I tried Amazon Ultra HD Music today. I was quite pleasantly impressed. There was a HUGE difference in quality over normal services. 

Granted, I'm somewhat of an audiophile. I have a fairly precise ear and can hear artifacts in most compression formats, but Spotify's 320kbps premium is one of the few lossy compression algorithms that is totally transparent to my ears. It sounds exactly like the CDs in every single perceptable way. (Ogg at 192kbps is very close as well). 

So when I compared Spotify and Amazon Ultra HD side by side, I was shocked when I heard FAR better than CD quality audio. It was a landslide difference. It was so noticeable that it was like being colorblind your whole life and learning to see.

Truthfully, I wonder if it was actually the mastering job and not necessarily just the format. Because suddenly I could hear where instruments were coming from spatially so much better than just sounding muffled between my ears. I could hear extremely faint sounds clearly (rather than being muffled or blending in with other parts of the mix). Even on live recordings, very quiet clapping from even a single audience member or very slight nuances that I couldn't hear were now audible. And the keyboards and guitars sounded so much more clear.

I can't explain it. The human range of hearing tops out at 20 khz, and CDs (with a sample rate of 44.1khz) can reproduce 22.05 khz accurately (above the human range of hearing). Furthermore, CDs use 16 bit audio which is well known to be more than enough to have plenty of dynamic range. Going from 16 to 24 bits only allows already imperceptable noise to become even quieter. Usually the differences are imperceptable. 

But somehow, when you take 96khz 24 bit audio and put them together on U-HD, everything sounds so much more spacious. It sounds less muffled, more nuanced, more detailed, and more alive. And scientifically that should be impossible, but it absolutely did sound noticeably better. 

Perhaps it really was the mastering (production) and not necessarily the format itself. I honestly dont' know, but in any case, if you have decent headphones, I'd recommend trying it. You won't regret it.

Hello all, 

I threw together a quick plugin last night to resolve a number of issues with "Authorization Mismatch Error" codes (or user login issues) on older MyBB themes. This is single-handedly one of the most popular problems MyBB users have when installing older themes, and previously, the only fix was to manually edit templates. This plugin will take care of these fixes automatically and should save administrators some time when installing older themes!

To run the patches, simply upload the plugin, activate, and you're done. The readme has information on how to patch additional themes after the patcher has been run initially. 

IMPORTANT: This is a best-faith effort to patch as many old themes as possible. It cannot be guaranteed to work on every single theme. Please make a database backup before use! This is pre-release and is currently in testing, full release is coming soon.

Attached Files

  MyBB Theme Patcher.zip (Size: 18.61 KB / Downloads: 303)
  MyBB Theme Patcher (Stable Version).zip (Size: 23.08 KB / Downloads: 290)

I have around ~70GB of old music projects (Logic Pro X) sitting on my hard drive. Every single track is a 48khz/24 bit wav/aiff, meaning that some tracks are over 50% bigger than normal CD-Quality WAV files. These projects easily reach several gigabytes, especially as they near completion, and WAV files are very difficult to compress with traditional compression algorithms. I am in the process of saving them externally to free up space, so I began my search.

Surprisingly, 7-zip did a pretty good job of shrinking the projects by 20-30%, but that didn't do a lot of good for situations when I had a lot of duplicate files (bounces and alternative versions) that added bloat. LZMA can detect duplicate files, but it can only do so if they are very close to each other (within 16-64MB of each other, depending on the dictionary size/configuation). 

I found a tool called ZPAQ for that. It's a command-line only tool and it's a bit obscure, but it relies on implementing several compression algorithms and determining which algorithm is best for each specific type of file. This allows it to do much better on raw audio files that are generally difficult to compress with standard zip/7z-style compression. 

The results: On about 9.5GB of data, I shrunk it down to a mere 1.3GB. This was a whopping reduction. (7-zip got it down to about 5.95 GB, for comparison). On files without duplicates, ZPAQ generally saw about a 35% reduction, and a 30% reduction on standard 7z/LZMA (compared to 10-20% on standard ZIP). The differences were far less extreme, but still very impressive considering the difficult-to-compress nature of lossless audio.

That being said, I will likely continue to use the 7z format because it's far better supported and doesn't require command-line interfaces to extract/compress (storage is cheap anyway ). However, with such extreme reductions seen by ZPAQ, I may look into it a little more for the future.

I guess I could share some art and stuff here. Basically I guess will be a dump spot for any art and graphics I make.

Here's some art. Most of it is older Put it in spoilers since some are a little bigger.:

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I discovered this recently, and it's been interesting. I don't have unlimited data, so saving data on Spotify is a big deal for me. I didn't realize this, however: It's 24kbps (HE-AAC). Spotify normally uses Ogg Vorbis, so I'm surprised they dropped it to AAC for this, but the 24kbps is shocking, to say the least. 

I took a listen, and it's absolutely amazing how good it sounds at such an abysmal bitrate. Make no mistake, I can definitely tell the difference from the higher quality ones (it sounds a little more reverb/echo-ish, especially when the drums come in), but it doesn't sound terrible by any means. 

Sirius/SiriusXM/XMRadio receivers generally use VBR at around 30-44kbps and sound MUCH worse (especially the old Sirius-only radios, the newer XM and SiriusXM ones sound a little better), so I'm quite surprised. 

I generally can hear the difference between an MP3 and the CD at anything about 160kbps and lower, or with AAC, I can hear the differences even between 256kbps and the CD (surprisingly, as AAC is a better format).I'm not even an audiophile (haha ), and can definitely hear artifacts in higher bitrates, so I was surprised at how good Spotify pulled it off at 24kbps. 

Anyone else used low bit rate audio before? What were your experiences? It's more or less obsolete with the storage we have available now, but it's still amazing how well some of the more modern formats can pull this off.

Has anyone else updated yet? 

It’s quite a welcome update in my opinion. Adds widgets and the new App Library, both of which are long overdue features that android had had had for around a decade. It’s also quite a bit faster and drains my battery less. 

What are your thoughts on iOS 14?

Congratulations to @brian51 on your selection as October Member of the Month!

I was getting doxxed (stalked on social media and having personal information leaked publicly by strangers). Things got out of hand a tadddd bit too much. 

And before you assume too much, I'm staunchly opposed to racism of any kind. I got doxxed by racist people saying some... very offensive things. Let's put it that way.  

I decided to deactivate my primary facebook account until after the election. I did this in 2016 and it was a good decision. (For anyone who isn't in America, it's absolute chaos on the streets here. It's pretty much war in a lot of places, so we're hanging in there the best we can. My city has stayed safe and thankfully, the police here did an excellent job listening to the people and addressing injustice. Not all cities in America can stay the same. That being said, I love my country and I do everything I can to make a positive difference. I'm very thankful to have a roof over my head and will never complain, knowing there are people who are doing much worse. I'm blessed and very thankful. )

Anyway, I feel much lighter and less stressed already. I created a new one for close friends and have about 20 people on it, and that's it. It's amazing how much better I feel not having to stress about being doxxed, finding random screenshots of my profile everywhere, and getting hate mail from people 2-3/week in my inbox and my posts. People are unhinged. It's amazing, in all the wrong ways. It's just... I'm truthfully shocked and speechless. 

Stay safe everyone. Make sure your posts are private on FB and otherwise!

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scien...phine-gas/

Detection of the chemical phosphine, PH3, phosphorus with hydrogens attached to it, has happened in the atmosphere of Venus. They say it is an energetically costly molecule that can only be made by either unknown chemical processes, or bacteria. It's not very common on Earth, because it can only be made by bacteria killed by oxygen, but Venus seems a suitable place for such a life form, if the phosphine is there, and it is life making it.

"But if phosphine really is floating through the Venusian cloud deck, its presence suggests one of two intriguing possibilities: that alien life-forms are deftly linking together phosphorus and hydrogen atoms, or that some completely unanticipated chemistry is crafting phosphine in the absence of life."

Hy friends, I would like to speak for a moment, unfortunately I am still very stressed. It's about my son Ben and the start of special school. Unfortunately, we don't get an autistic helper, the state doesn't want to take over the costs, the official car is very stressful, and as it looks now, he can't go to school. Without help with eating, changing diapers etc .. he cannot go to school, he also needs protection from himself and others that he hurts himself. Without accompaniment, no chance. School would start next week, but today I called again for 4 hours to get help, unfortunately only canceled, so I now have an application that I can only send this week for home schooling through me.
Sorry that I only take a quick look at you and don't post anything, but I just feel like I can do more with my head and energy.
Regards Tc4me