Intro Res: Fill & Download for Free

I get the feeling this has been answered 5 million times already, but here goes:As a producer, to me, the ideal medium is one where I can hear, at a consumer level, what I’m hearing in the control room as I mix. In other words, I’m hearing what I’ve put on the medium, not the medium itself.Am I hearing that on CD? Pretty darn close. The CD should have stayed in the 20th Century, along with vinyl and MP3 formats.21st century formats are High-Res downloads (24-bit depth, 96 or 192 kHz sample rate) in FLAC or ALAC.With Vinyl, I am NOT hearing back what I strived to do when mixing. That medium is marred with flaws:Quality that changes depending whether you’re close to the outer edge, or inner radius (CD or MP3 does not change)less dynamic range close to inner radiusless HF close to inner radiusEver wonder why the last song on each side of albums from the ’60s and ’70s were ballads?Artists such as Peter Gabriel have complained that they couldn’t sequence the songs the way they liked, because of the medium’s flawsTHD up to 1.5%. That’s not what I’m hearing through the control room speakers.Appalling L/R channel separation: 30 dB at best. That’s NOT what I’m hearing in the control room, and I actually have to change my mix because of the medium’s flaws. I prefer doing it myself as I have more control at the mixing stage, than at the mastering/lathe cutting stage.65 dB of dynamic range at best (see inner radius above as well), and that’s on limited run pressings of 1,000 or less. So I can kiss that super quiet intro or beautiful reverb tail goodbye.Measurable wow & flutter: 0.05% at best. Those intricate triangle resonances are just going to sound great once passed through that grinder!Frequency range is decent, but again, only on limited run pressings of 1,000 or less: 30 Hz - 20 kHz.How about a medium which deteriorates every time you play it? You’re effectively shaving off HF content at every pass.Snap crackle and pop. I am NOT hearing that in the control room speakers as I mix. (I hope you like my corn-flakes commercial reference here, which summarises all the clicks and crackles due to dust and other particles contaminating the medium’s surface, the deformities/scratches inevitably induced by the user on playback, and the imperfections that were already there from the moulding process). Here, have a look:Tone arm resonance. I am NOT hearing that in the control room speakers as I mix.Having to manually “wing it” if I want to locate the start of a song. No, you don’t wind an audiophile turntable backwards to cue a song start (you’d wreck the cartridge - bending its stylus right out)!I almost forgot: you can’t have your low frequencies too loud or too wide, so let’s restrict our mixes’ creative potential because of the medium, shall we?What I love about vinyl?The artwork. That’s never been matched, even with foldouts on some CD releases.Other than the wear mentioned above, can withstand time quite well.MP3 at 320 kbps. On rock/pop, you really need a darn good system to be able to tell the difference with a 16-bit/44.1 kHz CD-DA file.Why has CD gotten such a bad rap then?Because people have amalgamated what’s been put on it, instead of understanding the quality of the medium itself.So let’s first list a compact disc’s characteristics (by extension, any uncompressed 16-bit 44.1 kHz audio file):Frequency response is 20 - 20 kHz, no matter whether it’s the first, or last second of the 74 min album. I am almost hearing what I’m hearing on the control room speakers when I’m mixing. With higher sample rates, such as on the SACD, DVD-Audio or on High-Res downloads, I am finally hearing the same thing as what I’m hearing on the control room speakers when I’m mixing, as the frequency response goes far beyond that of human hearing.Dynamic range is 82 dB without dither (albums released up to the early ‘90s) and can exceed 100 dB with dither (albums released later on). I am almost hearing what I’m hearing on the control room speakers when I’m mixing. With 24-bit High-Res downloads, and its 122 dBs or so of dynamic range, not only am I finally hearing the same thing as what I’m hearing on the control room speakers when I’m mixing… I’m actually not able to hear the noise floor as it exceeds human hearing (hence why dither in 24-bit is an idiocy).Channel separation is equivalent to the dynamic range. If on a CD, I want to pan a snare drum full left, full blast (hitting 0 FS), … I can. None of it will ever appear on the right channel (perhaps a bit of crosstalk can happen in cheap CD DACs, but it’s still close to the initial 16-bit range). On vinyl, in the best scenario, it’s also going to be on the right channel, 30 dBs quieter. That is NOT what I wanted, when mixing in the control room.Wow & flutter: non-measurable. “OK, but I heard about this thing called jitter”. In the 21st Century, properly designed DACs reject jitter to non-measurable outcomes on the reconstructed audio signal.THD: less than 0.001%.Won’t wear out if you take good care when manipulating it BUT, unfortunately, has a shelf-life of about 10 years. Look up CD Rot or Disc Rot (see pictures below added in March 2020). Which is why these media belong in the 20th Century.Why are we seeing all those posts about vinyl sounding better than CD then?Short answer: because a CD has virtually no limitations, with audio quality 100% of what it can be within just 0.1 dB of its maximum admissible levels, unscrupulous record labels have played a stupid game of cramming as much RMS (perceived volume) as possible onto the CD medium:sacrificing transients (micro dynamics). Snare drums sound like a wet fart on a plastic tarp (loosely quoting the greatest mastering engineer of all time - Sir Bob Ludwig).sacrificing overall dynamic range (macro dynamics). The chorus isn’t louder than the verses, or the intro, because everything else is already louder than everything else.introducing distortion. We’ve reached the supreme level of crass idiocy, as there comes a point where to be 0.5 dB louder than everyone else, you just end up distorting the audio signal. Guess what everyone else then does?Look up “CD Loudness War” for a developed explanation.You cannot do that on vinyl, even though there was a loudness war in the ’50s with jukeboxes; you cannot push a vinyl’s limitations nearly as far. You have to mix/master conservatively for vinyl, respecting a whole bunch of technical rules so that things translate well to the medium.Does the vinyl medium sound better than the CD medium? I hope I made my point that it doesn’t.Does an album mastered for loudness on CD sound better on its vinyl release? Most likely yes, as it won’t have the living daylights crammed out of it at the mastering stage.Does a properly mixed/mastered album (conservative dynamic range - i.e., not giving in to the Loudness War) released on CD sound better than the same album released on vinyl? Oh yes. By far.So what about MP3?Well, depending on everything explained above, it can sit anywhere between “slightly better than vinyl” to “worse than vinyl”. Can’t beat an uncompressed 16-bit 44.1kHz WAV or FLAC audio file. Even more so, a 24-bit 96kHz file.Now can we please move on to the 21st Century?March 2020 addendum, regarding how CDs (optical media in general) handle the test of 30 years+ of time passing by:I’d set aside some CDs from my collection, for my students to see, which show severe corrosion of the reflective layer. Or it could be the protective layer of lacquer on top of the label, that’s given up. The end result is the same: reflective aluminium surface is gone.All four of these CDs have been stored and handled with great care - this is not a result of surface wear in transport, etc. Just the passing of time.On the other hand, many of my CDs purchased at the same time - in the late ’80s - are still 100% fine.

Let us say you have a method that has the following definition:std::string Person::getPicture(std::string id) {   std::string query = "SELECT picBlob FROM Person WHERE ID = '" + id + "' LIMIT 1;";  std::string res = "";  mysql_query(con, query.c_str());   MYSQL_RES *result = mysql_store_result(con);  MYSQL_ROW row;   while ((row = mysql_fetch_row(result))) {  res = row[0];  }  return res; } At first, it may look like it’s just a function that fetches a picture of a person in a database table. However along this code is a disaster waiting to happen.That is since the method mysql_store_result() will initialize memory in the heap but once it exits the current instance of getPicture, the memory will still persist in the heap, occupying memory space yet unused.Now imagine, if let us say the program who is using this is a chat client, where this method will be used a hundred times per minute? Imagine that there are 1000 calls of a 1mb picture file, that means it will already consume 1gb of memory!So that means as the chat client runs for a long period of time, you will notice that the amount of memory that chat client consumes will grow significantly. It wont be even surprising if it grows as big as 100gb depening on the size of the picture being retrieve in the database.This is a disaster since the program will eventually be forced to exit and refresh again in order to remove the occupying and yet unused memory. Now what if it is not a chat program but a server?So the server program will have to restart a couple of times a day and in the user’s perspective the server is having consistent downtime which has a disastrous impact for the company that is using the program.Edit: Ofcourse the fix for this is to use mysql_free_result before the function returns the picture string blob. But yeah simple things like this can escalate pretty quickly.

Which other video game has an insanely amazing intro like Battlefield 1?I’ll post a video for each, and then talk about it.Battlefield V, ironically, has a really nice, tonally consistent intro on par with the last game. People will conveniently forget this is how the game opens, so they can pretend the game is somehow SJW propaganda instead. DICE should’ve marketed the game using this cinematic, because it’s amazing.I don’t really care for Fallout 4 as an RPG, but Bethesda slammed it home with the opening. So much of this entry doesn’t feel like a proper Fallout game, but this intro isn’t one of them.World in Conflict is a sadly forgotten RTS from Ubisoft that deserves a lot more love. Playing like a video game adaption of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising it’s definitely worth a play if you have a PC and access to it.Resident Evil 3 has an opening that really speaks for itself. While Resident Evil 2 starts in medias res, this game actually got the chance to show us what the fall of Raccoon City looked like.FEAR 2 tops my list of greatest sequels ever made. The intro sets the bleak and depressing tone the entire game maintains. I can’t find a good full video of the entire mission, but if you’ve not given this (and the first one) a go I highly recommend it.Last, but not least, is the unexpected inclusion of a Valve game on one of my lists. I don’t care for Valve games as a whole, but Left 4 Dead has a certain aesthetic I appreciate. For me the gameplay and story didn’t really pan out here, but I love this opening all the same.All videos property of their respective owners.