Demonoid Gone

[Valkyrie-Favor]

The bands I've played with have used Audacity to produce records! Some were even successful! (i.e. they broke even on touring expenses )

I'm sure it's fine for your computer and your record collection. Certainly safer than torrenting dodgy ZIP files...

[Forlorn Drifter]

The bands I've played with have used Audacity to produce records! Some were even successful! (i.e. they broke even on touring expenses )

I'm sure it's fine for your computer and your record collection. Certainly safer than torrenting dodgy ZIP files...

My mom keeps telling me she'll find me a better program, and that "a guy at work knows a good one, I just have to ask him".

She's a huge control freak when it comes to computers/the internet. Comes from here job. Something about being up at 4 AM to explain how to reformat a hard drive to a Japanese executive who speaks no english and is using a translator does that for you.

Michi, you mention it covers over pops. How bad? I like the pops of a fresh record, but I have a couple of old, warped, waaay overplayed ones that need some help.

Right, so we lost a torrent site. Arrg.

[lisalover1]

Fighting piracy isn't a losing battle -- they're just not fighting it the right way. Layer after layer of draconian DRM, revoking ownership to content, and not allowing purchased content to be played freely where one wishes only makes piracy stronger.

The core principle of piracy that gets lost in these torrent sites (good riddance) is that it's not about getting stuff for free, it's about freedom for your stuff. As long as that principle needs to be fought for, piracy is going nowhere.

You're right; the best way to fight piracy is just to offer better service than what pirates can offer. I don't pirate movies if they are available on Netflix, and I don't pirate PC games at all anymore, since they can be found for so cheaply on Steam or GOG during sales. Most people would choose cheap and legal over free and illegal. Really, when companies whine about piracy, what they're really saying is they don't want to update their business practices to compete with piracy.

[Pulsar_t]

The price of globalisation is that you allow a bunch of sleazebags like Hollywood to meddle in the affairs of your—supposedly sovereign—country, even if it's just to protest products that are really nothing crucial to the advancement of world economy.

What bugs me personally when trackers go down like this is that the hosted out-of-print items are usually gone for good..

[Xeogred]

For each suprnova they take down a dozen more powerful rise up.

Sometimes. DDL's are having a hell of a hard time this year after the MU debacle. One of my recent and most reliable ones, oron, just fell through the cracks recently as well. So far a lot of the newer ones just straight up suck. Mediafire and Depositfiles seem to be some of the last few that are still worthwhile... rapidshare is somehow still around after all this time, but it's not that great anymore at all.

Anyways, this fucking blows. I've downloaded tons of movies from demonoid that I ended up buying after watching them. As a huge anime fan, it was my go to place for some licensed and harder to find stuff as well. The anime market is a thin and niche' one and I'm all about preserving ancient anime that are near impossible to find, and the destruction of sites like these and more DDL's is really crippling that possibility. A lot of fansubbers just straight up lost tons of raws and other really old obscure shows when that happened with MU, fileserve, etc. Who knows if that data will ever be recovered again.

The same can be said for some roms and rare games floating through the net. With sites like SNESOrama dead now, I'm sure a lot of history was lost there too.

Believe me, I am all about owning what I love and being authentic. But in this digital era, the hammers striking down on piracy are doing an excellent job at destroying rare history as well. Very unfortunate.

This is only hurting things in the long run for sure. Good job. As others are saying, the approach to getting rid of "issues" like this needs to change and now.

EDIT: Seems Pulsar_t and I are kind of on the same page here. What he said.

[D.D.D.]

With sites like SNESOrama dead now, I'm sure a lot of history was lost there too.

It was gone... now it's back with people trying to rebuild it (same url). But to what extent, that remains to be seen. It's still pretty empty.

[deathsled]

It suggests Audacity, but my mom, (AKA One of the biggest IT people in her company) tells me not to use it. I just need something so I can listen to my music in the car.

Not to rip on your mom or anything, but I've known Directors of IT that can't even connect their laptop to their home wireless network....

So because your mom said "don't use Audacity" you haven't tried it just to see if it can do exactly what you want it to do? What did she recommend instead? Oh wait, she said "a guy at work knows a good one, I just have to ask him."

[Michi]

Michi, you mention it covers over pops. How bad? I like the pops of a fresh record, but I have a couple of old, warped, waaay overplayed ones that need some help.

Audacity uses a filter called Noise Removal. You select a sample of just the noise you want removed (like a horrible poping sound brought on by warping in the gap between songs) and it uses that selection as a sample of what noise to remove.

I'm not sure how warped the records you mentioned are, but I've had good luck with it when I tried it on a couple of my mom's records that she was wanting to convert so she could put them on her ipod. Of course, her records only had a couple of particularly bad spots that didn't affect the rest of the album, so I'm not sure how well it would work if what you were trying to clear up were, say, the whole album. I've never had to try that before, but it couldn't hurt to try.

And it never really removes all the noise. It does reduce it significantly though. But it still sounds like you're listening to an old vinyl. So ideally, and this is assuming your albums aren't completely funked-up, you might be able to get them to sound like they were in moderately-used range.

I say, since you like the pops, to go ahead and download Audacity and give it a test on a record that's in good shape to see how it goes. If you like how it sounds, great, than go ahead and get started on converting a couple albums while you wait for your mom to go talk to that "guy at work."

[Forlorn Drifter]

It suggests Audacity, but my mom, (AKA One of the biggest IT people in her company) tells me not to use it. I just need something so I can listen to my music in the car.

Not to rip on your mom or anything, but I've known Directors of IT that can't even connect their laptop to their home wireless network....

So because your mom said "don't use Audacity" you haven't tried it just to see if it can do exactly what you want it to do? What did she recommend instead? Oh wait, she said "a guy at work knows a good one, I just have to ask him."

I respect my mother, so I follow what she says. Part of being a good kid.

She's the global IT Manager for her company, and I've seen her reset the global network using over 200 lines of code she had to type out from memory. I'm pretty sure about her abilites. Obviously, you also do not know my mother. She moniters everything I download, thanks to the router history...

Michi, thanks. I'll see about it. My main hope is that I wouldn't have to cut the songs myself, but I guess I can't help that.

[dsheinem]

She moniters everything I download, thanks to the router history...

What does she think about all the time you spend on RB?