I can't beleive that no one here has mentioned this yet. Or If they have I've missed it. I hear so much that people rip cds...encode to ape...and then burn back to cdr....to me this is pointless. I use lossless for the following reasons.

1. I don't want to keep swapping cds in and out of the cdrom drive. With lossless compressed files I can keep 200 cds or more on my hardrive and play any song I want at any time.

2. There every bit as good as the original cd. I won't have to keep re encoding when some new snazzy codec comes out. And I don't have to worry about hearing artifacts when I upgrade to better equipment.

3. Sharring: Pretty simple here; the smaller the file the better for trading in newsgoups and opennap hubs.

4. It is much easier to batch transcode files into another format instead of re ripping and encoding from original cd.

5. The backup is the original cd. So if the hardrive fails so what. Especially in raid 5 configuration.


Disagreement:
The windows only or closed source argument.

This is absolutely silly. If you put them on a cd then just include the os as well on another cd. If you do like me and just put them on the hardrive then duh you already have the os on it. Besides there are millions of pcs with some form of windows on it....surley in the future you will be able to find some os that supports what you've encoded on.

Besides...monkeys audio is now open source and has been compiled on linux...each new version is more and more non-windows friendly. Hell even optimfrog has linux support now. okay okay I'm done.

Just a small concept correction. Monkey's Audio is not regarded exactly "open source" as a concept open source is generally understood. It would be better to say the Monkey's source code is available..

Let's try to clarify a little more.

Monkey's Audio license is not considered "Open Source License" by the Open Source Initiative's definition. Therefore ergo hence, it's not open source.

But that definition was created by that same Open Source Initiative, what doesn't makes it more valid than the popular concept of "Open Source software is that software with source code available for free" (or something like that). Vox Populi. It doesn't matters if OSI thinks Open Source is something, if the majority of the population believes it's something different, the majority will prevail. OSI has no authority on "defining concepts".

Bottom line: IMO, you're not right, but you're not wrong either.

Regards;

Roberto.

Good enough.

Instead of a big man those lyrics/words sound more like a very little man whistling through a graveyard and repeating to himself over and over, "I'm not scared, I'm not scared, I'm not scared."

Sounds not too friendly... Hidden agressions?
In fact, I find it's unsuitable for a board like this. I felt offended when I read it...

I agree. This is not a suitable tone for this forum. Private message coming your way, Suspect.

Oh come on...

This is classic NIN, guys. I think we can cut a little bit of slack here, especially when we allow other possibly "offensive" content in people's avatars... (yes, you know what I'm talking about ).

If you don't like seeing a bit of personality on this board, you can always go turn off sigs and avatars in your profile. Probably soon enough I'll even add an option to completely ignore posts from a certain person if you like.

Anyway, bottom line is that I don't really see a problem here. There are limits, but I don't think this crosses them.

Feel free to argue with me if you like

@Dibrom: What a guy! How much more hip can a mod be?

I didn't know that these are some sort of famous lyrics. I agree that a certain level of "personality" is actually healthy for the forum... but as soon as users feel offended by it, no matter if it's religious/strong language/whatever, it's time to re-evaluate if personal expression is more important to us than other user's comprehensible complaints.

I beg your pardon?

Offensive? I was about to ask where to find those nice pics! lol

CiTay: that wasn't a sarcastic comment directed at you. Post edited.
(I call all admins "mods")

The issue is whether one person finding something offensive is sufficient reason to warrant banning it from the board.

It is clear at this point that some people find the signature offensive, some find it questionable but wouldn't bother about it, and others don't find it questionable at all. I would belong to the latter category.

It it not offensive because it contains any attacks to persons or groups. It's merely considered offensive by some people because of the language used. This is an important distinction for me.

What is offensive to one person, can carry particular meaning for another. I assume there is a reason the OP chose this as his signature. Perhaps he is just a NIN fan. Perhaps it states something about his view of the world. Perhaps about his current state of mind. Perhaps it was even simply chosen for shock value.

I think that this way of asking for a banishment of it is a way of showing disrespect without further question for a persons personal expression. There was a reason this person put that down as this profile. Is you not liking the language it uses sufficient reason to take it away?

Whenever you read a widely visited forum, you should be prepared to meet people that have a very different background, world view, values, thruths and language use than you. Your goal should be to learn to accept and deal with those differences, rather than to try to enforce your view upon the others.

On this board, there are no hard guidelines or limits for language use. If a person uses language to express personal feelings not directed to nor attacking anyone in particular, I do not think the moderators should come up with them, either.

I would just ask the OP to consider the fact that his signature may offend some people, and determine for himself whether that weights up to whatever message or meaning he wanted to show with it.

Just my 0.02 Euros.

As i said, i didn't have the slightest idea that he was quoting from a song. I was assuming that he wrote it himself and that he was talking about himself. Well, i was wrong. So i revoke my request to remove the signature. I hope it also sounds less offensive to cookie now.

Awesome!
I always THOUGHT Dibrom was cool but now I KNOW it!

Bow down before the one you serve
You're going to get what you deserve

Perhaps Suspect could make it clear that it's a quote from song lyrics.

I can understand that some people may find this offensive, especially if this reminds them from some violence they or their family/friends may have experienced.

I must say that I agree with Garf on this 100%, but I also do think that it'd probably be at least a good idea to do this as well. Not required, but I think it'd be a nice compromise to help keep everyone a little bit happier

Perhaps just a "-- NIN" or maybe a "-- Trent Reznor"..

Up to Suspect though...

Oh, so it's nine inch nails, right...I had to think a while before it came to me what NIN is. 'classic' is the wrong word here
As for the offensive avatars, I don't know what you're talkin bout. Maybe I'm blind regarding pictures, not text.

But as I was the one to start the discussion I'm probably the one to end it. The fact that it's from a lyric doesn't make it better, not at all. Noone else on this board uses that sort of language, AFAIK. We're here for peaceful audio compression stuff, but that's again what I think.

But I will do as you said, I will just ignore that kind of stuff. Maybe upsetting others is exactly what Suspect wanted to do.

Still, I find it 'tasteless'.

Well, I'd like to know where's the limit? Can people put lyrics of neo-nazi bands etc. to their sigs: "kill the jews"? Well, this attacks one group, so I guess it's not allowed.

What about some "death metal" or similar kind: "slaughter your neighbours, rip off their heads, eat the entrails of the weak ones, rape their dead bodies" -type of text. Or any kind of text as long as it's just not copyrighted..

I'm not saying Suspect crossed "the limit" though, at least personally..

What about avatars? Can somebody put a gif animation of Afgan rebels cutting the throat of russian soldier here, but not people making love?

Personally I would not like to see text like that here, just because different people have different limits. I've not seen any avatars yet which I would regard truely offending to most people imo.
Also any option to disable sigs or avatars doesn't affect the biggest visitor group here, guests...

hmm, this discussion really should go to the off-topic forum, since it doesn't have much to do with lossless audio compression..
Unfortunately current forum software does not have thread splitting. I think I remember reading that it would be a feature of ibf 1.1.

Of course, classic being a relative and subjective term. My classification of "classic" here is not incorrect, although you may not choose to agree with it.



Pity.



Yes, and as you might have noticed, Suspect did not carry this language over into discussion. He included it in its proper place, in a sig line. A place specifically designed for adding a bit of a personal touch like this. Nobody ever said that you would happen to like someone's personal interests however, but as I noted before, you have the option to disregard them both in actively or passively, as you see fit.



Or maybe he just happened to like NIN and thought that by including this in his sig, he could portray this to other interested parties.

You could give him the benefit of the doubt here just as easily as you are condeming him. You really have no basis to make judgements about his intentions, because you have no insight into them whatsoever.



It could be said that one might find your apparently close-mindedness on this subject to be just as tasteless.

You see, it's all relative and utterly subjective. And in the end, what you think doesn't really matter all that much to the next guy, no offense of course

The limit for me would be something which was not a statement made in the spirit of art, and was obviously intended to provoke hate towards a particular group, for no apparent reason, or without cause.

I'm a pretty flexible person, not easily offended, and I like to think that I'm open to other people's opinions, interests, wordviews etc. I like to cut people slack because I would hope they would do the same for me. Everyone has their quirks and their odd interests and really the only way for everyone to get along is to show some tolerance.

Heavy handed censorship is IMO worse than anything that could be brought about from some midly offensive content being portrayed.

I believe that there is a fundamental need to fight against falling into the trap of knee-jerk censorship. It's the easy way out, and it's more harmful in the end.



Well first of all, I have a sneaking suspicion that you are already biased against death metal here, from your sweeping over generalization.

Every genre of music has content which can be extremely offensive to some groups, why single something like this out?

Anyway, addressing this more directly, I still wouldn't want to censor this. I don't see a need to do it. Again, it's not directed at a particular group of people, and just because it's unpleasant and offensive to some people, does not mean that it's necessarily "wrong" (let's not drag this out into a deep philosophical discussion)...



Read my first response.



I'm sorry, but I have little concern here. If someone isn't serious enough about the board to register, I'm not going to waste my time worrying about setting preferences for them. Quite simply, it's not my problem. They can fix it themselves if they like, that's good enough. I'm not here to hold everyone's hand and make sure that they are shielded from the evils of the world on HA and that their experience here is free from all unoffensive and oh-so-unbearable experiences in the world. People need to learn how to deal with this on their own. This happens to be my stance on censorship for the large part also. I'm against censorship when someone can just as easily choose to ignore something. Why must we "silence" someone else, just because it makes you a little bit uncomfortable in your seat? Granted, there are cases where this is warranted (as outlined first), but something like this is so far from that, I'm left wondering why we are even having this conversation in the first place.

Heh, well you are wrong. I'm not in anyway biased against death metal, except that I don't like it musically.. Heck, I cant even understand usually any lyrics...
If you didn't notice I put the death metal in quotation marks, so that was just an example where this kind of text could be found.

So it's ok to have everykind of material here? Porn, violence, etc. as long as it's not illegal. I'm just asking this so that I know how to deal with it moderation wise..

I'm not really interested in writing a book defining what to do in every single case, suffice to say that certain things that are too far off topic, don't belong on this board simply for those reasons.

Lyrics do not fall into that category.

I'm not going to even bother to try and define what is "right" or "wrong" outside of this, and I've already given at least one good example of what is clearly inappropriate which could otherwise find it's way to this board.

And in the end -- and I know you guys are going to have a blast with this one -- it's the server admin who decides what stays and what goes in regards to this board. You guys will just have to trust my judgement for what stays in the database. Beyond that, you can choose to ignore anything that displeases you

I was really trying not to add anything to this, but I just couldn't resist.

Did anyone catch the name of the user who first pointed out the offending signature? It's the 5th post down from the top. I bet there are people who would find that offensive too.

Seriously, though, if people are offended this easily, what are they doing on the internet. Turn your computer off and cut the cable (or phone cord), turn off the TV and the radio, throw out all your books and CDs (or better yet, burn them!), and just sit there in the dark. B)

Rob

Hmmm, I was hoping to read a discussion on Lossless encoding....

This is a reply to the original post, not the OT discussion.

I can't beleive that no one here has mentioned this yet. Or If they have I've missed it. I hear so much that people rip cds...encode to ape...and then burn back to cdr....to me this is pointless.

Archiving. You save CD-R medias and you can more easily restore the music by reading files instead of ripping audio. Pretty obvious if you don't own the cds.


1. I don't want to keep swapping cds in and out of the cdrom drive. With lossless compressed files I can keep 200 cds or more on my hardrive and play any song I want at any time.

You will need a very big hard drive to store my 700 albums.


5. The backup is the original cd. So if the hardrive fails so what. Especially in raid 5 configuration.

Re-ripping 200 (or 700) cds is a nightmare.
- Possibility of errors while ripping -- even with EAC.
- Possibility of typos in track names - FreeDB/CDDB is not always correct.
- And then you just need to reorganise your music back the way it was.
- You might not own the original cd.
- RAID5 is useless if lightning strikes your home or someone steals your computer.

My apologies for bringing this up again, but I couldn't resist.

The lyrics from Suspect's signature are from the song "Big Man With A Gun" from the Downward Spiral from Nine Inch Nails. I only want to mention that the lyrics are not simply offensive because Trent wanted to shock the listener. They are there for a reason, and the song fits within the theme of the album.

I'm not going to explain what this song is about myself, because there's a great essay about the Downward Spiral that already does this:
http://www.smashedupsanity.com/leavinghope...piralessay.html

BTW, great to see some fellow NIN fans on this board. B)

JohnV,
Sorry to disagree with you on this one.

what have I become
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end
you could have it all
my empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

Eeeh?? With what exactly you disagree? I haven't exactly given any opinions (except just a personal note that I would not like to see that kind of text like in _my_ example, but I'm not saying I don't accept it at all, so I don't understand what's there to disagree?), just asked what's the policy, and tried to take into account both "parties".

I guess I would have to say that I disagree that this is even a legitimate concern. What do lyrics, even potentially offensive lyrics, have to do with that disgustingly ghoulish website you posted a link to?

Maybe if you'd actually read my message, you'd get it...
Question is: is anything allowed, if it's regarded as art... I'm not saying that particular website is any form of art, it was just an eaxmple what kind of things can be also covered under the concept of "art".

So, I was asking where's the limit...

And I don't understand how can one/few people decide if something is legitimate concern or not.. People have different concerns and as an admin I'd like to take different concerns into account.

Damn JohnV,

I feel like editing your link to that ghastly site. Now that was truly offensive.

ff123

BTW. Did you know there's a new lossless encoder? It's called "La" (short for "lossless audio"). It compresses better than anything else, but is very slow (about as fast as Psytel, so no problem for Roberto ). It is only a prototype and the format can change. Also there's not yet a Winamp plugin. But, check it out!
Link: http://lossless-audio.com/

PS. a frontend is coming soon...

That's what I'm talking about. Why should you even HAVE to worry about what MIGHT offend someone? Personally, I was offended that you posted that link. So what?

Great, now I'm the bad guy here...

At least you knew, when you clicked it, that it would be offensive... (but you still chose to click it, unlike here, where nobody can choose atm, if they want to see sigs for example.).
Anyway, I'm gonna remove the link and stop this discussion from my part here.

It is a discussion on lossless encoding. Can't you see it?

Lossless encoding is all around you.

lol Nothing gained, nothing lost. That kind of what this thread does for me too, but I passed all my college English classes writing term papers about nothing but music censorship, so I'm a bit interested.

I don't think any lyrics are worthy of censorship, yet there have been cases where this has happened. Usually I attributed these occurances to the stiffs who needed a bit of media coverage before the upcoming election. Stupid really, they don't care either way for three quarters of their term and then suddenly BOOM.

Suspect's sig didn't acutually make it clear they were lyrics, and that is unfortunate since they are first-person. Caught some flac for it too. (note I'm trying to keep this in the lossless discussion)

If I had a complaint it was that it was too long for a sig, I'd rather see the first one or two lines, and then we'd miss out on those pretty words.

I seem to have joined this discussion late, but I recall reading an interview in which Trent Reznor said that the song was intended to illustrate just that. So the lyrics' author apparently agrees with you.

Garf, that is exactly how I feel about the issue. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!

On the internet, where all we have is text, one must look through the text at the meaning behind the words. I fail to understand why someone finds words offensive - it is the meaning behind words that can potentially be offensive. If I mash all the keys on my keyboard and the word "f**k" happens to randomly come out amidst the jibberish, how could someone find that offensive? Even if I simply type that word on its own, it's just a word. "F**k you, feckn_eejit!" is a different story - it's still just words, but when I read the MEANING, the MEANING is offensive! This is just an example - in most cases it doesn't bother me if someone tells me to f**k off, because anyone who would say that to me is not worth me caring about what they think of me, but I digress...

Anyway, my point is clear.

This is just text, people.

--jeff