite frustrating for me as my ping is usually quite high which results in lots of annoying lag. I slightly suspect this to be down to the enormous phone extension lead used to connect our router to the phone line. Unfortunately no one will listen to me when I say if you're going to use a big fuck off cable like that then you should use network cable that was designed to carry broadband signals over a distance rather than a shitty phone extension that was not (particularly when said extension is literally meters longer than it has to be) Gears on Windows received a lot of bad press for bugs like unloadable checkpoints, but I never had any problems like that, the only problems I had were two occasions of computer-controlled Dom not following me and one occasion on the train at the end where I managed to get Fenix stuck on a door and had accidentally grenaded myself to death attempting to blast free. The Windows version has something like 20% more content than the 360 version and the latest patch seems to remove all the issues it had before, so I'd defo be happy to recommend this to others, particularly if you like a bit of online play. Also, I found out that if you launch a non-Steam game (such as GoW) via the shortcut launcher of Steam it'll apply the Steam overlay, so you can access you Steam web browser and your Steam friends list from within any game. Pretty useful. One last thing, I fucking hated that Brumak. freedoms_stain, out.

Sleep...

I often wish I had more ours in the day, or that I didn't get tired or that I didn't have to go to bed by 'x' o'clock in order to be refreshed enough to work the next day. The average person spends about a third of their life asleep, a third! Think about all the other stuff you could've done in that time! The skills you could have learned! The books you could have read! The movies you could have watched! The games you could have played! Look at all the exclamation marks!!! But we need sleep. We need to spend 6-8 hours a day for our brains to rest and our cognitive abilities be restored. If only there were a better way to obtain that rest. I used to think it would be cool if sleep could be taken as a pill or an injection, instant rejuvenation, the effects of a full nights sleep and no side effects. That's a pretty massive fucking pipe dream right there, but it still sounds awesome to me. Some people have experimented with so-called 'polyphasic sleep', the idea that you take shorter more frequent bursts of sleep periodically. Some people split their normal 6-8 hour sleep up, others try and bring it down to 2-6 hours total. It'd be a good idea if it worked, but all evidence suggests that people who try the polyphasic approach perform less well than they do while taking normal monophasic sleep. It also has a bunch of other problems, hard to integrate into a normal lifestyle if you have to take a nap regularly, where do you get this sleep during an 8 hour work day? It's really impractical on so many levels. Now don't get me wrong, I do enjoy sleep, my girlfriend will testify to that, I'd rather just have more control over when I did it and how often. Right now I really want to play some games or something, but alas, I am tired :s freedoms_stain, out.