Replay Gain Rocks!

According to Wikipedia 'Replay Gain is a proposed standard published in 2001 to normalize the perceived loudness of computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis'.

Due to the fact that my favourite method of listening to music is loading the whole library into my WinAmp and starting shuffled playback, I was very interested of the function of 'Normalizing' to take all the pleasure from the listening process without my any manual control since the very start of the playback. Really I don't like to excurse from what I'm doing just to find the new suitable volume level—that's annoying! Well, this can be a weak arguement for someone else with different preferences.

Another example is you are with the friends in your room chatting. You have set the WinAmp to play that loud to let you enjoy both the music and the conversation comfortably. In some tracks comes your favourite theme from your favourite album. But unfortunately that album was mastered by some.. h-m-m, let's call him very-odd-person, so the peak level is that high it can outheight Empire State Building twice!!! I mean, it is really much louder than the previous track. Surely your friends won't like it much. And they make you pay for that. Most surely, pay hard! So, now you see how useful normalization can be.

First normalization I tried was not even good enough. The principle was to calculate average level on-the-fly and apply the corresponding volume correction. The flaw of this method you see exactly the first time you start to play the song with the quiet introduction and much louder main part. In this case you actually hear when the volume is changed! And that's definitely doesn't reflect what was intended to by the artist.

Replay Gain solution offers the pre-calculating of the perceived volume based on the psychoacoustic analysis of both the current track separately and the album at whole. After that the values are stored in the header of the file. Now replaygain-compliant players can take advantage of it!

WinAmp is surely among them. Also it is supported by the majority of the most popular players: foobar2000, XMMS, Xbox Media Center, etc.

Hardware mp3-players are not that much favorable to this standard. Although there is a Rockbox firmware, but the coverage of supported mp3-players is not that wide to include iRiver T-30 I have chosen to be the one belonging to me...

Whatever, Replay Gain Rocks! Absolutely.

What do you think: How Much Is My Blog Worth?

My blog is worth $564.54.
How much is your blog worth?

What is the criteria I wonder: the number of quotings taken from my blog? nope, I've got none of them, I checked that.. the quantity of comments? nope, my livejournal.com blog has a way hundreds more comments, but nonetheless costs 0.0$.. random number? The most possible thing from my point of view..

Have a good day buying my blog! :-)

Google desktop gadgets

This is the test of the new Google initiative: little small widgets that can be embedded into the homepage using JavaScript. So, let's see..


Magic Ball, Magic Ball, tell me now
Shall I be rich someday somehow?

UPDATE: Google took its' Magic 8-ball back...

Where I've been

Here's the map of the counties I visited. It does not reflect the places I've been, but just the countries I've been to on the whole.



create your own visited country map

Picasa trial

Just wondered the way Picasa posts images to the blog (here is one of my favourite pictures from my trip to Kiev (the Urkaine) - me at the entrance to the Residence of the President).

Picasa is a rather quick and nice and pretty tool from Google. In my mind it is the most useful and comfortable-to-use image viewer/organizer. ACDSee is much more powerful (including such options like Batch Time Stamp Adjusting, EXIF data operations, etc.), but most of this power is not necessary for the common people (I mean, not enthusiasts like me (gg), or photo-professionals).
Picasa possesses the ability to convert, resize, retouch and all other basic stuff 90% of users don't need. And what is much more valuable - it's absolutely FREE!

But my own choice is ACDSee because it is more comfortable to use (for me) and also because of all this variety of wonderful features implemented in it.

Have a nice day!

Photo sharing resource

MyPhotoAlbum is supposed to be the resource for storing, sharing and printing pictures via Internet. Well, I used it just for keeping my pictures online. The resource is really nice: it is updated constantly, it is easy-to-use, it provides to the visitor shrinked images with the possibility to get the original one. Well, everything is nice with it (except the fact that it does not allow to use it from the countries in the Eastern Europe region!).

Unexpectedly some weeks ago I received a message, that told me that for keeping using this service it is required to order at least one print during the year. What can I say: this service was created for trading and commerce, so no offense.

But now I'm looking for the substitution. My requirements are:

• keeping the originals of the pictures


• organizing pictures by albums and/or tags


• easy and fast slide-show


• direct non-dynamic links to the pictures


• UI able to work in non-IE browsers (e.g. Opera)


• fast hosting & large storage

The closest one for now is Flamber.ru. It does not provide slideshows though. But everything else at the first glance seems to be OK.

So, my photosite is slowly floating to the new hosting http://avalanche.flamber.ru/.

Opera 9.0 Final is out!

Long chain of Beta's is over. Here it comes - the king of the hill - Opera 9.0 Final, The Fastest Browser on Earth!

At the first look, it became much more customizable.

And at the second - it passes ACID2 test, so there's a hope that soon comes the full support from the side of Google (Calendar, Page Creator, Spreadsheets, etc.)

At least I hope for that, because I'm tired of having two browsers: Maxthon for the IE-only sites and Opera for the whole rest of the world :-)

UPDATE:
OK, next my appreciates go to the History Browser. Well done! Bravo! Easy and neat, grouping by the visiting day, filter-search field, two-panels browsing - just perfect.

Visual content blocking and cache browsing - not the major ones, but anyway ARE really nice options.

Where all this gonna end I wonder?

I am not the follower of Luddite movement, I am not the conservative. But sometimes I got very scared of what happens in the world.

The mankind was always dependent on something it had produced. And it can't give it up. And I don't see the reason why it should.

But at the same moment I know some person who are involved in the changing of the Whole Wide World. And I am not quite sure in all of them being truly reliable on in that...

What I want to say. A lot of things are postulated & considered to be solid & unshakable. But the problem is.. that they are not!

Have a look for example.

First post

Hello!

This blog is supposed to be English-speaking representative of my virtual Me. I don't know yet what it would be like nor at least what it should be like. Nevertheless I have a very good feeling about it...

I go open the Champagne..