[HN Gopher] No patches for digital audio releases
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No patches for digital audio releases
Author : mcraiha
Score : 46 points
Date : 2022-04-17 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mcraiha.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mcraiha.github.io)
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| GAS's (Wolfgang Voigt) latest album [1] was criticised by many
| (including Pitchfork [2]) for having a very high pitched (~12khz)
| tone throughout the album. Pitchfork was speculating in their
| review that the artist suffers from hearing loss, after decades
| spent in the Cologne techno scene. In response they removed the
| 12khz tone, and uploaded the new versions to all digital
| platforms, and even sent repressed CDs to customers.
|
| [1] https://kompakt-gas.bandcamp.com/album/der-lange-marsch
|
| [2] https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gas-der-lange-marsch/
| sueders101 wrote:
| Kanye West 'patched' multiple songs on his album The Life of
| Pablo.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_Pablo#Post-release...
| rectang wrote:
| > _I assume someone joined the invidual tracks manually in their
| digital audio workstation (DAW) software and botched the thing at
| that point. And I can safely assume that person didn't even to
| bother to listen it (it is over 50 minutes long so...). Nor did
| anyone else working there with that release._
|
| > _I get that people make mistakes. That is natural. But
| WaterTower Music should have some sort of QA team in the building
| to prevent something like that from happening._
|
| Former audio mastering engineer here. Audio QA is hard. You need
| very high attention to detail to work in a mastering role.
|
| Many customers do not have serious QA skills and even if you get
| everything "right", if they miscommunicated their instructions
| and you faithfully fulfilled them, unfortunate things can happen.
|
| I once had a guy screaming at me over his assistant's phone
| (because he'd thrown his own through the window) "I JUST THREW
| AWAY A HUNDRED... THOUSAND... DOLLARS!" It was their fault,
| though. 300,000 CDs had to be destroyed. We got paid to make a
| new master, with rush fees. Not how I like to make my money, but
| the people who mattered were thrilled with the service we
| provided and our ability to turn around perfectly executed
| masters repeatedly under intense time pressure.
|
| With regards to the Batman Begins error, if I was the mastering
| engineer AND the one who did the edit, I would _definitely_ have
| caught that. I listened all the way through to at least one copy
| of every master I ever prepared -- you couldn 't decline that
| service. That's not uncommon for mastering houses, and so I
| speculate that the error happened earlier in the chain, with a
| DAW operator who could have been an engineer or perhaps an artist
| with DAW skills. Somebody was tired and overbudget and couldn't
| muster the energy to listen to the damn thing for the ten
| thousandth time.
|
| Regrettably, although it seems clear that the overlap is not what
| the artist intended, it would get by most listeners -- it's not
| like it's some nasty digital glitch, the overall mood and flow
| isn't killed dead. At the mastering stage, there's not a
| guarantee that somebody would point it out, even though we'd
| really like to have done so and earned the gratitude of the
| customer. Between the mastering preparation stage and the
| publishing stage, probably only someone highly familiar with the
| piece would have picked that error out, and sometimes those
| people don't bring their A game for QA.
| HidyBush wrote:
| Unrelated question: it seems to me that the majority of music
| is recorded/mastered in a bad way. This is especially painful
| when I'm trying to judge a new pair of headphones. What do you
| think are some music albums that really hit the nail in terms
| of mastering?
| kingcharles wrote:
| The Batman thing is just the CD tracks bashed together into a
| single file. My guess is that task was dropped on some minimum
| wage intern, and that no-one with the title "engineer" or any
| serious experience with audio was involved.
|
| Source: used to work for Peter Gabriel
| k_sze wrote:
| My hypothesis about no-patch is that there is no incentive. You
| can't report an audio problem like you report a software bug. I
| can't imagine a situation where the kind of audio problem
| described by the author is show-stopping.
|
| Audio problems are also subject to subjective judgement. What one
| considers a problem might go completely unnoticed by other
| people. Heck, the content creator may even argue that it's part
| of their creative output.
|
| In some cases, there is less ambiguity. e.g. you really shouldn't
| hear any voice when the track says "instrumental", but does any
| consumer protection law care about that? Like, in Hong Kong, we
| have "Trade Description" laws that protect consumers against
| merchandises or services that don't match the advertised
| descriptions, although I have no idea if those laws would help
| here. What judge would not roll their eyes and tell you to just
| settle out of court? But if you settle out of court, I'd bet
| their laywer would try to add gag terms to the settlement. Are
| you really gonna allow yourself to be silenced in order to get a
| 10.99 USD refund?
|
| Maybe we could create incentives if 1) audio hosting platforms
| actually allow listeners to report audio problems in a
| _systematic_, _publicly visible_ way, like you would file bug
| issues on GitHub, 2) leaving the problems unfixed will lead to
| demonetization of the content.
|
| Also note that the performance of art seems to become perversed
| when (big) money becomes the incentive. If you know where to look
| on the web, there are groups who fansub anime and who will go out
| of their way to re-encode original bluray releases because they
| think the audio is out-of-sync, or because they think the picture
| of the original looks like shit in terms of colour
| temperature/lightness/saturation/gamma. And they seem to do it
| out of the passion of sharing the joy of watching anime.
|
| While fansubbers have total freedom to decide when to do a patch
| or re-release, your professional audio engineer working for
| Warner Bros (again, hypothetical) doesn't have that freedom. If
| they report a problem about something already released, the first
| question they get asked by their boss would be "does this hurt
| our bottomline?" And probably overwhelmingly often, the answer is
| "no" because we don't have a system that builds the right
| incentives.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > You can't report an audio problem like you report a software
| bug.
|
| Well, that depends on who you're reporting to. How do you
| report a bug to MAMAA? Sure, you can click "Send feedback" all
| you want, but how likely is it to reach a person (as opposed to
| /dev/null), and then fixed? At the same time, if you tell a
| small artist or label about an audio problem, they might be
| able to do something about it.
| k_sze wrote:
| Exactly. Part of the problem is that the media hosting
| platforms don't make these reports public. And there are also
| multiple platforms where Warner Bros (just as an example) can
| get their soundtracks hosted. And then such reports would get
| fragmented across the platforms.
| timmattison wrote:
| I used to report broken tracks to Google when I had Google Music.
| I gave up. I'd get a form letter that said to reset my cookies,
| uninstall and reinstall the app, etc. every time.
|
| I'd write and explain the problem was with the same song, on
| different machines (Windows, Linux, and Max) and both Android and
| iOS. Still got the same form letter back.
|
| I'll almost guarantee that if I search my email for the broken
| tracks they'd still be broken. One was Saddam-a-Go-Go by GWAR. A
| few seconds in it just skips ahead a few seconds from one lyric
| to another.
| peterkelly wrote:
| I think there's something to be said for the inability to issue
| patches. It's created a culture in the software industry,
| especially in games, of rushing to get the first version out in
| basic working form and then have a "day one patch" followed by
| many subsequent fixes. Quality suffers because there's an
| attitude that problems can always be fixed later, so it's not a
| disaster if the initial release is below standard.
|
| 30 years ago this wasn't an option. Whatever the development team
| designated as the golden master would be written to physical
| cartridges, floppy disks, or CDs. Any bugs that were there would
| stay there, so you _had_ to get it as close to perfect as
| possible because there were no second chances. This pressure
| meant that people were, by necessity, more careful. How many
| times have you installed a patch for a Super NES or Playstation 2
| game? Compare that to today 's releases.
|
| For developers and other creators, the idea of being able to
| repeatedly update things is attractive. It's also necessary in
| certain spheres, particularly in fixing security vulnerabilities.
| But I know the sense of finality and relief can be immense once
| you publish something that _can 't_ be changed (as was the case
| with my thesis) and that something is finally "done" and I know
| I'll never have to worry about it again. The requirement to get
| something right the first time has a significant impact on
| quality.
| kingcharles wrote:
| The first time I came across patched _video games_ was the late
| 80s. You 'd regularly get updates to PC games on magazine cover
| disks.
| tialaramex wrote:
| While "Day One Patch" is basically a curse (and a reminder that
| pre-ordering games is a sucker bet since even people who buy it
| when it's released aren't sure yet what they'll actually get)
| it's worth remembering that even when things were "written to
| physical cartridges, floppy disks or CDs" there actually were
| version changes.
|
| If you get into speed running you'll find that on some of these
| very old games it's specified the _exact_ version you must run,
| e.g. the Japanese original CD release with no version on the
| title screen, not the English or German versions, and not a
| later Japanese version showing 1.0 on the title screen. Because
| even if a casual player doesn 't care that there was a glitch
| where you can phase through walls by pressing PAUSE once per
| frame ten times in a row on the other versions, the speed
| runners absolutely do care.
|
| There are musicians who clearly don't see the recording as the
| primary outlet, and so aren't bothered if the CD goes out with
| a mediocre attempt at a song because for them the live
| performance is what matters. That's not something that really
| exists for video games.
| _moof wrote:
| I've noticed this too. Combine the constant patching with auto-
| updates and my whole system starts to feel like it's made of
| sand, constantly shifting under my feet. It almost feels
| disrespectful. Like, I use my computers to _work._ The most
| important thing is that it work for me, reliably and
| predictably, not that it serve as a showcase for whatever the
| product manager du jour needs in their promotion packet. There
| 's just a total failure to prioritize the needs of the user.
|
| Needless to say I keep auto-updates off. What a world we've
| made where updating your software has become something to be
| avoided.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Believe it or not, games regularly did get updated even back in
| the NES era. There's many games out there that had a long
| enough shelf life to get a PRG1/CHR1 revision and reprint.
| Furthermore, almost no games were sim-ship[0] back then, so
| even if games didn't get a re-release in the same territory you
| still had the opportunity to patch a game for the next
| country's release. e.g. US v1.0 might be equivalent to JP v1.2
| even if Japan never got that version.
|
| This is also why a lot of Europeans get really confused at old
| AVGN videos: some of the games he trashes were _dramatically_
| improved for Europe and only sucked in the US. (e.g. Fester 's
| Quest)
|
| Furthermore, developers back then were very much not "more
| careful"; in fact, there's plenty of examples of games that
| were shipped back then with little or no playtesting or QA work
| done. And likewise, being able to patch a game later doesn't
| really fix the reputational harm from shipping broken software.
| If the game is not playable day-one[1], nobody will care when
| it's playable on day 255.
|
| [0] Industry jargon for SIMultaneous SHIP - as in, release in
| all territories
|
| [1] Day-one patch inclusive. I know people hate them, but they
| let developers eke out an extra month of QA and bug-fixing time
| because of how cert works.
| ovao wrote:
| There's one example I know of in which a 'patch' was released for
| an album: in 2008, Trent Reznor released a corrected version of
| the 24/96 version of _The Slip_ (the album he had released for
| free through nin.com, and at the time, their own torrent tracker)
| due to a mastering error. The re-release replaced the existing
| release on nin.com.
|
| It obviously wasn't _technically_ a patch, and was easy enough to
| do since it was self-distributed, but it's not entirely unheard
| of for a major digital music release to have seen corrections.
| david_allison wrote:
| Kanye[0] and Drake[1] have done the same:
|
| > The changes feature a few new alternate vocal takes and
| lyrics, but mainly comprise mix and production tweaks.
|
| [0] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kanye-west-
| mak...
|
| > These weren't overhauls that significantly altered the length
| or content of songs--just tweaks to the mixes of select songs
|
| [1] https://kotaku.com/albums-are-getting-patches-
| now-1827376874
| k_sze wrote:
| I also remember that Kahvi Collective re-released one of their
| netlabel albums, "Tangents", to fix a mastering error, although
| they decided to actually charge for the new version due to
| mastering effort - their albums are usually pay-what-you-want
| on Bandcamp (including 0 dollar if you just want to download
| the FLAC version).
| tialaramex wrote:
| It would be nice to patch metadata somehow formally.
|
| I have the version of "Furious Angels" on which a track on the
| second disc is incorrectly labelled "Clubbed To Death
| (Instrumental Version)" but er, no, it's just an instrumental
| unrelated to "Clubbed To Death". I know that, but it does say
| right on the label that it's Clubbed To Death and so I'm torn
| about how to record it in the metadata for the album.
| bombcar wrote:
| The CD that came with the original World of Warcraft collectors
| edition mislabeled the ironforge theme as stormwind. Is
| annoying.
| bscphil wrote:
| A related issue: in some cases the industry has allowed _anyone_
| to upload a copy of a song, and so you run into the issue that
| you 're at the mercy of whoever the uploader was when it comes to
| the quality of your upload.
|
| I ran into a case where there were reports that a specific
| release of a CD has a much better mastering than other versions,
| it was a Super Audio CD (SACD) as I recall. I looked up the
| release on YouTube, since differences in mastering are clearly
| audible even in a lossy encode. The one upload was by a random
| person who had put it up in an HD video, but the volume of the
| release had inexplicably been boosted to the point that the sound
| was _heavily_ distorted!
|
| Another case: the most popular version of the Eminem "Lose
| Yourself" music video (over a billion views) is uploaded by some
| random person, with one of those ludicrous "no copyright
| infringement intended" messages in the description. It's
| seemingly the one that the industry approved as the legitimate
| version of the music video on YouTube, however. I actually tried
| tracking down the official version on the artist's page, and (at
| the time) it had actually been taken down by the studio with one
| of the standard DMCA takedown messages YouTube shows!
| amelius wrote:
| Is there some deep-learning tool to reconstruct songs that got
| distorted in various ways?
| lozenge wrote:
| "Content aware fill" works on the basis that you just want
| "some grass" or "some rocks" and don't know or care whether
| it matches the exact grass that was in the original picture.
|
| If people have already heard the original song, then the
| computer isn't going to be able to fill in the lost
| information in a way that matches their memory.. even with
| deep learning
| 323 wrote:
| Regarding the Eminem song, I found this on Reddit, don't know
| if it's true:
|
| > _YouTube allows copyright owners to choose to leave videos
| /channels up when they report them and simply divert all
| monetization from the videos to the copyright owner. That is
| likely what is happening here._
|
| Could be some sort of authenticity play from Eminem, him
| wanting to look less "corporate".
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