Microsoft tests CD ripping for Media Player in Windows 11 Microsoft is journeying to the past with a Windows 11 Insider build that allows testers to rip CDs in Media Player and evokes memories of Windows 10. As part of Build 25158 that arrived in the Windows Insider Dev Channel last night, Microsoft added more dynamic examples of Widgets to the taskbars of the chosen dev channel …
Apple did always joke, 'Redmond start your photocopiers' . You don't have to look far to find endless counts Microsoft copying Apple.
Apple : MacOS we're now giving it for away for free. Microsoft : we will make Windows 10 free .
Apple : Spotlight introduced Microsoft : badly copy it, make it slow and buggy and add to Vista
Lemme fix that for you:
"made it Slower and Buggier"
and at least the old versions of windows search didn't crap all over the root directory of every piece of removable media that was plugged into it. Or copy search index data from the main machine onto every thumb drive you ever plugged in(yup that happened too). And there still isn't a way to block indexing of new devices until AFTER they are plugged in. It's genius. :)
Apple had the Apple menu button centered in the menu bar in the OS X Public Beta. The screaming was loud. The Apple menu button went back to its traditional location and has stayed there ever since.
The OS X Public Beta was over two decades ago. MS can’t learn from the mistakes of others.
Microsoft had prerelease builds of Windows in the late 90s with a centred start button. It's not as if it's such a blindingly unobvious design choice as to require copying,
The movement from mouse-centred to pen/finger-centric selection in the intervening decades is more relevant as Fitt's law issues are weighed differently.
with support for formats including AAC, WMA, FLAC and ALAC
...and MP3, perchance? FLAC is useful, but there's no real reason for ALAC to exist (other than Apple refusing to support FLAC); AAC is fine but suffers from non-universality, and WMA is undeniably the spawn of Satan. In any case, you wouldn't catch me using WMP to rip CDs since I discovered Exact Audio Copy and LAME.
"I do get a bit worried that so many, maybe 10, like to hang around my house. I'm not that old yet."
Once they opened it up we found out that it in fact is better than FLAC on many fronts. Packs lossless audio smaller, some differences in decoding overhead as well. There is def some political history there, but we all have it now, no reason not to use the best (free) tool for the job, and more stuff supports ALAC than FLAC or high quality playback for the OG formats (or sadly the OGGy formats).
I'm glad to see that you are bringing your kids up to never own anything outright, and to be happy paying a subscription for everything they consume. Carry on doing a fine job as the new world economy depends on chump-milking.
78rpm is easy to rip using Audacity, so MS really don't need to add that sort of thing to the OS. 1/4 Inch tape is more of a faff, although I prefer to play them on my Akai 4000D through big speakers anyway.
Now get orf my laaand!
it is dead easy to mod most players to spin at 78rpm
That's only one of several considerations.
bringing your kids up to never own anything outright, and to be happy paying a subscription for everything they consume
You can actually still buy DRM-free digital music, you know.
I intend no personal offence, but I don't really believe you. Have you ever done a truly blind listening test? At 320kbps (and even 256kbps), even professional sound engineers tend to do no better than chance on A/B tests (see Figs. 1 and 4 in particular). Having said that, I'll still buy FLAC by preference, as I feel like something has been theoretically stolen from me otherwise.
Which codecs? If there's so much as a single cymbal sound in a 192 or lower mp3 (or similar) the hairs on my arms stand on end. I'm not any kind of an audiophile but I can hear the thing I'm thinking about a mile off. It became very noticeable when bars/restaurants/cafés started plugging laptops in and playing the ropey crap they'd either ripped or grabbed from torrents, and I still hear it when they're using Spotify and the streaming quality dips.
Yes, it's the cymbals that get me too – I call it a "swishy" sound – and I believe I can detect that at 192kbps in MP3 (I have one particularly annoying copy of Warning by Green Day with that problem). At 320kbps, it disappears from my perception (not sure about 256kbps as I have almost nothing at that bitrate).
None taken, but I regularly get tested by my music server when it plays tunes at random. My audio files are a mixture of FLAC, OGG & MP3 gathered over the years, some being CD rips and some as 'studio quality' lossless. I take the point about older codecs being inferior, which may explain some of the differences, but sometimes it really is noticeable to me - again, on my proper system with big amps and big speakers. In the car though, forget it.
(Before you ask, all tracks are normalised to eliminate 'loudness wars'.)
You can try for yourself by listening to the excellent Radio Paradise and switch between the MP3 and FLAC streams. I assure you on a decent system you will hear and feel the difference.
> ripping for 78rpm vinyl
{grumpy old sound man mode}
There are essentially no vinyl 78s. 78s predate (commercial) PVC. You need a stronger stuff for acoustic playback (and for the crude electric pickups which came later). 78s are called "shellac" which was largely talcum and gypsum dust cut with floor-sweepings and just enough shellac and similar resins to bind it together.
{/grumpy old sound man mode}
Actually RCA worked with vinyl records in 1931, as 33RPM 'transcription disks' for time/place-shifting or documenting radio network programming, but went nowhere on the consumer side.
I no longer worry about 78 (or 72 or 85RPM) player-- software can trim the speed/pitch up 237%. The EQ is mind-throbbing but as-said Audacity has a tool.
BTW: they were not "78s" until after WWII when other speeds displaced 78s; before that they were just "records" (unless you were doing radio transcriptions and sound-checks).
Yet another 'material' was "wax". Hipsters in the old-folk home still say that. Edison's dictation cylinders did cut a wax coating (tin-foil on prototypes, but wax could be erased and re-used). As the technology evolved masters used other materials, notably a witch's-brew of lead litharge and wax, and going through nitrocellulose by the end of mass-LP days.
Did they remove the feature to rip audio CDs as I am pretty sure i remember it used to be able to do that in WMP back in the XP/Vista days? So its hardly a 'new' feature to add something back in that used to be the the software years ago.
It has been a long time since i used Windows media player though as I remember it didn't even used to come with codecs for most popular video types like DVD playback built in so I switched to VLC which played pretty much anything you through at it without having to go and hunt for the correct codec first.
'94 or '95, borrowed the first recordable CD kit I'd access to. I'd rewritten the ROM so it could record audio, learned how on my snazzy 14k modem, then I invited three pals around to all burn their very first audio CDs. Albeit from my record collection, but I had 500 albums, 700 singles and they only had to choose ten or eleven songs each. Everyone got drunk, everyone was happy, I dunno if minds were blown but for once I was the coolest kid in the room.
I'd made about 5,000 compilation (mix) tapes by then because piracy was fuelling music, and it was an art form. But burning CDs was a game changer as they say now.
Last compilation CDs I gave and got, 2006. I had to make my niece a comp for her 21st and had to have one of my friends help me. He pontificated, "As anyone familiar with the 21st century knows it has to be on Spotify..."
Oh, eff off you sanctimonious twat, I can remember you calling a 3.5" floppy disk a hard disk because it was hard.
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The Computer Aided Design joint versus the artists joint
In the mid to late eighties my trouble girlfriends trouble friends would compete to make the bigger joint. I couldn't compete until I was sent on a Mentor Graphics CAD course then I built the biggest joint any of us had ever seen. It was like two hand lengths. It was an engineers joint par excellence, like a rocket ship. It helped I had more money than those doleys, but the structural integrity came from the CAD.
I never thought I'd see a better or bigger joint. 15-20 years later I'm in a Moroccan coffee shop in Amsterdam because I prefer being the only white guy in the room and the snacks are better. Some genius had made a joint in the shape of a rose, for his girlfriend, must've taken him weeks. Totally impractical to smoke compared to mine but a thing of beauty. They must've put it behind the counter for him night after night.
My humongous rocket ship didn't compare to his perfect rose so I gave up and stuck to jointjes after that.
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