Shane_B.

1 hour ago, Pragi said:

I agree with ol' honest Abe. Lol. Especially the " ... that said ... " part of one of his famous speeches, that almost nobody has ever heard of and historians hide ...

The place I read Washington's diary is at an online library. It's really a fascinating site for old writings and things like that if you're in to such things.

I seem to remember a thread about this site years ago. openlibrary dot org. They actually have scans of many very old documents and books. At least they used to. I haven't been to that site in years.

20 hours ago, kitekrazy said:

Izotope offers just don't tempt me

I got an email from them the other day so I checked out what the deal was. I didn't realize Ozone was up to 11 now. I'm still on 9 Advanced and it does more than I could ever want or need although it is a massive resource hog on my system. I probably couldn't even run 11. I think the key is to bounce or freeze all your tracks and only use O9A at that point.

That said, I can't say enough good about O9A. It helped me greatly in regard to mixing and mastering. I'm sure a professional or even a hobbyist who is far more capable than me could do what it does with various other VST's but for me it makes it all a lot simpler.

The graphical part of it that shows you where frequencies between different tracks were colliding is a huge help to me. I always struggled with isolating those problem areas.

37 minutes ago, craigb said:

Benjamin Franklin allegedly wanted the turkey to be America's bird...  Sounds about right!

I was reading part of George Washington's diary one time. You can find it online. He had an entry about the abundance of turkeys in the wild while they were out surveying parts of the east coast and how the survived off of them while camping out in the wilderness.

Anyhoo ... Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

Sumptin ain't right now that the forum is back up. I can no longer use the back button on my cell to go to the previous page I was viewing. I have to scroll up and tap on the coffee house tag and go back to the full list of threads then work my way back in.

Oh well. It's not the end of the world. It's just 20 to 40% more annoying than it used to be.

2 minutes ago, paulo said:

No I'm really not. I had no idea that paid radio was even a thing. I never listen to a radio at home and I don't even know how many stations the DAB radio in the car has, other than a lot, because I've never really bothered with it. If it's on then it's on the local one and when that gets tiresome ( like in the whole of December) then I just go with a random selection from the HD if I'm not in the mood for listening to an album. 

Yepper. It's a thing. The difference with XM is, if you buy an XM radio, almost all cars come with them here in what used to be the U.S., they operate off satellite. If you use the app, it goes through the internet.

I think people like our group here would enjoy youtube far more. There is way more and you can pick and choose what you want to hear. Plus you get all the vids and movies too.

Or you can put up with the ads and it all for free on youtube as well.

Sorry we hijacked your thread @craigb. I know that never ever happens here and you would never do such a thing. ??

17 hours ago, paulo said:

People pay for radio stations ?

Dont know if youre joking or not, lol, but Sirus XM has about 150 channels of music and talk radio commercial free. All randomly played.

YouTube on the other hand has the entire album catalog of a lot of artists. You can play the albums straight through or make a playlist or play things randomly. It's a little bit more than XM monthly, or less depending on what deal you can get from XM, but it's well worth it especially if you listen to a lot of music.

16 hours ago, CoveCamper said:

You talking about Sirius XM (satellite radio )?

I pay about $40 for three months. I been thinking about dropping it but sometimes I have long drives for my job. Going to call now and threaten to cancel.

Yep, Sirius XM. I just checked and with taxes it's $8.48 a month. I can use it on the app on my TV, cell, laptop, and my trucks radio or I can use the app through my truck via android auto. Using the app guves you access to more channels.

I just got an advertisement from them the other day that said I could add a family member (2nd radio and app access) for $5 a month.

I uploaded a video of me covering the lead to Hotel California. Just the lead. I set it to private before I even started uploading it. They immediately flagged it as soon as it was done uploading and wouldn't even let me watch it in private. I contacted them and said there were a dozen or more full covers of that song set to public and asked why my little snippet with no lyrics, set to private, was blocked. I never got a response but a few days later it was unblocked and monetized with 100% of "the royalties" going to the publisher. Looking back it really doesn't bother me that much but it was just frustrating as hell that I had to go through all that to share a little snippet of me playing guitar in private with a few friends and family. I could see if I set it to monetize and made it public, but it was set to private before it was even done uploading. Oh well.

That implies, for example that if anyone ever found out what we do on our DAWs in the privacy of our own home, we would be charged for it. Who knows, maybe that's next. Can you imagine one day we get a pop-up in the middle of recording that says "Copyrighted material has been detected by your DAW. Please click here to continue.". Then it locks the project and takes you to the publishers website where you have to pay royalties to continue. It's not so far fetched the way things are going. Heck, the gov just passed a law that fed controlled kill switches be in every new car starting in 2026, MIC of course. Nothing else would surprise me at this point.

I do understand they have to charge for their services. I have no problem with that. I think I mentioned that already? But the way it's handled and the amount they charge is not right by any stretch of the imagination.

5 hours ago, smallstonefan said:

looked into premium but felt $14 a month was extortion.

Every once in a while I'll get an ad for premium offering 3 months free and $139 for 12 months after if you pay a year in advance. It has only come up when I'm watching it on my TV. I've never seen it come up when watching YouTube on my cell or PC. To me, that's not a bad deal for a single user.

I also have XM. I get it for $7 a month. They raise the price significantly after a year, I call to cancel it, and they renew it for another year at $7. The tech support people even tell you to do that. He said to call back, and tell whoever I get on the phone I can't afford the price increase, and it's their standard policy to allow you to continue for your current rate.

Even with XM, I only listen to a few channels. My brother just reactivated his XM radio for $5 a month. They run specials all the time.

I'm seriously thinking of dropping XM and just getting YouTube Premium which includes the music app also. There are a lot of movies on YouTube also that are there legitimately. Not illegal rips that people post.

Another good way to stream is Amazon. You can add a lot of big streaming services for a single month then cancel.

You and I, we are not so different Bapu. I just gave away a couple million Bubcoins.

*insert range of emotion emojis here ranging from laughter to crying to acceptance*

Lol.

The last time I tried Ad Block Plus it wouldn't work. I'll have to give it another go.

You can also set your PC up to record anything and then just fast forward through the commercials. I watch a lot of Tubi and Freevee too.

I actually feel bad about using the ad blockers. I get that they have to make money just to be able to offer anything at all, but it gets out of control. And I think a lot more people would be receptive to it if it was more reasonable.

The streaming service I miss, that I just lost, is Discovery +. They have a lot of good shows. Especially the ghost hunting ones. Paramount + is really good too. I still have that for now but I don't know how long. I have access to Disney + also. I've watched 2 movies in the last year. The Beatles Let It Be documentary last year around Christmas when I was given access to Dis+ and I watched Home Alone last night. I would never ever pay full price for Dis+.

You'd think they would learn from the gaming world and just put everything in one database and make watching a movie a "micro transaction" at a buck a piece. They'd be trillionares overnight.

56 minutes ago, pwal said:

nor youtube if you use the right adblockers

I've actually been thinking of subscribing to just get rid of the ads. You get ad free unlimited access to their dedicated music app as well as everything else. I use YouTube way more than anything else. I just got kicked out of Netflix. Had a deal with someone where they paid half and I paid half. Literally 3 days later they changed their TOS and you can only share logins now on the same wifi network in the same house. But to be honest, if I watch 5 movies a year on Netflix I'm exaggerating so I won't miss it. There's still a lot of great things on youtube, they just need to back off the censorship.

3 hours ago, Nick Blanc said:

With my limited knowledge of the platform I heard it was kind of an offshoot because youtube de-platformed some rightwing people

Without going to 'there', the difference is anyone is welcome to say anything they want on Bithchute and Rumble within reason. Don't advocate for anything illegal. Anyone's point of view whether you or I like it or agree with it or not is allowed. Left, right, up, down, sideways. That's what YouTube used to be.

YouTube has taken censorship to the extreme and its not just on the so called 'right'. For example, there is a guy who had a huge woodworking channel called Doublereno. He did fractal wood burning and showed you how to make your own machine safely. After many years on youtube out of the blue they gave him 2 warnings for his content.  After 3 warnings your channel is permanently banned. So he took them all down and is moving them to Rumble so his entire channel isn't erased on youtube.

Meanwhile, there are dozens upon dozens of other channels that show the exact same content, and let me tell you, I'm shocked (lol) that those morons are still alive. The guy never talked politics, religion, nothing. It was purely woodworking, and he was forced out.

Anyway, it's about over the top and out of control censorship. I dont even think youtube can control it anymore. The vast majority of it is AI controlled.

That's why people of all ideologies are leaving YouTube. The only reason YouTube is the place to go for music is they cut a deal with the record companies and they get a huge cut of the forced ads that pop up. It's all about the money. Even covers that I have done get ads on them and they are all set to private and nobody can see them but me.

Youtube had a lock on all devices for a long time. You still can't watch Bitchute on a TV via an app. And they just recently allowed Rumble as far as I can tell. My firestick would never let me download it until recently.

But to be clear, this isn't just some r-wing conspiracy thing. YouTube's out of control censorship is being applied to everyone and that's why people are mirroring their content on other platforms now.

The only reason YouTube is so popular right now is its competitors aren't allowed to have their app on most smart devices. They must have cut deals to create a monopoly.

And Rumble as far as I can tell doesn't get their money from ads. They must take a cut from people who subscribe to content creators? I don't know. All I can say is I haven't seen a single ad pop up on Rumble since I've been watching it on my non-adblockable firestick.

Cables do make a difference, but I'm talking about a $1.99 cable from the impulse buy rack at your local Casey's (Midwest's version of 7-11 only a trillion times better) vs. a decent $20 dollar cable. I tried out Amazon Basic's cables and they are excellent. They are all I use now. Those and the inexpensive audio and guitar cables Sweets pushes. Those things are indestructible and absolutely noise free.

One of the tenants where I work had problems with her TV locking up. Circle of death when you turned on the cable box and router and you had to keep rebooting everything. She had two people who "know a lot about the internets and AV" check it and the cable company twice. The cable company said they found a piece of metal inside the wall jack and blamed her problem on the guy who rewired the place. So she called him (me). 

The phone line, AC, HDMI, and cable box wires were all in a tangled pile of spaghetti. None of the 4 people who looked at it before me untangled it. I separated everything in to nice neat coils and moved them away from each other and she hasn't had a problem since. That wouldn't have happened if they were decent cables with shielding. 

So yeah, I'm a believer in decent cables, not the hair thin stuff that comes with most cheap devices, but man, $130 for a USB cable and $626 for an 18Gb HDMI cable is an absolute rip off. Sorry if I offend anyone by saying that, but it is. A 6ft. 48Gb 8K certified Amazon Basics cable is $9.49.

What would be interesting to see is if there was some kind of video null test like we do with audio to visually see if there's a difference between cables.

12 hours ago, craigb said:

  

 

I find that hilarious that they have resolutions over 4k!  Unless it's broadcast on something like the huge screen inside a stadium, the human eye can't tell the difference between 4k and anything higher.  So, why waste the time, bandwidth and storage on higher resolutions???

I don't get it either.

It all has to do with compression IRT 1080 and 4K. You can't tell the difference between an uncompressed 1080 file and an uncompressed 4K file.

The media at the time wasn't large enough to hold an uncompressed 1080 file on the Blu-ray disc. 4k UHD disc's are compressed too, but the media is larger and they use a better form of compression. IOW yeah, we actually do see a difference between most 1080 and 4K disc's, but its due to the compression they use.

If you scanned a film twice, once at 1080 and once at 4K and viewed the uncompressed files they would both look the same on consumer TVs.

I went through a phase where I wanted to put multiple movies on one Blu-ray disc. I figured out how to do it and bought some Blu-ray authoring software to make disc's playable in any player. That's when I discovered all these disc's are compressed. I had to figure out how to compress them even further using open source line command compression. I got the command lines worked out to where I couldn't tell the difference between the already compressed rips and my double compressed files.

The trick was to prepare a file that was already Blu-ray compliant so the authoring software wouldn't force you to use their crappy compression method. I just dragged and dropped files in, made menu's, and that was it. There's certain flags that have to be in a file and framerates in order for the authoring software to say, ok this is an actual file that can be played in a U.S. player. I learned quick that the authoring software did a horrendous job at that. Lol.

Newer movies use a new type of protection that is very difficult to circumvent. So that fun little project of mine came to an end quick. Lol But it was cool to get 10 movies that I couldn't see a quality difference in on one disc.

That said, if you play the files from a PC or a server the protection is ignored. I'd like to get all of my disc's on to a server but I never got around to it.

The Plex app allows you to create your own personal streaming service to access your own server from any device anywhere that you have it installed on. You just have to have your server on and you have a good enough internet connection at home. I always wanted to do that but setting up the server is difficult for a hobbyist like me.

I like to own the actual physical media. I really don't like "subscribing" to streaming services like Netflix and all that. But it would be nice to rip my movie and audio collection and stream it from anywhere. 

2 hours ago, bitflipper said:

We called it the "UTK Interface" when documenting service calls that turned out to be user error.

(User-to-keyboard interface)

And yes, it's common that the resolution you see on your device is streamed at a lower resolution than the original file. It may have been for bandwidth conservation, to accommodate  limitations of the target device, or even an excuse to charge extra for higher resolution (see YouTube's "1080p  Premium HD feature).

YouTube will let you upload anything. There are people uploading in 12K. But ... they will not let the content creators channel stream at that resolution until they have so many subscribers and so many views on their videos per month. They lock the creators account to only be able to stream in lower resolution. I've uploaded 1080 files but they have my channel restricted to only let it be viewed in 720 iirc. 

I had to go down quite the rabbit hole of forums and research until I discovered that. I thought I was doing something wrong but it's them. There are certain file types and settings within those video files that you upload that makes their conversion better and faster, but ultimately everything you upload for others to view gets converted using their streaming codecs.

They convert the video to the resolution of their choosing until you have met their demands and maintain them monthly.

I'm assuming that's why you'll see some videos with the official little 4K symbol on the thumbnail, put their by YouTube, but the max resolution you can view it is 1080. 

I had a 30 down 30 up connection in MO and I could stream in 8K. I have a 600 down 100 up here on NJ.

My cell will play 1080 HD, that's what was weird about Craig's video. I'll have to see what happens on my TV when I have time. It's 4K.

On a side note, I read this morning that Amazon is switching from Android to Linux on their next generation of Firestick's and Fire TV's.

It will make hacking it so you can load any app you want easier I would think.

I've told this story before in another PC vs. Mac battle.

Here's the short version ...

I worked at a place that forced us to learn how to connect multi function copier/printer/scanners to Mac. They said it was infinitely easier than PC and wanted to get rid of their only highly overpaid Mac specialist and have all the techs do it along with the PC connections we were already doing.

12 of us drove 2 hours to the office they set the training up at. Our IT/Mac guru couldn't get a single thing connected to a Mac. After an excruciating 8 hour day, he passed out a handbook and said follow this, thanks for coming.

56 minutes ago, craigb said:

It's in HD (1920 x 1080) which is one of the resolutions called 2k.  The file is over 11 GB in size now, can you imagine what the 4k size would be?  (Note that it's not as simple as doubling since 4k (3840 x 2160) is actually four times larger, but some storage tricks can make the file a bit smaller without impacting the quality.)

tl;dr - Yes, it IS in 2k.  ?

Hmm. I only had some weird 843 x 6 something available on my cell. I noticed other vids allowed me to choose higher but that was on my TV. I didn't check your vid on my TV. Probably a limitation of my cell. ?

On 11/8/2023 at 3:30 AM, Rain said:

Man, I love the Beatles. They weren't even around anymore when I was born and I feel I owe them so much.

Same here. The first song I learned to play on guitar without having the music in front of me was Misery. Lol. Second was Anna. I was 10 or 11. I had The Pocket Beatles paperback book with all the lyrics and chords. I used to wedge it under the front edge of our big tube TV to keep it open so I could play and read it. The binding separated and all the pages fell out eventually from jamming it under there.

I picked up a CD at a record shop one time. Ritchie's in fact, when he was in The Pocono's in PA. long before he moved out by you. The Beatles at The BBC. I think it was an import but I may be wrong. I don't think you could ever get it here in the U.S. from a retail store. It was a 2 or 3 CD set iirc. That set paints a whole different picture of them. It sounds like a studio recording but I think it was actually live. 

He also had a ton of bootlegs on CD. Somewhere, somehow, over the years, somebody got a ton of their studio tapes and put them on CD. He had a 10 disc set of nothing but studio banter and starts and stops of them doing takes. 

He wanted too much for them and I never got them. He did let me borrow a couple to listen to for a few days to try and entice me to buy them. I was pissed. I never could get my SCSI CD drive to rip and burn. ???. To this day I cringe when someone mentions scuzzy (SCSI) drives.

One of the spots on that bootleg CD that sticks out in my mind was, the recording engineer got pissed off at them for goofing off and you hear him yell at them, "TAKE FOUR!!!".

I also had quite a few bootleg LPs. Lost them all when my basement flooded one time. Had them in cardboard boxes on the floor. Because of that, to this day, I will not store anything on my basement floor unless it's in those big plastic totes. I keep most stuff on those metal racks with the bottom shelf removed so I can slide the plastic totes under it. If anything happens the water has to get at least 18" up before anything gets touched and at that pointn ou got bigger problems than just your basement flooding. Lol.

Of course I got blamed for the flooding. Iowa weather is very unpredictable. We had an early freeze one fall and I left the garden hose out because I was still using it. It froze, broke, then thawed and we didn't know it. Of course, my reply was, well you're too cheap to go let me get the sump pumps to put in the sump pump pits we paid the concrete guy an extra $2,000 dollars to put in and run drain tile from out in to the ****ing yard Mrs. Scrooge.

Ah memories. Good times. Good times.

I stand corrected. For the heck of it I checked to see if Rumble or Bitchute were now available on my firestick last night.

Rumble is now available, Bitchute is not. It seems a lot of youtuber's are mirroring their content on all three of those platforms, some are actually saying what they want on Rumble and Bitchute and keep their blah watered down content on YouTube. I guess that's still where the money is

@craigb Gasp! Your video's not in 2K!? ?

I can see it too. You did an excellent job with it.

I wish I could get Rumble and Bitchute apps on my Firestick and/or TV. YouTube is all but gone. Unless you're one of the alphabet mob.

That sucks. I've had similar things happen. I took a video of my fireplace and posted as private to share with my family a couple Christmases ago. I had Christmas Vacation on TV. I got a copyright strike for it, but they still let me share it as long as it wasn't publicly visible. Here is the video. There isn't even any music, just talking.

https://youtu.be/pKeQ_5VZp00?si=4SWKasR_qWxaZ_kU

I've read that it has to support Thunderbolt. Even a really good normal C cable doesn't support that. But $130? I dunno. Amazon has a ton of Thunderbolt capable cables starting around 25 bucks.

13 minutes ago, craigb said:

Hey @Shane_B.!  Look above for the correct way to play a guitar!  ?

 

?

 

One of the biggest regrets I have is not grabbing a left handed John Lennon Series Rickenbacker when I had the chance. My local music store called me when they got it in and said, you have to come down here, now! Hah. I just couldn't afford it at the time. I was 16 or 17.