#PCM audio

[captaingimpy]

Thoughts on Cinema: Finding the Middle Ground Between Film and Digital Filmmaking

As someone who has spent a significant amount of time working with audio and video production—and as a long-time moviegoer—I’ve noticed a troubling trend in the film industry: we seem to have fallen into an all-or-nothing mindset when it comes to film versus digital. It’s like there’s this unspoken war between purists who champion celluloid as the only “real” way to make a movie and the…

[extraplugins148]

Mastering Sonic Excellence: Explore Lexicon PCM Total Bundle for Unparalleled Audio Processing

Lexicon PCM Total Bundle: A Comprehensive Suite of Professional Audio Processing Tools

Explore the pinnacle of audio processing with the Lexicon PCM Total Bundle, a meticulously crafted collection of premium plugins designed to elevate your sound to new heights. Immerse yourself in a world of unparalleled reverbs, delays, and effects that have defined the industry standard for decades. From the lush and expansive reverberations to the precise and intricate delays, each plugin within the PCM Total Bundle is a testament to Lexicon's legacy of excellence in audio engineering. Unleash the power of iconic Lexicon algorithms on your recordings, bringing forth a sonic richness and depth that will transform your music production experience. Whether you're a seasoned professional or an aspiring artist, the Lexicon PCM Total Bundle is your gateway to a world of sonic possibilities, ensuring your music stands out with clarity, dimension, and brilliance. Elevate your audio production game with the unmatched quality and sophistication of Lexicon's PCM Total Bundle.

[dandelionsprout42]

«Queen Clarion's Pixie Dust» (Its official name)

One of the designated "Deleted Scenes" on the Blu-Ray Disc of Tinker Bell 1.

Recorded by me at 1080p 24Hz, stereo PCM. Bitrate at 6Mb/s, OBS's sound mix volume at -2.5 dB.

And trust me: There's more to come. Believing in a PlayStation 3 Super Slim is just the beginning.

(I had accidentially set the audio bitrate in OBS to 64Kb/s instead of 320Kb/s, but you're not missing out on all that much in that regard given the nearly non-existent voice lines or SFX.)

[amyfarbright]

Sonic 1 Mega CD Port

(download here)

(if you think this is cool, consider helping me find work/money <3)

Welcome to the Next Level!

NOTE: I'm aware of issues regarding audio playback and transitioning between zones, and intend to push an update once the contest judging period is over. In the meantime, you can use level select (Up Down Left Right A + Start at title screen) to explore the game.

At the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show, a teaser for a Mega CD version of Sonic 1 was shown within a sizzle reel. No Mega CD version of Sonic 1 was ever produced, and this footage is almost everything we know about this project, but it's extremely likely that this idea is what morphed into the separate game Sonic CD, the only Sonic game officially released for the console.

In 2006, Stealth released the Sonic for MegaCD tech demo, marking the first time any substantial effort was made to bring another Sonic game to the console. It contained the title screens and first levels of Sonic 1 and 2, with three playable characters. In the following years, he would build on the ideas in that demo further, eventually reaching a point where his setup accommodated a Mega CD version of a rom hack called Sonic Megamix.

For a long time, this rom hack was the only way to experience Sonic 1's levels, and was the closest you could get to playing the original game on your Mega CD...

until now.

This is a port of the original Sonic the Hedgehog (revision 1, mostly) to the Sega Mega CD (running in Mode 2/off a CD). Not a mere one-zone demo, not affected by an original hack's mechanics, this is a full playable Sonic game running on the Mega CD, with the source fully available, and with the intent of enhancing the game with the extra hardware.

I started this project about a month and a half ago to enter into the annual Sonic Hacking Contest. This was done as both a learning experience for myself to learn new hardware (I was already familiar with programming for Mega Drive, but wanted to explore its addons), and as an example others can learn from.

This has been tested with BlastEm, Fusion, Gens, and on real hardware using a Mega Everdrive Pro.

Features:

Expanded Sound.

The Mega CD comes with a chip supporting PCM playback for up to 8 channels, complementing the 10 sound channels already in the Mega Drive. This port leverages that by moving playback of drum samples to a custom PCM sound driver running on the Mega CD CPU.

Because drums no longer need to play on the Mega Drive hardware, an extra sound channel was added in the main sound driver to allow for more sound effects to play without cutting out channels of the music.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get CD audio playback fully implemented in time for the initial release. Most of the pieces are there though, and I intend to add it in a future update.

An open-source Mega CD game. The scene for Mega CD has grown significantly over time, and over the years there has been new homebrew and hacks of other games, but not nearly as much done with the blue guy this contest is about. This port aims to change that; this is a full game running on Mega CD, with source code and development history available for browsing right now. Code for the kernel programs to load and run the game from disk is written in mostly C using the megadev toolchain. Rom hackers and developers more familiar with the Mega Drive standalone can use the code repository as an example of how to bring more full-fledged MD projects over to Mega CD with as few changes as possible.

Other features:

Custom loading screen while files are loaded from CD

Modified title screen, to remind you that this is indeed utilizing Mega CD hardware

Various bugfixes applied (for those familiar with Sonic Retro's Sonic 1 disassembly, FixBugs is turned on)

Much smoother special stage. The movement of objects making up the maze was unlocked, and the walls now display with 128 degrees of rotation (up from 16).

Even though I started this project to have something for the contest, I'm incredibly happy with what's been done so far, and I intend to work on it further after the contest to add more features. I consider this the beginning of a goodbright future for Sonic games and hacks on Mega CD.

Note: Debug mode and sound test have not been fixed to accommodate for the code that has been moved around. Try at your own risk!

Credits

Main developer: Amy Farbright

Playtesting and bug reporting: The Let's Talk About Sonic Discord

Special thanks: @fiffle, @milly, @crepe

Code used/referenced:

drojaazu's megadev toolchain

Devon's partial Sonic CD disassembly

SCHG How-to Guide

tversteeg's Rust implementation of rotsprite

Graphics used:

CD graphic on title screen: Sega Multimedia Studio, converted from sprites ripped by Mister Man

[jennyfromthebes]

hi hello! as a live show taper, do you have an advice for where to start for someone interested in learning to tape? with the new tour announcement it seems like i'll be able to go to a bunch of shows in an area that's kinda light on tapers, so it would be really neat if i can learn enough to get some decent quality tapes from this tour, but as someone with no background in audio stuff it all seems a bit overwhelming from the outside!!

SO YOU WANT TO BE A LIVE SHOW TAPER: an overview by your favorite amateur tMG taper!

Before we start: my top resources here are the Taper's Section forum (yes, a real old-school forum!) and the taping thread in the unofficial tMG community discord server (it's an older thread, will have to scroll down to it in the tmg-forum section). I really hate to be the "join my discord server to get your answers" guy, but it's genuinely a great space to talk to some really knowledgeable regular tMG tapers and get a lot of good specific advice.

You can get really intense about taping really fast. It depends on how much time and money you're able to invest into it, and there are a million factors wrt approach, gear, investment, etc. For this post, I'm just going to do an overview of what I would recommend for a beginner-friendly setup that's not too big of an investment and is a step above a cell phone recording.

Gear: I love my PCM-A10 recorders because I can connect them to my phone and control and monitor them remotely, but the price tag isn't very beginner friendly - you'll likely find A10s going for ~$150 on eBay. Also, the ideal use case for an A10 is with external mics or to pull soundboard, not as an all-in-one to just set and forget. You'll want to look for something like a Zoom H2* or H2n, which are a smallish all-in-one recorder and can go for less than $50 on eBay if you do a little searching. (*Note: the H2 has a known issue where it stops and restarts with a small gap once it hits a limit, but you can patch that out by following this tutorial with this updated firmware link.)

Recording during the show: unless you have permission to tape, which is a whole nother can of worms, you'll have to get your recorder past security. Usually if you hide or disguise it somehow in your bag you can get away just fine. If you're in the front row for the show, you can usually discreetly prop up your recorder on the barrier or just set it somewhere that it won't move. If you can stay relatively still and not sing into it, putting it in a chest pocket on a shirt or jacket is also a good option. I always try to capture everything from the moment the lights dim, so I usually start my recording a little early and just chop off the excess at the beginning, but if you're worried about storage space or anything you can just try to be really aware and hit record as soon as the lights go down.

Processing: At a minimum, you'll need to name the file, chop it into tracks, and populate metadata. I do this in Audacity (free) and it takes less than an hour once you get a workflow down. However, you can also go crazy with processing if you want to - I do EQ and mixing in Reaper (free trial version) and audio repair and de-click in iZotope (paid software). You can do some fairly basic EQ work pretty easily in Reaper and it can make a decent difference with how the audio sounds - I typically do parallel compression and chop the low end in order to bring the vocals up a little bit and balance out any boominess. My order of operations is mixing (if applicable)/EQ > repair > tracking/metadata. I know EQ sounds complicated, but it's really just fiddling with some standard presets until you like how it sounds.

Uploading to the LMA: The Live Music Archive is specifically for decent quality lossless tapes - cell phone tapes are fine to upload to the Internet Archive as "community audio", but the LMA is supposed to be higher quality. WAV or FLAC is your lossless format, I always work with WAV throughout the whole process. There's a fairly standard convention for file naming, page info, etc that I think there's a tutorial on somewhere but I'm also happy to go into that if need be. It'll take a little bit to upload the files, so I usually just leave it running on my computer overnight. After uploading, it automatically derives the upload into different file types before it can be streamed or downloaded.

Congrats, you've done a tape! I'm happy to go into significantly more detail on any part of this, whether here or in the discord server - feel free to send further asks or drop me a DM and I'll do my best to answer, I just wanted to keep this post as a relatively high-level overview. Thanks for asking, I'm always thrilled when people express an interest in taping!

[notquitedeadpod]

A new episode of NQD is now undead wherever you listen to podcasts!

This time, Alfie and Neige explore an old sanatorium, perhaps biting off more than they can chew.

You can find this show wherever you listen to podcasts; every episode has a transcript and content warnings in its show notes!

If you love these vampires as much as I do and/or want to sink your teeth into new episodes two days early, PLUS get a ton of bonus content including extra stories and notes on episodes, you can sign up to my patreon from just £2 pcm!

[donjuaninhell]

Okay but that's also not true. CD audio is actually pretty damn fantastic. You're probably familiar with listening to CDs through shitty headphones with your discman or through one of those cheap all in one (radio/cassette/CD) stereo boom-boxes we all had in the late '90s and early '00s. Play a CD through a really good sound system (a decent amplifier and a nice pair of passive speakers) and it's going to sound wonderful, and I'm talking about the original Red Book specification CD (PCM audio at 44.1khz and 16bit) when I say it will sound good. Above that there's Super Audio CD which is four times the bitrate and the audio is encoded with DSD and PDM so you've got a wider dynamic range. I own a few SACDs and they honestly blow me away with how spacious and detailed they sound, and there are some really amazing 5.1 mixes of albums on SACD and DVD audio (pro-tip: get the 5.1 downmix of the Talking Heads discography, you can thank me later). Unfortunately SACD was always pretty niche and requires special equipment to take full advantage.

And I'm going to be real for a minute. I love vinyl. I own hundreds of LPs. My stereo system for listening to vinyl is a pretty high end mid-70s vintage setup that would've cost the equivalent of a brand new car in 1975. Vinyl can sound incredible on the right setup but vinyl has problems. There's surface noise, there are bad pressings, inner groove distortion is a thing, records pressed after the 1973 oil crisis are often pressed on thin, shitty vinyl that has more surface pops and deforms more easily. Records pressed from recycled vinyl have more surface noise than ones pressed from virgin vinyl. Records pick up dust and you need to keep them clean or you risk damaging both them and your stylus. You have to replace your stylus after every four hundred hours of use or so, and if you're using a vintage cartridge (like me) that might be both expensive and difficult. Then there's the issues with your setup, a tone arm with too heavy or too light a tracking force can damage your records or introduce more noise. If your turntable is belt driven, a worn belt will cause timing issues, and a direct drive turntable can introduce unwanted noise. It's a very fiddly format. It's a very nice experience, I love listening to records on the turntable because I give them my full attention, but under no means does it "sound better", it sounds different.

And these days very few people know how to master vinyl properly so you're often just getting the CD/digital master pressed to a record and you can tell. I bought a reissue of Bowie's "Heroes" and it's mastered so loud it made the stylus skip.

I honestly don't know where this idea of "CDs don't sound good" came from, no they sound great, they're just fragile and jewel cases suck so goddamned much.

[archoneddzs15]

Sega Mega CD - Shadowrun

Title: Shadowrun / シャドウラン

Developer/Publisher: Compile / LMS Music

Release date: 23 February 1996

Catalogue No.: T-66024

Genre: RPG

Shadowrun. Many games come into our lives and alter who we are, becoming a part of us for the rest of our lives. Shadowrun is one such series that after the first time I played it I had become heavily engrossed in everything to do with the canon behind it. This game is an especially strange beast if you've played the SNES (Data East) and Sega Genesis (Bluesky Software) Shadowrun games.

You see, at the end of 1995, we saw the last Mega CD releases. In the US, the last game to be released for the Sega CD is a half-arsed update to "Demolition Man", a run-n-gun based on and featuring grainy FMV clips from the Sylvester Stallone movie. Then, in Europe, came The Adventures of Batman and Robin. That game was clearly based on *just* the driving levels from Mega CD Batman Returns and greatly expanded on, and featured splices of an "original episode" of Batman the Animated Series specifically for the game.

For a while as the year 1996 began spinning into rotation, there would be no new games for the Mega CD, making it seem like The Adventures of Batman and Robin was indeed the last ever Mega CD game to be released.... which it did end up being if you lived in Europe. That is until, in some miracle on the 23rd of February 1996, Compile resurrected the aging Mega CD devkits and worked together with Japanese tabletop RPG distributor Group SNE and Chicago-based tabletop RPG company FASA Corporation to release one last Mega CD game once and for all. That game would end up being based on a tabletop RPG that, since its inception in 1989, has remained among the most popular role-playing games. This is Shadowrun.

Mega CD Shadowrun is a pretty good game. You play as one of four characters: Rokudou, Shikumo, Mao, and D-head and battle your way through Tokyo in the year 2053 while discovering a massive conspiracy that could potentially destroy the city of Tokyo as we know it. The game is divided into a few sections: a "digital comic" mode similar to Snatcher and Dead of the Brain, a top-down RPG mode outside of battle similar to the original Legend of Zelda, Golvellius or Ys, the Battle mode which triggers within the top-down view and plays in the same way as how games like Final Fantasy 6 do it, and a "Matrix" mode where your characters hack into the Matrix supercomputers.

The main character (Rokudou) acts pretty cool and a little harsh at times but is quite appealing because of it, and the story has some nice ideas, but is maybe a little muddled in places thanks to the language barrier. The action scenes play like an average Squaresoft Super Famicom RPG game, but look nice enough so the game gets away with it. Good enough to satisfy the role-playing fever for a while. My only complaint that I can level against the game is that I can't really recommend this game to those that can't understand Japanese at a native level, and that there are no voice acting or CD redbook music to be had here. All the music is generated via the Mega CD's PCM sound chip combined with the Mega Drive's YM2612 FM synth, though there are two hidden CD audio tracks, none of which are used.

Another weird point is that the characters look good in the visual novel scenes due to Compile making use of the Mega CD's scaling features, but during the RPG segments, they look super tiny and cute. It's a damn shame that games like this never get a complete playable English translation. I really wish that would happen though, but it seems like an English translation to Mega CD Shadowrun is currently suffering from development hell and may never be completed. What a shame.

[brokehorrorfan]

BloodRayne will be released on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on January 9 via Massacre Video. The 2005 action-horror film is based on the video game franchise from Majesco Entertainment and game developer Terminal Reality.

Uwe Boll (House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark) directs from a script by Guinevere Turner (American Psycho). Kristanna Loken, Michelle Rodriguez, and Ben Kingsley star with Michael Madsen, Matthew Davis, Geraldine Chaplin, Will Sanderson, Udo Kier, Billy Zane, Meat Loaf, and Michael Paré.

BloodRayne has been newly scanned in 4K from the uncut original negatives with HDR color approved by Boll and uncompressed PCM Audio. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by director Uwe Boll (new)

Deleted and extended scenes

Cast & crew interviews

Behind the scenes

CGI making-of

Dinner with Uwe Boll

Rayne is a dhampir - a human-vampire hybrid - enslaved by a malevolent traveling circus. When she eventually breaks free of her servitude, Rayne vows to confront her immensely powerful vampire father, Kagan, for abandoning her. But when Rayne learns of her father's long history of betrayal and vindictiveness, Rayne's daring quest turns into a fight for her life.

Pre-order BloodRayne.

[sonicmusicmusings]

A bit of a weirdly specific request, but could you cover Launch Base Zone Act 2 from the Nov 3 prototype of Sonic 3? The version from Sonic & Knuckles PC Collection would work if the prototype version is hard to find, even though it still sounds different /shrug

Hey there, sure thing! I LOVE weirdly specific requests! I hope this is what you're listening for!

Listening to this through, there's a ton of variety, and what a pretty little Genesis/MegaDrive track this is! The A section at the beginning reminds me of something, but I can't put my finger on what...oh yes, it reminds me of Chrome Gadget in a way! It's not exact, obviously (the prototype Chrome Gadget is pretty similar to what is in the release version), but the rhythm of the melody evokes it, even if the notes themselves don't quite do so. I really like the arpeggiating sections in the mid-section--they have a beautiful, lilting sound and soar over everything. As with all well-made tracks made in the times before PCM audio, this has a strong and well crafted melody, really establishing it before elaborating on it in further phrases. The harmony also does some interesting wandering without going too far out of the realm of its key. Even a mild modulation! I really like this!

[myvinylplaylist]

Led Zeppelin DVD (2003)

Housed in a cardboard slipcase and contains a foldout digipak with 2 DVD transparent trays, 16 page booklet and a 2 page promotional material from other Led Zeppelin releases.

Some copies included a small double-sided printed insert

Comes with detailed notes about each performance

Occasional bootleg visuals are interspersed with official recordings.

In addition to the listed tracks, there are various clips and audio excerpts (in some cases complete) appearing on the interactive menus including 'Moby Dick', 'Heartbreaker', 'Thank You', 'Stairway To Heaven', 'Dazed And Confused', 'Since I've Been Loving You', 'That's The Way', 'The Song Remains The Same' as well as backstage shots.

Region: 1

Picture Format: 4 x 3

Sound: L-PCM Stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound, DTS 5.1Surround Sound (Main Feature); Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo (Extras).

Colour & Monochrome.

Running Time: 5 hours 20 minutes

Atlantic Records

[mineofilms]

Perfection is just another kind of fake

Faking It: On the Ethics of Fake Musicianship, Perfection Culture, and Why Intention is Important

This isn't gonna be some finely tuned thinkpiece or perfectly structured deep dive. It's more like a sprawl of thoughts I've been having while in a two-week mental and creative rut. I am sitting there watching Adam Neely's The Ethics of Fake Guitar and thinking back on my own creative past and present. I’m not here to lecture anyone on how to do it, and I’m not pretending I’ve got a definitive answer to anything, but I do have a compass, and that compass always points to intentionality. I still feel all I have that is truly my own is intentionality. So let’s talk about what it means to fake something, what it means to chase perfection, and what happens when the internet—and especially social media—gets ahold of all of that and changes that intention to an expectation. With that expectation based on a lie for monetary gain.

Part 1: NO-Budget Filmmaking, Perfection Culture, and Reflections in the Mud

I went to film school from 1999 to 2004. A community college that no longer exists. Part-time. Full-time job just to stay afloat, and I was lucky enough to have family that kept a roof over my head and a plate of food in front of me. But camera gear? Editing bays? Glossy production? Even Time… Forget it. I was scrapping together Mini-DV setups and busted PCs, praying they wouldn’t crash before I could save the project file. That’s where I come from—NO-budget filmmaking. Capital N-O. That mindset never left me. After college I struggled to find stable employment. I basically kept truckin’ along filming what I could and make something out of it. I still make things with what I have. If something sucks in the final product, it’s not because I didn’t care. It’s because I couldn’t afford better. And even if I could, I probably wouldn’t obsess over it. I care more about what I’m trying to say than how glossy it looks. People chasing that “Aesthetic of Perfection” are chasing ghosts. They’re chasing a version of a thing they think they saw, not what’s actually there. Could be a statement on our human society experiment. What happens if you stop chasing that and start creating from where you are instead?

Because Here’s the Truth: Perfection is Just another Kind of Fake.

Part 2: The Line Between Editing and Faking Ain’t as Clear as People Pretend

Now let’s get into the thick of it. Is editing a live performance “faking”? Depends. If you’re just sweetening the sound—cleaning up the EQ, leveling things out, maybe patching a glitchy mic—that’s post-production, not deception. I don’t think anyone should be faulted for wanting to make their performance presentable. Especially if they’re filming on a cell phone in a garage or bar with poor sound and/or acoustics.

YouTube’s compression algorithm noticeably degrades audio quality during upload, especially in the higher frequencies—cymbals, vocals, and clarity tend to get flattened. After extensive trial and error, I found that exporting the final video using VSDC in the .mkv format with PCM S16LE audio encoding preserved far more of the original sound. Unlike standard .mp4 exports with AAC compression, which YouTube compresses more aggressively, the .mkv + PCM combo seems to bypass some of that automatic degradation. It’s not perfect, but the improvement is real—especially for trained ears—and it’s become my go-to method for getting cleaner audio onto the platform. That's not me trying to deceive anyone. That's me working with the limitations, trying to squeeze as much juice out of the lemon as I can with the controls I have. But yeah, if you’re miming along to a studio-recorded track and selling it as live, you’re crossing into a different territory. And here’s where it gets messy: It’s not just what you do, it’s how you frame it. Your, ‘intention…’ If you tell the audience what you’re doing, most people are cool with it. It’s the hiding part that rubs people wrong. Transparency covers a lot of ethical ground. The ones that actually can do these amazing things. They worked incredibly hard to get there. AND in many cases most of them never really got the recognition and real profits from their work, which they should be credited and even paid in my more cases than not.  

Part 3: Social Media and the Great Monetization Lie

Here’s where the whole thing twists into something nastier. This drive for perfection—this impulse to fake your way through—it’s not happening in a vacuum. Social media monetization has created an entire ecosystem where people aren’t making art anymore. They’re not even really making products. They’re making content. And more specifically, they’re selling themselves as content. Their personality, their lifestyle, their vibe.

Somewhere between 13 and 45, an entire generation got convinced that if you were fun at parties and worked retail that one summer, you were just a ring light away from being a brand ambassador. What they’re selling isn’t just a product—it’s the belief that if they say it’s cool, it must be cool. And sometimes? That works. Some people can sell that illusion. But most people can’t. Most end up chasing something that was never actually real to begin with: the idea that charisma alone can substitute for experience, skill, or hard-earned credibility. What we’ve ended up with is this fake hustle culture. People “working hard” on building their brand—but it’s all image. It’s cinematic. You know how movie characters only face the parts of life that move the plot forward? Nobody in a movie spends three hours troubleshooting why their WiFi won’t connect to the printer. That’s what we’re doing now. We’re cutting out all the unglamorous stuff—the years of grind, the failed attempts, the dead ends—and presenting a highlight reel as if it were a documentary.

And the result? People think they’re working hard, but they’re not actually doing anything. Because in real life—especially with tech, with music, with film—you have to know what you're doing. There’s work involved. But the illusion sold on social media says you don’t need that. You just need to be seen doing the work.

And this is the part that really gets under my skin: what people now call “influence” or “reach” used to be called resources. It was marketing budget. It was connections. It was a studio or a label or some angel investor quietly bankrolling the whole thing while pretending it was just some quirky girl in her bedroom making videos on her phone. It’s not grassroots. It’s AstroTurf. There’s a whole industry out here trying to convince you that these influencers are “just like you,” and some are. However, in many cases the reality is they’ve got deep-pocketed support, production teams, and years of unseen infrastructure propping them up.

What they’re selling isn’t a product, or even a skill. They’re selling belief. They want you to buy into them. And that’s wild to me. That’s televangelist territory. And yeah—not everyone online is doing this. There are legit creators, legit businesses, real product testers that influence product trends.

A “confidence game,” or con, is a method of manipulation where someone gains your trust (your "confidence") in order to exploit it. It's not always about outright lying—it's about framing something believable enough to get you to invest, commit, or act… even if what you're committing to has no real foundation. This solely operates on trust and belief, not substance—a more nuanced and stronger word for it could be is "speculative branding" or more sharply, "belief-based marketing." A term that captures the illusion of substance—where the product is really just the belief in the product—without a clear product, goal or vision.

This type of influencing has now krept into the social media world of performance art like guitarists, drummers, even vocalists, all trying to sell the idea that if you "buy in," you’ll be part of something profitable.

But in truth:

The asset is often unproven.

The odds of success are downplayed or hidden.

The story is polished to hide the risk.

You're investing in their ability to attract others, not in a tangible return.

This is classic con structure:

Gain trust through charisma, social proof, or flashy success stories.

Present belief as product, appealing to your emotions or FOMO.

Shift risk onto the buyer, while keeping the seller insulated.

Profit off belief, not substance.

But like anything else—music, politics, religion—the scene gets polluted by people who are just gaming the system. You see it in politics all the time. New tax law drops? Within a week someone’s already figured out a loophole. That’s the American tradition now: don’t work harder, just find the cheat code. Circumvent the rules so you can look better than you actually are. Especially online, where one rarely has to actually prove anything they do. Numbers, views, hearts, likes, even comments can be generated by AI in mass to manipulate how much “influence” a channel, account, business or single person has. That mindset has bled into how we think about success. It’s no longer about doing the most logical, skilled, or creative thing to reach your goal. It’s about finding the path of least resistance that still looks good on camera.

So yeah—when someone fakes a guitar solo, or mimics a live performance, or cuts corners in post and sells it as raw talent, it’s not just annoying—it’s part of a bigger problem. It’s another symptom of a culture that values perception of substance over actual, real substance.

Part 4: Intention Matters More Than Tools

Let me be clear—I’m not anti-AI. Not even close. Hell, this whole essay was structured with the help of AI. When I’ve got too many thoughts colliding in my head and can’t quite nail the phrasing, I bounce ideas off it. I test tone. I reorganize arguments. I care deeply about semantics, and sometimes it helps me not butcher my own meaning. That’s a gift, not a threat. I’m also a scatterbrain, if I’m being real. And AI helps me reign it in. That doesn’t mean it wrote this. It means it helped me shape this. Like a co-writer, or an assistant editor. I’m still driving—it just helped clean the windshield.

What bugs me isn’t people using AI. It’s people pretending they didn’t. Acting like every word or note or design choice sprang perfectly from their untouched genius. Like, why? Most content isn’t made by one person anymore. It’s usually a team, or at least a couple of close collaborators. If your buddy helped with camera work or gave you feedback on your mix, you’d thank them. You’d credit them. So why wouldn’t you do the same with AI, if it helped shape the thing? And honestly, I don’t even mind if AI does a lot of the work. Sometimes that’s necessary. Sometimes that’s how you get unstuck or get something done at all. But just say so. Give the tool its due. Don’t slap your name on an AI-written book like you typed it all out on a typewriter in a cabin. That’s not authenticity. That’s performance.

Same deal with music production. You want to use backing tracks, drum machines, pitch correction—do it. We’ve been doing that since the tape deck. But be up front. Don’t roll out a video where you look like you’re playing note-for-note perfection when it’s really comped to hell and back. The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the pretending. It’s the whole “fake it and act like you’re not faking it” loop we keep finding ourselves in.

But—and this is important—I also get the weird beauty in it. Sometimes the fake stuff does lead to real growth. A kid sees a faked guitar solo, and maybe they don’t know it’s fake, but it lights a fire. They want to play like that. They go chasing that sound. And in the process, they get good. Really good. Better than the faker, even. That’s the contradiction. That’s where I agree with someone like Rick Beato or Adam Neely—it’s complicated. Sometimes the illusion plants real seeds and the fruits from those seeds we all enjoy and get emerged in. And that’s not nothing. That absolutely is something.

So I don’t think it’s a question of “should you use AI or not.” It’s about your intention. Are you trying to express something? Or are you just trying to appear impressive? That’s what separates art from content. One is a reflection of the self. The other is a pitch deck with candy flavored vibes.

Part 5: Genre Codes, Gatekeeping, and the Woke Redefinition Game

The genre stuff at the end of that video? Yeah, that wasn’t just noise to me. What Adam Neely was getting at is that a genre or sub-genre isn’t just a checklist of sounds and styles—like tempo, tuning, instrument choice or technique—it’s a kind of social contract. A shared code among a community about what’s authentic, what’s fake, what’s sacred. And that hit home for me. I’m a metalhead. I’ve watched these battles happen in real-time—arguments over what counts as “real” metal, or who gets to fly the flag of some niche sub-genre like they invented it. Is deathcore “true” death metal? Is nü-metal a joke or a gateway drug? Is Djent a sub-genre at all or just a sound, like an effect? The tribal lines are drawn in every comment section. But here’s the twist: this isn’t just about sound. It’s about values. Identity. Cultural territory. That used to be messy enough on its own. Now throw in woke subculture, and the whole thing gets distorted beyond recognition.

Woke thinking—at least how I see it—tries to take minority arguments and attempt to make them majority arguments. Take a widely agreed-upon bad idea, strip away some of the baggage, repackage it with newer language, and then scold anyone who doesn’t clap along. It’s not progress. It’s marketing. And now it’s invading art, music, genre, and scene dynamics. Suddenly, people aren’t just fighting over whether a band fits a sub-genre. They’re fighting over whether that genre itself is problematic because of what someone said on a podcast or tweeted in 2007 about social dynamics at that specific time to them. You’ll see this play out in ways that sound harmless at first. Someone says a genre is “too masculine” or “too violent” or “too whiney,” and suddenly, the subculture has to shift to accommodate a narrative that was never really part of the music’s DNA. These criticisms start as niche takes, but thanks to social media and algorithmic validation, they balloon into mandates. Then comes the guilt-tripping, the digital shaming, the weird re-education process: This sub-genre is actually about this now, and if you don’t agree, you’re a bigot, gatekeeper, insert buzzword here.

And if you push back? You’re “toxic.” You’re being “negative.” “Out of touch.” Just another troll who doesn’t “get it.” Never mind that the whole point of subculture was to resist conformity in the first place.

It’s like every genre has to go through a weird spiritual audit now. Not just “what does this sound like?” but “what does this say about your politics? You as a person?” Which is insane. Music is supposed to be a place for escape, for release, for raw emotional reaction and entrainment—not a damn TED Talk with fake playing guitar solos.

And then there’s this individualist twist where people experience one thing, and suddenly they try to rewrite the entire genre canon around their feelings. “Well, I listened to X and it helped me through Y, so now this genre is about Z.” I get that it meant something to you. That’s valid. No one is saying one or a few cannot come together and share this thing in a different light. But your emotional reaction doesn’t overwrite the cultural framework that genre came from. Not every genre needs to be soft and affirming. Not every lyric needs to be therapy. Some of it’s supposed to be ugly, aggressive, nihilistic—because that’s what it’s channeling. We’ve got a generation trying to fix things that were never broken to begin with. And what we lose in the process is the texture, the risk, the rawness that made these subcultures worth fighting for. You can’t remap black metal or punk or horrorcore through some feel-good HR training lens. You’ll sand off everything that made it matter.

Community norms didn’t collapse because people stopped caring. They collapsed because people started pretending anything goes as long as you can spin a social virtue out of it and gas light people into treating you like a victim. When you are a victim of your own making. It’s not creativity. It’s control—dressed up in the language of inclusion. And I’m not saying “keep things pure” like some frothing elitist. I’m saying stop treating cultural identity like it’s a choose-your-own-adventure morality tale. Some things actually have context. History. Meaning. Rules. That’s what makes them genres. That’s what makes them powerful. Its ok to change things. That is what sub-genres are for. A variation of the original with nuanced twists. Nü-metal isn’t a joke or a gateway drug to nonsense-core but a nuance of fusion from a decade before. That is all nü-metal is; a fusion of different styles and it was heavy and closer to metal than hip-hop, funk, electro or reggae. At the time it was a huge shift from where metal was in the 1990s. The labeling name makes sense. That is how these things happen. But more importantly ‘why’ they happen.

Part 6: In the End, It’s Still About Intention

Look. I’m not here to say don’t fake anything. I’m saying know why you’re doing it.

If the goal is to share an idea, an emotion, a perspective—and you’re using every tool you’ve got to get that across—cool. Go for it. Cheat the lighting, filter the hell out of it, remix, repackage, whatever. If it’s in service of something real, that intention comes through.

But if the goal is to game the system, farm dopamine, and dress up clout-chasing as “authenticity”? That’s not creativity. That’s commerce wearing a cosplay wig. That’s performance art with no art. And yeah, the internet’s always had fakery—but now we’ve got people with delusions of grandeur being handed tools that amplify those delusions at scale. Taking away from real creators just trying to get some momentum in life with the talents and creative things they do. To fake it to directly take away from lesser people’s efforts and propped one’s self higher than they actually are is the worst kind person out there. The damage isn’t just in the trick—it’s in pretending there wasn’t a trick to begin with.

Social media was supposed to be a quick peek into someone’s day. A way to stay connected during the in-between moments of life. But now it is the day. It’s the job. It’s the hustle. It’s a 24/7 grind machine full of fake smiles, fake stories, fake lives—people living like avatars of their best guesses at what other people might want to click on. This isn’t a shot at real salespeople with real track records who just adapted to new platforms. Sell stuff. Talk about what you love. No shame in that. The problem isn’t sales. It’s when the entire persona is a lie, built to manipulate good intentions for personal gain. That’s where I draw the line. Intention is everything. If your intention is pure—even if the result is messy, flawed, imperfect—no one with a conscience is gonna fault you. But if you use sincerity as a prop, if you twist trust into currency, if you hijack empathy just to raise your stock... that’s not just wrong. That’s objectively wrong.

And yeah, I said objectively. That word still means something. It means something is true regardless of your feelings, your preferences, your influencer score and your influence upon it. It doesn’t need you to function. The universe doesn’t care if you’re trending. It doesn’t care if your lighting is good or if your truth gets applause. The universe is indifferent. It gives zero fucks. But we should care. Because the moment we stop caring about intention—the moment we start pretending that subjectivity is objectivity—we lose the thread. We let the algorithm tell us what matters. And we forget that what we intend is what makes us human in the first place.

So yeah, maybe this all gets me fewer views. Less reach. No monetization. So be it. If I’m gonna be seen, I want it to be me being seen. Not some echo of someone else’s polish. Not a mask of greatness I haven’t earned.

Just me.

Raw, flawed, real.

And that’s enough.

Perfectio est aliud genus ficti Latin: Perfection is just another kind of fake by David-Angelo Mineo with editorial assistance from a Generative Pre-trained Transformative Artificial Intelligence 5/4/2025 3,504 Words

[dandelionsprout42]

«Fairies Venture to the Mainland» (Its official name)

One of the designated "Deleted Scenes" on the Blu-Ray Disc of Tinker Bell 1.

Recorded by me at 1080p 24Hz, stereo PCM. Bitrate at 6Mb/s, audio bitrate at 320Kb/s, OBS's sound mix volume at -2.5 dB.

PlayStation 3 Super Slim, Trust, and Pixie Dust.

(There were 3 other deleted scenes on the same disc: Becoming a Garden Fairy, Tinker Bell's Tinkering Talents, and Vidia Tricks Tinker Bell. Those were rudimentary sketch drafts that were much closer to the final movie, and are not my main focus this morning.)

(Tumblr apparently compresses 1080p videos down to 720p, so the proper-ish 1080p version is at https://vimeo.com/1065384195; I also tried OneDrive's on-site video playback system, but its image quality was horrid, while Discord's player I couldn't get to work as an online raw playback.)

[johntayjinf]

lazy test: plok goes to neo-minnesota

(and it isn't even snes/sfc because idk how to optimize for the audio ram like a fucking idiot so have 8x general pcm instead)

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2023-12-11

la baguette, etc.

EDIT: god damn this got longer than I expected

Listening: I almost exclusively listened to Against Me! during this trip for some reason. On Saturday night my metro got interrupted and I got kicked out a few kilometers from my hotel, and after watching a couple full busses skip my stop, I just walked back. I put on Black Crosses for the first time, which is a combination of demos and acoustic versions of the songs from White Crosses which is probably one of my favourite punk albums.

I can't listen to some of Against Me! without having a good bad time because of Memories but I do not have that issue with White Crosses. As far as the demo/acoustic versions go, they are much lighter than the mainline releases which is bad if you want something energetic but good if you kind of want to soak in the lyrics.

There's a lot of great ones on Black Crosses including the obvious ones like Spanish Moss and The Western World but the one that really got me while walking back was the acoustic version of Because of the Shame which is positively heartbreaking when given space like this.

Reading: I fell down a rabbit hole on delta-sigma conversion while doing simultaneous reading up on 32-bit float audio and what the hell DSD is. I will reverse explanations.

Delta-Sigma is a collection of techniques used, roughly, to convert between high-sample-rate, low-bit-depth data and low-sample-rate, high-bit-depth data. A delta-sigma audio analogue-digital converter might sample a low-pass-filtered version of incoming signal at 6MHz and 1-2 bits and use that to reconstruct a 16-bit 44kHz version of the signal. Thanks to nyquist and other various equivalences this works with basically zero quantization error if you chose your filters right.

I was familiar with this from class-D amplifiers, which are effectively delta-sigma digital-analogue conversion, which reproduces a low-frequency analogue signal by feeding a pulse-density encoded chain into an amplifier and a low pass filter.

Anyway, DSD is a silly audiophile brand name for an audio codec that stores the 1-bit pulse encoded form of an audio signal rather than storing traditional PCM audio. Fundamentally if your hardware is correct there's basically no difference in information content or density between them.

This led me to these two good articles on dithering and delta-sigma architecture, among others.

Watching: I stumbled across this ongoing good series on YouTube a few weeks ago discussing trends in marketing movies as being "no CGI" when they are absolutely the fuck not. The second part just came out, but here's part 1:

"No CGI" is always a ridiculous claim in basically any modern movie, but this is a really good breakdown of how a combination of irresponsible journalism and intentionally poor communication creates the impression that tons of incredibly effects heavy movies are actually "free of CGI".

Treating computer graphics and effects as some kind of scourge is a misled reflex. It reminds me a lot of backlash against pitch correction, because in most cases people do not realize how much pitch correction is used in basically all music you hear. Big artists playing live performances are even pitch corrected in real time these days.

It's just part of the business, and in a very parallel way, people expect the output of CGI/pitch correction even if they don't know that. If P!nk were to go out on stage and sing her music without pitch correction you'd hear the effects of her ridiculously energetic acts, and people would bitch about it because as evidenced by people who describe good sounding music systems as feeling "like live music", people don't know what live music sounds like! Live music sounds like crap compared to studio production, you're there to inhale six different kinds of cigarette and get hit in the chest by a drunk girl who isn't paying attention to where she's going.

Wow I have a lot of opinions about how people don't realize how much production is in things. This should probably be a post. Later. Hey this is like guys who talk about "no makeup" look-*I AM YANKED OFFSTAGE WITH A COMICALLY OVERSIZED SHEPHERD'S CROOK*.

Playing: Nothing really! Dark Souls stalled not because I'm stuck but because I was doing other things. Making block took up a lot of time.

Making: Hacked together a very basic proof of concept for inserting my own controller into an LED string. As encouraged by definitely unbiased user @compiler-specific I am going to try and write my own DSL for this, which will probably end up resembling a lisp just because that simplifies my life.

Also almost done with hambanner, an IRC ban management bot. I would have finished that if I was not. In Paris. over the weekend. Hopefully this week.

Tools and Equipment: Sometimes you will find that your phone is dead and you need to find your way back to your hotel in a bizzarely convoluted part of La Défense late at night. And at this time you will be grateful that you took the time to orient yourself relative to local streets and the river and the metro station so that you do not have to find a corner to charge your phone and can instead just get back to your hotel. It could happen to you.

[scifiseries]

1960's digital PCM audio stored on video tape.