Moguta

'tis true. I'm just saying that a law covering the ways bittorrent can violate copyright will not cover the next generation of technology. So the legislation process will have to be repeated all over again. But, if darknets end up being the next popular P2P method, I just don't see how the legal system can do anything to stop copyright infringement on them. Everything going on inside the network is hidden to those outside, and even those inside can only see so far. So its either illegalize all anonymizing networks, or hire agents to "friend" suspected filesharers and go back to individual prosecution. Neither of those sound like particularly appealing, or plausible, options. I think we're using "value" in two different senses. I was referring to the potential, in this manner: People don't pay specifically for copies of your work, but they pay for it because a copy happens to be identical to your original work. The value still lies with your original creation. The actual funds come from the copies of that creation, yes. By all indications, though, this eventually will not be a significant source of funds. If commissions and works-for-hire don't bring in nearly as much... then, it seems it's the time for some creative thinking. Why do you think Trent Reznor has been experimenting so much? Just non-commercial copyright violation seem to be hurtling toward being unenforceable, or at least unstoppable (effectively the same). Commercial copyright violations are still prosecutable, companies being quite public and funded better than your average filesharing family. The entirety of copyright would not disappear.

I'm not talking about torrents, either. I'm talking much more generally, about computers, and the massive global interconnection of them that we call the Internet. More stringent laws regarding bittorrent will likely be rendered null by the next evolution of this worldwide copying machine. Recently, darknet-based P2P services have arisen that work as simply as registering for MySpace and friending someone. This is the total decentralization of filesharing. Sure, you have to sign up with a central site. But even the operators of that site can't tell who's doing what, as darknets mask both the origin and destination of files. The only way to kill this cow would be to make any darknet illegal. Don't get me wrong, zircon. I'm not saying your work & investment is worthless. Hardly. In fact, that creation is where all the value of your art lies. It never was in the copies! They were merely how you recouped your costs. Now the landscape is changing, and charging for copies of a work seems due to come to an end. It may take some time. But people are growing up now who have never paid for copies of music or movies, and they won't have the same paradigm as we who were raised when the opposite was true. The fact is that revenue will have to come another way, whether it be by commission, group commission, donation goals toward a new song... or whatever else. To ask whether copyright will be abolished is the wrong question. Rather, it seems that no matter the law, non-commercial copyright infringement is simply on its way to becoming unenforceable.

For those who are staunchly against The Pirate Bay, I have to ask if it would be a tragedy to have nearly-costless matter replicators? Place one next to that shiny Aston Martin in the parking lot, and WOOSH an exact copy appears next to it! (You can bet Aston Martin would be upset.) Why should the public give more priority to the negative effects on the current physical-construction industry, than to an entire ocean of brilliant new possibilities? So why is it so upsetting that we now have ridiculously-cheap information replicators? Are libraries not viewed as some of our greatest institutions? The internet has enabled an entire global library. The fact is that we are in a transitory period. Old models are still trying to adapt to the new technical reality. People are still viewing the world with their previous paradigms, created out of that previous reality. But the fact is that copies of information are now near-worthless, economically-speaking. People are -- in their free time -- now distributing copies of information more efficiently than the companies that base their revenue upon such copy-distribution. The original *creation* and gathering of information is now where the real value lies. We may see a return to a commission-based art culture, or perhaps some other model enabled by the global connectivity of this new internet. In the coming years, we may see governments and authorities of the old paradigm use their power to temporarily prop up the old structure. But the playing field has changed, and such laws and measures are like building a dam against a rising river.

Awesome new feature. Hopefully this will get more people to register and review mixes. Also, I love how the OCR Mascot Bios project has finally been implemented. Progress! I think tabs on the ReMix pages could be outright eliminated. Instead of a download tab, you could simply make the "Download MP3" link a script-generated link to a random mirror. I always wondered exactly why OC ReMix showcases the multiple servers its files come from, when most other major sites distribute server load without showing the users that its happening. Also, if certain mirrors wish to receive less or more of the load than others, you can program that in too. As far as the chiptunes tab, perhaps a link like "Download original chiptunes" could be placed near the "Download MP3" link, with a smaller "Won't play?" link beneath to Chipamp? One reason I see for eliminating these ReMix-page tabs is their JavaScript implementation. Many tabs on the site give expected behavior with back/forward browser actions, but these do not.

Bandwidth is a fairly marginal cost for residential internet services. The price of sending data over the internet (backbones) just keeps plummeting. And to add insult to injury, Time Warner is proposing this at a time when their cable internet expenses are significantly shrinking and their revenues steadily growing. These two Ars Technica articles provide many other good points: The price-gouging premiums of Time Warner Cable's data caps Time Warner tries again, fails to justify caps and charges Yes, it's no wonder your government just recently announced it's going to fund a public fiber network. From what I hear, Telstra was a near-monopoly in Australia, something that doesn't exactly spur competitive performance.

Wait, that seems to imply that you might release SQUAREDANCE (remember how attentive you used to be when posting the album's name? ;P) as a digital download in the future. And yet you said earlier OneUp Studios doesn't have the right to sell the album? Which is right? I was referring to lack of any official availability. (Plus that link doesn't have the full Limited Editon track set.) And while VGMCentral has loads of albums, they never seem to have the newest releases that I so desperately want to try-before-buy. Seriously, dude? I loved that song. It's one of my favorites on that album! The soundscape and SFX are so effective at conveying their atmosphere. It's like Drift - Act II.

Not sure it's necessary to be so careful. I mean, as it stands, there is NO source for this album. If shared, the album could still spread and live on and exist, for posterity's sake if nothing else.

Hey Mustin, am I allowed to fulfill this dude's request? I had thought that OneUp Studios was selling SQUAREDANCE digitally, but I see it's not even on the albums page.

I hope this move is overturned far before it can be rolled out nationwide. As tech-knowledgeable publications like Ars Technica and Wired have shown, there is no real financial basis for these usage caps. Well, none besides "MORE PROFITS$$$!" And it really does serve to impede high-bandwidth uses of the internet, which will no doubt grow even higher in the future if not roadblocked.

Definitely attending the Baltimore concert. Despite having seen VGL a few times as well as PLAY!, I've never been to a Final Fantasy concert before. So I suppose I might as well add that distinction to my 'inventory', too.

I echo this sentiment. The only prize I care about is Dave whittling down the to-be-posted-ReMix queue.

Just donated. Thanks for the great site & music.

Today I finally got around to watching the latest episode. The clip's a teasingly short 30 seconds or so, but it's sweet. Certainly never expected to recognize an OCR artist's music playing on a popular network TV show! Here's to hoping there's a big fat check on its way, at the end of the next 6 months.

They should only need to encode a video stream once, since the audio & the length will be the only differences between the files. Muxing (mixing existing audio and video streams into one file) is a lot shorter than re-encoding all the A/V data. I wish you could influence the quality of the audio separately. But, the standard-quality YouTube video format is constrained specifically to 64Kbps mono audio. You only get stereo audio in the high-quality formats. Sorry for the confusion. YouTube no longer shows the text options "watch in HD" or "watch in high quality". At least, not in my locality. It's simply been replaced by a "HD" button on the player, that shows up whether the video is truly HD-capable or just "high-quality"-capable. That's why I specifically mentioned the HD button. And HQ is indeed 480x360 (or different aspect ratios that fit or exceed that box). Standard quality is a mere 320x240. It's really not that hard. HQ just means making a video at 480x360. Ideally, it would be encoded in an MP4 container with H.264 video and 128 AAC audio... but honestly, any video format will do. Also, I think you can just combine a remix's actual MP3 data into the video stream, without even re-encoding the audio. (I may be wrong on this, though, haven't tried myself.) This man knows what he's talking about. That's just the sort of automation needed.

Nice graphics. And you're right, I had totally not thought of that. Once you have a video file long enough to fit the longest remix, it's only a matter of copying (muxing) the audio file into the stream, then cutting the video down to the audio length. Encoding a new video for each audio track is indeed just a waste of time. And I did get stereo on your test video, but only after I appended &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. There's no "HD" button on the player for someone to reach it without manually editing the URL. For the "HD" button to appear, the video's resolution must be at least 480 pixels wide or 360 pixels tall. (Yours is 320x240) I hope the source video on your computer is at least that large, because I'd hate to redo all that. o.o

Just so you know, YouTube uses FLV for its standard-quality videos. For the high-quality videos, YouTube uses MP4 H.264 video with 128Kbps AAC audio. By uploading MP4 w/AAC, you might be able to achieve even better audio quality. Interesting thing, is that YouTube does not seem at all optimized to handle still-picture videos. I've uploaded MP4s that only consume ~30Kbps video bitrate (and the still picture never degrades). But then YouTube converts the video to ~200Kbps, more than doubling the size of the source file. LOL?

Did some searching, and evidently you can indeed embed the "high quality" (stereo) version of any YouTube video: http://kottke.org/08/11/high-quality-youtube-video-hack

a) Considering how many remixes this site has, the video encoding needs a way to be automated. Is there a way to make the videos interesting that is also automated? That's good. I was worried that each remix page would end up with a sizeable YouTube embed that takes up space for a still video. As far as stereo audio goes, though, you don't have to sign up with YouTube. (I was without an account for the longest time.) But, you *would* have to make the embed play the High Quality version of the video (the MP4 encode rather than the FLV encode, see the "&fmt=18" mentioned before). Is that possible?

Sweet! The main thing I was waiting for was ReplayGain support, which they have in this new 1.1 release. Gapless MP3 support is also nice. And not even Winamp has a "watch folders" option! (Winamp just has a "completely scan folders every X minutes" option.) Looks like it's finally time to try this sucker out & see if it can dethrone Winamp as my player of choice. (...assuming it gets VGM-format playback eventually)

You may've already known, but Firefox 3.1 is going to include support for much of these standards. Just gotta wait for it to get past the beta stage...

Oh, I completely realize it's not a serious issue. Certainly not near the level of plagiarism. But considering the soundtrack essentially came *from* the web (unlike other games that have their music on YouTube), I found it highly ironic that someone posting stage themes *on* the web makes no mention of the website where they can be so easily obtained. 'tis all.

Happy Birthday to thee, demonic overlord of all IRC. (Hey, it even rhymes!)

Oh, jeeze. I totally missed this. Well-belated Happy Birthday to you both! Another year gained in wisdom and experience! ( Or... something like that. o.o;; )

Nice work, guys! Have been eagerly anticipating SoS's release. Haven't listened to it much yet, so I'll have to let you know my more-detailed opinion after some (hopefully) smooth headphone jammin'.

Quite ironically, I just noticed that many of the most-viewed SFIIT HDRemix stage-music vids on YouTube don't mention a thing about where the music came from! Like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOAWFMMTwuQ