There’s a really funny duality to mistakes in recorded art that is vastly different when viewed as a fan and the creator.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
>As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums.
Me too. For me as a Genesis fan since I was a teenager, the worst example of a change has been the 'remastered' version of Supper's ready. There's a 'mistake' in the bass part right at the end, which to me is absolutely beautiful. It's about 22:46 in, right at the fade, and he plays the wrong bass note, a tone (I think) above what should be there, and then resolves down to the root note of the chord. Always loved this, it sounds lyrical and works really well.
And in the remastered version, it's not there, he goes straight to the root note.
And for me, it ruins 20+ minutes of buildup. I never listen to the remastered version and I'm glad I ripped my CDs back in the day so I have a record of the original (and for me, far better) bass part. Yes, it's only one note, but it's a great note!
They are given fake names and identities in the platform in a deliberate intent to mislead the audience, deprive the real author of credit, and hide the real source of the work the major record labels. “Fake artist” is a generous term.
what is an artist name, alias, etc. if not a fake name? should people be forced to put their government id name on display to be deemed real artists?
there are some genres in which making up artist names, even just for a one-off release, is almost the point and part of the fun of making music. should artists be forced to release music under one name exclusively as well?
Indeed, ghost writing/producing being so popular in the ecosystem that if a "Real-name mandate" happened over-night, much of the industry would be in shambles as people realize most superstars don't write and/or produce their own music.
they can look up credits of any given song right now and realize that literally everybody involved in music making has some sort of made up name, be they a singer, songwriter, producer, engineer, or whomever. like, spotify has a credits button. it's not really a revelation.
I'm hitting a bug where clicking New York just refreshes the page instead of loading the city's page. Los Angeles, San José, and... most cities seem to exhibit it. Chicago seems to work?
Picking a city was tough. It insisted on the more general New York instead of the more specific Long Island City.
So is Apple the building that contains a Starbucks or the business known as Starbucks? It seems like it’s both — that is a problem. Is Starbucks charging its customers steep costs for entering the building? Where does the existing App Store with its large transaction fees and restrictions around billing fit into this analogy?
I remember finding that secret track based on that "0 is also a number" and being blown away. IIRC there's at least one other secret song in another track's pre-roll.
The separation of art and artist is a complex thing that differs from person to person. I think one universal aspect is that one's willingness to divest from art (or product, in this case) is relative to the ratio of disgust felt for the artist to desire for the product. Elon has reached a point of cultural over-saturation while Tesla's products move in the wrong direction on the ladder of cultural cache, the result of their (Tesla vehicles') own foibles and the industry as a whole just becoming more competitive. While plenty of people won't buy his cars, I'm sure they will or would still use a Tesla Supercharger if they could, because the value there is simply too compelling and the relationship is brief but powerful.
Elon in particular has become a liability thanks to his deliberate efforts to be the face and voice of Tesla. For me and clearly others, it's no longer possible to think of Tesla independently of him. His products need to be that must better to work against it and they're just not making the cut.
Other products -- Shell, Nestle -- are reevaluated for disgust-vs-need each time. Most of us have tiny, brief interactions with these companies. There's no meaningful relationship, so I'd have to be extremely furious with a brand to avoid their product. Right now I'll get gas from Shell but not Lukoil, for instance.
I love CSS Grid. When you’ve got a design that really needs it, it feels like magic. But truthfully, I so often try to use it but wind up back with flexbox. Or there’s some quirk to a design that just doesn’t work out. Subgrid will make it much more usable (at least as I understand it) and I’m very excited for it to have wider support.
There is something flexbox cant. Center the content columns but align rows with uneven numbers at the start. Unless I'm missing something. I don't want to nest more stuff
Cassettes are coming back in a big way. They never totally died in the underground metal world, especially black metal, but they’re bigger right now that at any time in my 20-ish years of recording and releasing music. They have a few benefits: extremely cheap to make and ship. Easy to store in a small apartment, car, pocket. More durable than a CD. Imperfect and grimy in a way that feels appropriate for underground music that celebrates rawness. My new album was released at the end of September and it’s selling well across all formats but the only ones where we’re sold out: limited edition vinyl colors and — you guessed it — cassettes.
After years of fighting it, I’m finally getting a new tape player for Christmas. I’m a digital audio guy but so many albums that I want to listen to can only be found on YouTube or tape and I want to support the bands directly. I can get a modern unit complete with rechargeable battery and Bluetooth for $160. https://www.wearerewind.com/ Finally, I can use my AirPod Max headphones to listen to a $6 raw black metal cassette as the Dark Lord intended.
New tape decks are poor quality, even wearerewind which puts it in a cool package uses the only new mechanism still manufactured, same as everyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WleZGWAebsY&t=33s . It may be fine for some genres though ;)
The only way to play cassettes with high fidelity is to use a vintage tape deck, some of them are amazing.
This irks me. Not that it's not true, but that tapes come with protective packaging intrinsic to the tape itself, whilst CDs are the raw media that you actually touch with your fingers etc.
CDs, way back when, were touted as the future not only because of their increased capacity for sound quality but also, ironically, their durability.
Would CDs be actually more durable if they were also packaged with a small plastic exterior that was insertable into the player, like tapes?
(Tape as raw medium isn't very durable if treated the same way as a CD. Tape needs that plastic exterior to even be viable).
This actually existed; I remember, back in my youth, handling an optical disc for a Sun machine that was packaged the same way that floppies were - within a hard plastic enclosure with a little sliding mechanism that was activated by pushing the package into the slot (exactly the way 3.5" floppies worked).
Yeah, my first CD-ROM drive was like this [1], the enclosure could be opened to place the CD inside.
The drive came with one enclosure, I'm not aware that anyone (including me) ever bothered buying additional enclosures. This surely wasn't helped by the fact that Audio-CD's (with their mechanical trays) were already widespread and produced at large volume without such a cartridge-enclosure...
Also DVD-RAM, when in the writer, had a shell. The single sided ones could be removed from the shell easily and put in a DVD drive (I do not recall if they worked in a regular DVD player)
One of the biggest wastes of money, for me. I got way more use out of my minidisc stuff, which is another optical disc in a case. In fact I still have my net-MD recorder/player, and it works fine.
Oh, if only they hadn't jacked up MiniDisc with all the copyright-related stuff. A beautiful replacement for the convenience of cassettes (portability, battery life) with most of the benefits of CD (better sound, can't be eaten by the motors). Unfortunately expensive and never took off in the US.
CDs seem to be pretty resilient compared to tapes, from my experience buying used media. A small percentage of CDs will be unrippable, but a fair number of tapes are torn or self-destruct, and the players can have tape-destroying failure modes, aside from being mostly collections of belts that inevitably stretch, melt, or snap. One I was fiddling with managed to wrap several metres of tape around the capstan shaft so tightly it had to be cut off with a penknife.
VHS tapes seemed to be even worse at this. We had several dozen incidents of "tape stuck in player" and we were pretty careful with them. Fast-forward to the 2020s, when my wife has been trying to rip some VHS to computer, and it requires considerable babysitting of fragile tapes and players to get it to work reliably.
Personally experince was that DVDs became unplayable way more often than VHS tapes, especially if kids had any part in the handling. It's all anecdotal but I really soured on CD/DVD media due to the apparent need for clean-room handling to keep them playable.
I grew up with CDs and never knew of one cracking. With sufficient scratching it was possibly to get them the skip, but even friends who kept CDs unboxed in piles round the CD player didn't have this problem.
No, but if you manage to scratch the aluminum foil layer on the backside, the CD instantly becomes useless. Or when you store cd's in large unboxed stacks, they can stick together, which can also damage the backside.
It seemed to me the main risk was those CD cases with the little plastic fingers on the centre; they seemed to require a big force to get the CD in or out.
I was there for the late 80s and 90s and my personal experience is mixed!
Now if a CD fails with a horrible scratch, it fails completely sometimes.
However, CDs often got kicked around the interior of cars for months and you could pick them up, wipe them off, give them a polish and they’d still play!
Tape would degrade naturally through usage.
Tape twists and stretches. Tape players can and would destroy tapes.
We never purchased new cassette tape audio. It was purely a portable disposable medium for the original Vinyl or CD. A way to copy music and play it in the car!
Hah! Nice call out, but they even required the 'reel' to keep them somewhat manageable.
My dad had a reel to reel player. First time I heard Hocus Pocus by Focus was on that device. Still one of my top ten favourite songs. He's probably still got it too.
Most modern CD players have cheap mechanisms. The oldest, heavy duty CD players can often read right through damage that would result in skips on a modern player.
Caveat Emptor. The "We are rewind" player is absolutely awful quality. There are any number of reviews of it around, here's one from a respected YouTuber:
One of my favorite experiences from my daughter’s earliest years was the realization that she was able to think about, describe, and deliberately do things much earlier than I realized. More plainly: once I recognized she was doing something deliberately, I often went back and realized she had been doing that same thing for days or weeks prior. We encountered this a lot with words but also physical abilities, like figuring out how to make her BabyBjorn bouncer move. We had a policy of talking to her like she understood on the off-chance that she could and just couldn’t communicate it. She just turned 5 and continues to surprise us with the complexity of her inner world.
We did this, and I'd add that repeating what they say back to them so they get that feedback is important too. It's startling to see the difference between our kids and their class mates, who's parents don't talk them (I know this from observing at the countless birthday parties, school events, and sports events). Talking to kids is like watering flower, they bloom into beautiful beings.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.