*art, and *meme - as you all know, Tom's Diner is the song regarding mp3 compression.

A bit misleading. MP3 is stored as frames, uncompressed audio is not. This causes tiny phase differences that when nulled causes the differences to be much larger than what they actually are. Don't get me wrong, the resulting sound resembles what we hear in this clip, just with LOT less transients (beginning of sound, for ex "t" in "the"). If you want a true difference between MP3 and uncompressed, it needs to be resynced each frame. The further the clip advances, the differences grow to be larger and larger as the two streams drift apart more and more.

Also to be fair that's a bunch of bullshit...the technology exists to overcome all of those issues. You really can't count it as she IS singing if no one can hear it and what they can hear is a pre-recorded track...one that was most likely auto-tuned so even THAT isn't a live pre-recording.

I just don't get the logic of the fans and the defenders....you like the music you "hear" on the radio...you like the music you "hear" on your CDs or MP3s. When you are paying top dollar to "hear" and now "see" that music performed live why is it OK to let the "live music" slide and be sacrificed for a dog and pony show that doesn't have anything to do with the music you were drawn to in the first place?

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

Regarding sound quality, the masses have spoken and their response is "meh, good enough".

Convenience is now prized over quality.

I find it hilarious when people spend thousands on a sound system and then plug a mp3 player into it...

Interesting. I find that I learn MUCH better with Rocksmith than I do from a straight tab. I hate the difficulty levels; I'd rather just show ALL of the notes ALL of the time (although that is easily fixed by just selecting the whole song and turning up the difficulty to 100%), but riff repeater plus slowing a song down to 60% or so (depending on how tough the bits are) has been my new ideal way of learning more difficult songs.

But for bass at least, I find that I'm able to sight-read the majority of songs to 97%+ accuracy. Probably 9 out of 10 new songs that I try, even if I've never looked at a tab before, I can get that kind of accuracy with the Rocksmith note highway / tab hybrid.

I do agree that sometimes it would be nice to be able to pause and just show a pure tab, to have more time to prepare and anticipate what things are coming. I know of two things to assist with that:

1) I know that there is a program that somebody put together that can read Rocksmith .psarc files and automatically create a tab text file from the song's arrangements. I can't recall the name of it, but I know it exists -- I've seen people talking about it at www.customsforge.com, the community for creating custom Rocksmith DLC tracks. I'll do some searching and see if I can find the exact name of that program for you.

2) As an alternative to Rocksmith if you prefer reading tabs but like playing along with the recording, check out "Go Playalong", which you can use to sync a guitar pro or powertab format tab with an .mp3 or other audio file and do Rocksmith-like features like slowing down, etc. but with the cursor scrolling through a traditional text-based tab. I sometimes use this also, but overall I prefer Rocksmith now. Works quite a bit like GuitarPro, but the cursor scrolling through the song is more intelligent about keeping bars ahead of your current position in view, and most importantly it lets you sync up to an actual recording rather than just playing back MIDI.

HOPE X just featured Ellsberg and Snowden, and it was better than ever. So keep an eye out for recordings of it, I should be able to provide a link by tomorrow morning.

Edit 07/20: audio recording

Ellsberg live at HOPE X right now, epic as always: http://radio.hope.net/feeds/

Edit: Snowden up in 10 minutes

Edit: Ellsberg brought out the big guns, serious dose of dignity and decency here. There better be a bloody recording available for download later.

Edit 07/20: audio recording

It's been tested and the "best" audiophiles can't hear differences between 14bit and 16bit, nor can they hear differences between 44.khz and ANYTHING higher. In some tests they could use12bit sound with 36khz sampling frequency... The differences they hear are inside their head. Thus the description of improved sound is always "air", "brilliance", "organic" etc.. Don't be fooled by their fancy gear, most of it is for nothing. Cables: i am always willing to bet my months salary on doubleblind tests, 10 000€/m against a coat hanger, no audible differences.. It's all about confirmation bias, you think there's a change and suddenly you hear it.

About MP3s vs PCM:
Here we have audible differences. But. Put on high enough energy, ie turn your amp high enough, suddenly double blind studies can't find which is which. But it can be audible, mp3 is lossy format and even 320kbps can be heard. Not with all material, it's about in the limits of human hearing. Some might hear high end loss, if you're in your twenties. Once you hit 40, everything above 17khz is gone, forever. You will never hear 20k again. And to really notice the difference, you need good gear. Your laptop earphone output most likely won't even output anything past 18khz well and it's dynamic range can be represented with 8bit depth.. It can be just horrible. Fix that with usb box, around 80€: you can take that box anywhere on planet to the most "hifiest" guy out there and he can't hear the difference between his 10000€ A/D converter.. In fact, 5€ A/D converter can produce the same output as 3000€ one... That's not why i said buy a external.. It's more to do with RF and other shielding, protection against the noises a computer makes than A/D conversion quality. Note, i'm talking about audible differences, you can find faults with measuring equipment and 95% of the gear price is about "just to be sure".

If you want a good sound, first, treat your room. Dampen it, shape it.. If you spent 10k on stereo and 0 on acoustics, you will not have a good sound no matter what you do. Spend the same amount on acoustics than what you do on you equipment, room makes a lot more differences than gear. Next comes speakers, they are the worst link in the chain by a large margin. Quality costs, still wouldn't go to extremes here either, the changes are again "just to be sure", not always audible.. Then amps, beefy, low noise, A/B. You don't need to spend a huge lot of money but some. Then cables.. Take the 50€ version instead of 300€ or 3000€. Build quality and connectors, durability. Those are the reason to buy more expensive than 5€. Not because of sound quality.. There will always be group of people that will swear they can hear the differences, that's bullcrap. Human ear CAN NOT detect any chances, even meters are having a REALLY hard time getting any changes. You need to either amp up the signal to saturation point, or use frequencies in the Mhz ranges, thousands of times higher than what media needs to get any changes between cheapest crap and high end scams.

Audiophiles can't be convinced they are wrong, they are suffering from the same thing antivax people do: give them facts, they will be even more convinced they are right.

Here's a video that was (highly) recommended to me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpkoCZ4vBSI

I haven't had the time to watch it yet, just wanted to drop a link in case I forget about it.

Haven't gotten around to Wolff's latest podcast either:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/70559138/Econ_Update_Truthout_2014.02.20.WEB.mp3

Interesting. They reminded me of the Vespa MP3 before I saw the tag. I've always wanted an enclosed motorcycle design that was safe.

I'm wearing a jacket like that. Awesome place to hold your phone or MP3 player. The normal pockets get bashed around a lot if you don't have it zipped up.

I first heard Pete do this bit on his Podcast. It was an audio recording from the UCB theater in New York. He says it is an early version of the joke. Comparatively, the video version seems like he was going through the motion. The video also seems to be edited and the audience wasn't responding the same way. I'm not saying this was bad, it just wasn't as good as the UCB audio version. See for yourself, he plays the bit at the beginning of this podcast:

http://ec.libsyn.com/p/e/5/6/e568af5cf000d20d/YMIW11_Doug_Benson.mp3?d13a76d516d9dec20c3d276ce028ed5089ab1ce3dae902ea1d01c18731d5c859d1ae&c_id=4123069

If somehow there is a video of the UCB version, please let me know. I've Googled every word combination I could think of and this is the only video I could find.

You are right to be mad.
However, there's also the question of actual revenue loss.

For example, if I download an mp3 of a song, does that mean if I hadn't had a link or way to download it, would I have actually spent money buying it?

Of course there is actual revenue loss from piracy, but Hollywood and the RIAA have taken the claim to moronic levels.

I've heard him talk in the past about wanting to do some experiments that Discovery thought were too mundane, so they never did them, such as testing if analog audio, such as vinyl records and audio cassettes, actually do sound better than digital audio, such as CD and MP3.

In this clip it seemed like he was talking more about big experiments they weren't allowed to do rather than experiments that were too small.