lazygecko

I realize I'm not going to convince anyone just by arguing over the internet. The best thing is to just listen and compare for yourself. Now, I had a skeptical stance towards mastering from the start, but it's easy to get dragged along with it since it's simply doctrine and that's what happened to me. But I'm a lot more confident in myself now. There's a studio in Stockholm that takes this stuff very seriously, and audibly demonstrated to me just how much better today's music can sound (electronic dance music in particular) and just how destructive the mastering school of thought really is to sound quality. I can't think of anyone who has been to that place who hasn't had the same realization.

Compression of any level (and EQ boosting for that matter) on the master also adds intermodulation distortion. This is basically inharmonic non-linear artifacts from a sum of different frequencies that is pretty much universally regarded as unpleasant (and AFAIK is scientifically linked with hearing damage and speaker damage) unlike harmonic distortion which is the desired type used for distortion processing. Subtle processing will result in subtle intermodulation distortion, but gets more apparent and eventually unbearable as you raise the volume. Of course, most modern music is so processed that you can barely turn the knob above zero before things start to feel grating. If I'm feeling extra cynical I'll say that the whole mastering culture as we know it today came about when CDs were established as the standard format, and former vinyl mastering engineers had to think up a way to keep their jobs by claiming that the produced material needed to be processed further by them before ending up on CD. And then we have the radio which further added to this development. Radio has a huge psychological authority on our society/culture. If a song is played on the radio, then it must obviously have professional merit if it ended up there for all to hear. Multi-band compressors were not born as commercial products for production use. They were originally McGyvered by radio engineers competing with eachother to make their stations feel louder. Now, if there's one thing I've learned about trends it's that they have no correlation to quality (kinda like how people percieve 24fps as better than higher framerates because it feels more cinematic). So once people got used to the compressed material broadcasted from radio stations, musicians started wanting that sound on their CDs, since if it sounded more like radio then obviously that meant it sounded more professional. And from there things started snowballing out of control.

You'll have to be more specific with what you mean with "cohesion", since the way I see it that's exactly what you'd accomplish by tweaking the individual signals. Same with making sure the volume never peaks above -0.1db. To me, putting a compressor on the master is the equivalent to trying to make a picture larger by resizing it with bicubic or nearest neighbour. Actually, that's probably too generous of a comparison since with the former you're erasing information that you can't get back afterwards.

I don't really see anything in master processing that couldn't be accomplished more accurately/surgically during mixing without introducing artifacts on the whole package.

Inferior ports to vastly superior systems tend to be the most noteworthy fuckups. FF Origins for PS1 made the games so, so much worse simply thanks to the addition of loading times. But the most awful port is a relatively recent one: Mega Man X for iOs. It's actually graphically worse than the SNES original, with sprites having less animation frames and completely lacking parallax background scrolling.

And here comes the hilarious damage control http://www.destructoid.com/ea-simcity-s-broken-because-it-s-just-too-much-fun--248186.phtml

It keeps getting better http://www.gamechup.com/ea-refuses-to-refund-user-for-simcity-threatens-account-ban/

Nord Korea

If it's enough to affect the stock value of game retailers, then the rumors probably have some weight to them. I won't shed any tears over the death of the brick & mortar market though. Moved on from that years ago. The whole "AAA" gaming trend is something I hold no interest in, and the last console I owned was a Gamecube which didn't recieve a lot of attention. What I've come to realize I like the most is the whole open platform culture which has been largely defined by the PC since the early 90's. Anyone can make their own game and distribute it in whatever way they like. That's what makes games like Doom and Minecraft possible, and the unorthodox business models that helped those games become incredibly successful. That kind of innovation also benefits the industry as a whole (Minecraft on Xbox Live now has more players than Call of Duty) and I think both the game design and business aspects of the gaming industry would be really stagnant without an open platform. Pretty sure Gabe Newell echoed those sentiments as well during his recent keynote and the motivations behind the Steambox. Microsoft isn't likely to change their iron fisted approach to the Xbox.

Sytrus is an FM synth. There's one called Oxe that's free. I'm not sure if i has an arpeggiator though.

Bigger? Last time I checked, the maximum city size was... around 2 square kilometers. Sim Backwater Village is more like it.

Any short range weapon is effective against vanguards with spears or bardiches. You stay close to them at all times since those weapons rely mainly on staying out of your reach. Personally I found the claymore to be the best all-around vanguard weapon.

It's a free weekend on Steam if anyone is on the fence.

I've been looking to purchase a cheap, decent library of orchestral sounds. GPO seems to fit that bill, however looking at the system requirements on the site it mentions Finale which leaves me confused. It actually only runs in Finale now? I am pretty sure I've tried an earlier version of GPO many years ago and it was a standard VST that could run in any DAW.

Chivalry has the best voice acting ever put in a game. Nice peasant uprising you've got here!

The Xbox cannot really be worthy of being called a PC when it barely has any of the platform's defining traits. The most important thing about PC is that anyone who has one can create their own software and sell/distribute it in any way they like. The Xbox is subject to the same licensing fees, certification processes, etc as the other consoles and they control content that goes through Xbox Live with an iron fist. You won't see stuff like Doom, Steam, Minecraft etc happening through an environment like that.

The writing in this game is a step above what you'd expect from video games. However I was still let down by the game. I thought the player's decisions would impact things more in the long term, but at certain points person X is going to die or situation Y will happen no matter what you decide to do. For a game that has a disclaimer at the start of each episode saying the story tailors to how you play, I don't think it was unreasonable to expect something more.

The last time Capcom gauged fan interest, we got the Megaman Legends 3 incident.

It's really no different from how songwriting in average pop music is done. Use a handful of chords (mimic the most cookie cutter progressions if you're feeling extra cynical) and 2-3 melodic phrases.

It's less than $10 on the Steam sale, so now would be a good time to pick it up.

I think largely the wrong attitude is employed in the fight against piracy. You can get the same message across (ie reducing piracy) using more positive methods. 10-15 years ago I would have sympathized with someone saying they're just a bedroom hobbyist who can't afford all the tools needed. But it's a very different world today with a huge amount of free software. And this free stuff will largely outperform what even the biggest professionals had access to in recent history. Yet most people are still completely ignorant to this amazing development. I very often manage to surprise people just by prodding them in the right direction. I think a large scale information campaign about freeware could have a lot of impact. And for smaller developers selling software, I think a unified marketplace like Steam has for indie titles would be very beneficial.

It's not as simple as a case of rose-tinted goggles. What is different today is that almost all genres lumped together under "mainstream music" are converging into the same shit, using the same chord progressions, synth presets and production techniques. It's barely worth telling pop, dance or hip hop apart from eachother any more as they're all beating the same dead horse, instead of everyone beating their own dead horse. This is an observartion that even has scientific backing.

In electronic music and to a slightly lesser extent metal, it seems to take a whole lot less to break apart into a "new" genre. It's little wonder then that they tend to sound extremly formulaic compared to other types of music.