It's an internet-TV show the follows a group (not a documentary, it's all staged) that releases movies. The first "season" was very good and I highly recommend it. The second has yet to really interest me. I watched a few episodes but it's different from the first.
This reminds me of using oth.net to browse ftps for tracks in late 1990s. I used to burn custom mixes for friends in high school back then before napster exploded and everyone had a burner. On a 28.8 or even 56k connection it was an amazingly tedious process to download tracks from ftps. It is pretty insane how you can download an entire discography today in the amount of time it took to download some single tracks back then. oth.net is still active today it looks like, crazy.
I made some pretty good beer money running one of those FTP sites by making people download Bonzai buddy for a password. I feel a bit bad for advancing that purple ape, but at least I could increase my sysadmin skills on something that didn't matter.
+1. I was running an FTP server on one of the few multi-honed T3 connections (late 90's) in our city. OTH sent me a ton of traffic, which also included RIAA scouts. I almost lost my job after they sent a C&D to our IT department; I was ~16 years old at the time and was forgiven.
It's all relative. I moved out of my parents house and left behind my old computer and 56k modem. I came back a few months later and found my brother had BearShare or something running with all these downloads trickling it at .5 kbps, and found that he had amassed hundreds of megabytes of MP3's.
I remember those days - I used to download mixes, albums, tracks over ISDN, which was basically an all-night affair. Getting up in the morning in anticipation of listening to a new Global Underground compilation is something that just rarely happens these days.
Not having everything readily available made me appreciate the smaller, but carefully selected collection I maintained.
I still buy lots of music, since I prefer to own my collection and don't want to rely on a streaming service. However these days I find myself to be much quicker to hit the skip button and enjoying a new album is more often than not a short lived pleasure. The downside of modern conveniences I guess.
Believe it or not, it's a kind of altruism. You've benefitted for years from these networks. You get to know the people involved. And now you have the skills to contribute something back to the community.
(That and, as a sibling said, being taken seriously despite your age)
I have no personal experience but from my observations I see it like this:
Number one you are a part of something big, even small groups can have massive impacts from their leaks/releases. It's no fluke that the demographics for scene members often favors younger people, I know that for the internet in general, when I was younger, it was a magic place where age didn't matter, only merits. I would assume the scene is no different. It doesn't matter how much you make, and your race, religion, age are not important. You are judged by what you can DO not who you ARE. That alone is a VERY powerful motivator.
Secondly I think the scene is very appealing to people who have a tech inclination plus a love/hobby for something else (Software, movies. music, etc). The scene allows them to interact with people who share the same interests and gives them access (through top sites or similar) to more content that they love.
Lastly sharing. When I like/love something there is a part of me that wants to share it with everyone else. When that something is funny story then all is well and good but when it's a TV show/movie/album/etc it's a little harder to share. Sure you can share a link to Amazon/Netflix/etc but unless your friend already pays for access then you share isn't "free". It's free to you but not to the person you are sharing. Piracy makes it easier to share because you don't let those pesky laws get in the way. Even so sharing is not 100% free, you can tell someone about a piece of content but they still have to go find it, download it, and then they can watch it. Topsites are like your friends opening up all of their content so that you can sample it on your own or go grab something on their recommendation. There is still a little friction to the sharing (a direct link to watch would be ideal) but it's about as close as you can get.
That's just my 2 cents.
To answer directly to: What motivates someone to risk so much and invest so much time and money into participating in the scene today?
I, for example, love messing around with web dev. Because of this I have tried out (and continue to pay for) a number of online hosting platforms (both dedicated, shared, and your AWS/DO/RS/Google clouds) either to try them out or because I am long-term hosting things on them. This ends up being a fair amount of money when all is said and done but it's my hobby, it's what I love and it benefits me at work. Now other than the "benefits me at work" bit I don't see how my hobby is any different from file sharers (legality aside). Even then I'm sure you can learn skills participating in a release group that can benefit you in your professional life (server management, release planning, etc).
Keep in mind that the majority of the torrents are actually scene leaks (never intended for public distribution). The scene is now a well known thing, but years ago it was a very exclusive club.
Certainly not the majority. Scene releases still feature, but they are no longer consistently the first to market, and they are almost universally derided for prioritising speed over quality.
Scene rules are anachronistic and slow to change. The MP3 scene stuck to -V2 VBR for far too long, for example; the change to -V0 VBR in 2011 came as the sharing of FLACs was already ubiquitous outside the scene, and it wasn't until 2012 that the FLAC scene was established. Even now CUE and LOG files are not required from a CD source, which is insane.
for me, it was about getting anything and everything the moment it hit the sites. It was just fun knowing I had access to it faster than most others. Most of the time spent in the irc channel was just bullshitting about what was going on in front of you.
I remember seeing people at flea markets selling bootleg compact discs. They'd rent a booth and have boxes and boxes of them in those fluorescent colored plastic holders, the ones you could buy in 500 packs at Sam's Club or Egghead. Some of them even printed out fake covers and labels on inkjet printers, heck they would be doing it in between customers.
I couldn't figure out why the cops never came and shut them down. Same goes for the gas stations or convenience stores that sold obviously bootlegged movies for $3 on the check-out counter.
Now I want to read an article on Adil R. Cassim, the guy behind that whole ring.
In some parts of the world (Singapore, Malaysia are places I have seen) there are shops in malls that openly sell copies of stuff. In fact when I first bought a PS3 and went looking for games for it in Singapore I was frequently turned away with "Oh, you want originals? We don't do that here".
...coupled with the "legitimizing" effect of paying some amount of money for something. aka "You wouldn't steal a car would you?" "No, but I might pay a dollar for it".
A group of my distant family were all into selling knock-off purses at flea markets. They all did it for years without any problems from the law. Suddenly about two years ago the police cracked down on everybody and they all had to stop due to being arrested & getting in trouble. I had heard it was due to some type of political pressure that had originated from the designers. I.e the correct local politicians palms had been greased.
I'd imagine the bootleg movie selling would be similar. The police don't really care until someone above them puts out the order to deal with it.
I couldn't figure out why the cops never came and shut them down.
At one Dutch internet marketplace, you still see people selling Garmin maps (topos) which are clearly copies. They even have the gut to say 'one topo for 25 Euro, two topos for 40 Euro'. Nobody seems to care.
As someone who buys them legally, I am quite appalled these businesses (since the people who purchase them legally are paying higher prices to compensate the profits of these crooks).
I'm not convinced that is always the case... there will always be downward pressure to compete, as long as there is competition. Copyright/Patent laws have been extended so far that it's become difficult or impossible to compete fairly, so black and grey markets become more viable as competition.
If you liked this I'd check out http://www.welcometothescene.com/ The first season is great, I never got into the second season. It's an interesting format for a show, most all text with just some music in the background but I quite enjoyed it.
It's hard to believe one person was able to successfully leak so much material. I got into album leaks in the early-mid 2000's. Even if I would end up buying the album anyway, that first listen of the leaked album was awesome.
...if the MP3 was just as good, why bother with the CD...
The thing is, MP3 _isn't_ “just as good”. A rendering in lossless compression from a CD still sounds different than a 320 kBPS MP3. Which is why I just can't get over the iTunesStore selling sound in 256 kBPS. Much too bad. Amazon does 320 kBPS, but it's still not good enough.
For the majority of people, mp3s seem to be "just as good" enough.
I remember some low-bitrate songs encoded with some very early encoder where you could hear a difference. Not necessarily "the" difference but "a" difference. After a couple of years the worst encoder anyone could find was better already and since 192kbps bitrates mp3s were 99.999% there.
I'm sure that a trained ear can hear differences between 256kbps vs. 320kbps in a special studio with high-end audiocards, amplifiers and speakers but 99.999% of all people don't and they don't own the equipment either.
The conventional wisdom is just that - MP3s don't sound any different than their CD counterpart, but we all know that they don't have the same degree of fidelity to the original mastered audio files. While it is true that most cannot detect the differences between MP3 (and other lossy formats) and PCM (lossless) audio, this is beginning to change as consumers become used to a higher quality of sound delivery than before. The popularity of Beats headphones, for instance, meant that hip hop producers could no longer just push the limiter until the sub bass begins to sound farty - their fans were all equipped to hear the differences now.
Vinyl playback, in the pre-CD days, had consumers interested in a whole different kind of audio fidelity. The noises in the record were largely ignored, and nobody tried to get past them. Now, all listeners notice the sound of a vinyl record immediately, and people either love it or hate it.
The point I'm making here is that audio fidelity and quality are separate topics, but while fidelity is an objective measurement of audio, quality is a subjective one, and it shifts with the culture of the day. The problem with the MP3 and other lossy audio formats is that they are taken to be the same as their lossless origins. Consumers will catch up to the decay that MP3 codecs cause and feel the same way about them that a millennial feels about VHS tapes. It may take a few years, or even decades, to arrive there, though.
>The popularity of Beats headphones, for instance, meant that hip hop producers could no longer just push the limiter until the sub bass begins to sound farty - their fans were all equipped to hear the differences now.
I think you're being overly charitable about how well Beats perform.
Not really. They're terrible headphones in the grand scheme of things - especially in terms of their price:performance - but they're a huge upgrade for most consumers.
That's probably the weakest compliment that I've heard for a set of headphones ever. I have something like 7 pairs of earbuds and I pine for the bass that I remember from my crummy Philips HS820 (foldable neckband) headphones.
For some reason the only place to get good earbuds is from someone who is selling something else: Samsung's in-ear earbuds sold with Galaxy devices and Apple's earbuds are both somewhere between OK and pretty good.
>For some reason the only place to get good earbuds is from someone who is selling something else
Or you buy quality stand-alones from Shure, Sennheiser, Beyer Dynamic, or Sony (and many more probably)? I always throw into my e-waste bin the Apple earbuds since they're both really low quality. The Shure SE215s are so much better than any bundled earbuds it's barely an opinion.
> Consumers will catch up to the decay that MP3 codecs cause and feel the same way about them that a millennial feels about VHS tapes. It may take a few years, or even decades, to arrive there, though.
I'm not sure if that's really a fair comparison. The difference in both video and sound quality between a VHS tap and a DVD is easily noticeable. There is also improved cost and improved convenience. Cost and convenience won't vary much with the higher quality or lossless digital formats, so you're solely relying on quality, which most people seem to have a hard time distinguishing between.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of: DVDs don't need to be rewound, discs take up less space than tapes, DVDs don't degrade with repeated viewings, you don't have to futz with tracking when watching a DVD (I totally forgot about tracking until now! Good riddance!), DVDs come with multiple audio and subtitle tracks (anime fans especially love these), DVDs can be watched on a computer without specialized equipment (seriously, this was the main reason I switched to DVD as a teenager: I could watch one on the same screen I did everything else on!), DVDs can have all kinds of special features...
If it was a simple matter of a quality difference that was barely perceptible to the human ear, especially on consumer-grade equipment, DVDs would have never replaced VHS.
Oh, and audiophile equipment still hasn't trickled down to the consumer level yet. Every other technology that starts as a high-end professional thing trickles down to the consumer, but audiophile equipment stays right in the ultra-high-end so-expensive-your-wallet-cries sector forever and ever and ever.
The trouble with audiophile gear is that it is really a scam to separate people from their money. I've found that, for me at least, the best deals for music fidelity are in studio-type equipment. A good pair of powered mid-field studio monitors and a Focusrite FireWire audio interface gets me sound that would cost $thousands if I bought audiophile-market gear.
Also, there are some interesting audio cards for the Raspberry Pi that are quite reasonable and offer great sound. I've set up an old Model B with the Wolfson card and RuneAudio, and plugged in my monitors. Outstanding sound from a box that cost less than $100.
Audio is engineering, not magic. Sure, people can spend big bucks on AudioQuest cables with Extra Bling, but I'm not one of them. I even consider Monster to be a ripoff.
I know somebody who used to buy Monster, but only because he worked at Best Buy (this was years ago: he quit Best Buy in 2007), and his employee discount was so good that he was paying considerably less for Monster than he would've paid for dirt-cheap cables anywhere else.
He would show off, too: dude had his apartment wired with Monster outdoor cables, just because he wanted to show off that his employee discount was so good that even a broke-ass college student can afford to buy Monster outdoor cables on it and use them everywhere.
Maybe. The competing standard for many, many years was analog FM, though. Most places now don't even have the 300kb/s digital radio.
192kb/s is definitely good enough for the vast majority of people. There are always going to be audiophiles and artists who make derivative works, but those aren't the people who are served by the widespread piracy of media.
Music consumers won't catch up to the decay that mp3's cause, _by definition_. Consumers only listen to music. The most sensitive, highly trained ears listening to the absolute best equipment in a perfect environment cannot reliably tell the difference between a decent mp3 and the original CD. Anybody who tries to distinguish guesses wrong as often as they guess right. Anybody who thinks they can tell the difference either got lucky the first time and quit testing, or is doing a flawed test (improper blinding, bad encoder, etc.)
The only way any consumer will ever notice that music is from an MP3 is if it's a bad encoding. That's the fault of whoever chose the encoding parameters, or picked an obsolete encoder. But even CDs aren't immune from stupid people. Lots of poor quality CDs are produced. I actually bought a major label CD with a song that clipped! It was mastered so loud that it clipped, and they didn't even bother to fix it. That's the sort of problem you can detect with software -- if you're deaf, because even my grandma could hear the flaw. How that got released, I'll never know. Yuck!
Only music producers may notice the "decay" you speak of. MP3 compression throws away data. It's data that no human ear can possibly hear, but when you're in the business of making music, you want to do things like process samples to change how they sound. It's possible to transform uncompressed audio data to bring out sounds that weren't audible before. Those inaudible sounds are likely to be thrown away by an mp3 encoder, making that sort of processing impossible.
But even CD quality PCM audio isn't lossless. It's perfect for listening to, but it's not great for processing. Music is often recorded and processed at higher bit-depths and frequencies before being compressed down to CD quality. You can't possibly hear the difference among studio quality 24 bit 192 khz, CD-quality 16 bit 44 khz, and a good mp3 encoding -- but the studio quality data gives you more processing headroom.
The photography world has analogous issues. Professional photographers and serious amateurs often shoot "raw". Their camperas are capable of producing normal jpeg files, but they don't use that feature. Instead they shoot and process massive, uncompressed files containing the raw sensor data. They then export the processed raw files to jpeg for publishing or printing. You can't see the difference between a raw file and a jpeg. (Actually, a jpeg straight off the camera often looks better than the raw file because the camera does a bit of processing.) The reason photographers bother with the big, unwieldy raw files is that they have more processing headroom. If a raw photo is too dark and there's a big black shadow in one corner, you can ofter brighten it up in postpressing and reveal the flowers that were there. If you do the same to a jpeg, which has much less information, the big black shadow will often brighten up into a big gray shadow. The "invisible" detail in the flowers has been thrown away during compression. The point is, the original unprocessed images looked the same. The differences are invisible in the same way that the differences between CD audio and good mp3s are inaudible. The differences only matter when you go to process the data.
I appreciate what you're saying, and largely agree, but I'm not sure your photography analogy holds up. Although this could just be my ignorance of photography because I'm not 100% sure what data "raw" formats hold. But from the sounds of it, that might be closer compared to a tracked out song, meaning pre-mixdown, where you're accessing individual instrument recordings.
As an aside, I know producers who have sampled from lossy formats and had those songs put on major labor records. It's not that big of an issue, though I suppose how the sample is used could make in impact on it.
You speak of ...compressing down to CD quality. That's wrong. The samples stored on a CD are not compressed, as opposed to compressed formats like MP3.
The issue is that you can't reencode. I can't take a 256kbps MP3 (or even 320) and then reencode it at 128kbps for my portable media player without significant lossage.
Have you gone through a blind test? Because most musicians, DJs and producers I know that tried it, either couldn't tell a difference, or told it wrong, on a big enough sample. I'm not even mentioning people who are not music industry professionals.
Don't forget that the early encoders were pretty bad. It seems conceivable that a old encoders might have produced 320 kbit mp3s that were distinguishable from CDs in blind tests. Perhaps tempodox gave up on mp3s before they got good?
Have you ABX tested 320kbps mp3 against flac? If so, what track was it, and what audio equipment? If not, the difference you heard was the placebo effect of knowing it was flac.
All lossy codecs have some problem samples and cranking up the bitrate isn't a guarantee of transparency. Newer codecs tend to do better than MP3, and at lower bitrates. The only point in lossy encoding is to save space, so it makes sense to do it as efficiently as possible, and considering that, 320 CBR is actually the worst of both worlds because it always wastes space, and is often overkill anyway.
An AAC file from a good implementation of the encoder (e.g. Apples, or either from Fraunhofer including the Open Source FDK-AAC from Android) will usually (for most people, with most music) achieve transparency in the mid to high hundreds of kbps.
The material listened to always makes a difference, therefore unqualified arguments about "can always tell" or "never can tell" are always flawed.
I could tell the difference. I produce music, and I can usually tell the difference between low and high bit-rate MP3s. Certain sounds are handled poorly at lower bit-rates: especially high-frequency sounds - you tend to hear obvious artifacting which comes across as 'mushy'.
The link above is clearly a biased example where there are barely any real high-end sounds, and therefore it would easily fool an untrained ear. I think if they had more than one example, across a range of music styles, then it would be a fairer test.
It would be incredibly easy to produce a better test. The hard part is getting permission from copyright holders.
Now - I'm sure a lot of people can't hear the difference because they don't know what to listen for.
The issue isn't that the difference doesn't exist or that it's "not audible" in some objective sense.
It's that they're not listening to the sound in the same way a producer or engineer listen to sound.
Listening is an active process. It involves a lot of unconscious focussing on specific elements of the sound/music.
You can argue whether or not this matters, but that's really an economic argument about distribution and storage costs, not an absolute argument about the physics of audio compression.
Saying the difference isn't audible at all is like saying that you may as well quantise all rhythms right on the beat because most people can't tell by ear if beats are early or late.
>Saying the difference isn't audible at all is like saying that you may as well quantise all rhythms right on the beat because most people can't tell by ear if beats are early or late.
This is a great analogy that gets to the key point: most of the things that make records sound good are 'inaudiable.' That's why making music is so hard.
Back in the old days, a traditional test of a music setup was to jangle your keys in front of the mic. MP3 is optimized (understandably) for pure tones and melodic instruments; it's the percussive sounds where it can't quite keep up.
If you want something that's more likely to be on an actual track, try cymbals, and listen especially for the moment just before the "actual" sound.
There have been many properly conducted (double blind, level matched) ABX[1] tests. It's easy to test yourself: encode a lossless CD rip to various bitrates of whatever codec you want to try, and use software like the ABX plugin for foobar2000, or similar standalone software to compare the lossless and lossy versions. You may be surprised at how low you can go before noticing much difference.
Some sounds compress better than others, and the different codecs (MP3, AAC, Vorbis, Opus etc.) tend to have different problem samples, so take your time and play about. Of course the only point in lossy encoding is to save space (or bandwidth), so it makes sense to do it efficiently hence MP3 CBR320 is rarely the best option, despite it's popularity as a common "go to" solution.
Back in the time period being talked about, 96kbps was common, 128kbps was top of the line (no VBR), and absolutely you can hear the difference between that and uncompressed.
I wish this website had a downvote button of sorts as this is a ridiculous notion. You have VBR MP3s that rival vinyl. You have FLAC, you have Ogg. People say "lossless" is such a big deal with MP3s but your ear can't really discern anything (unless you're still a teenager) above 256kbps anyways. It largely depends on the speakers, monitors & how they are made that you're listening through. Do your research.
You seem to be confusing compression bit rate with audio frequency. Even if my ears can't hear frequencies above, say 15 kHz, that doesn't mean I can't hear compression artifacts in music compressed at any particular bit rate.
Yes, there may be a lot of audio content where what you say is true. But there is also audio content where I can hear differences. You may find such content uninteresting or the differences negligible, but I don't.
It's an internet-TV show the follows a group (not a documentary, it's all staged) that releases movies. The first "season" was very good and I highly recommend it. The second has yet to really interest me. I watched a few episodes but it's different from the first.