Zeus

Are you more attracted to music that emphasizes technicality and instrumental proficiency or music that puts more emphasis on soul and accessibility?

A: I need both. In order to make good music a band needs equal parts inspiration and skill. If a band is technically exquisite but there is no soul behind the music and no motivation in their playing it makes any potentially great album suck. A good example of this would be Versailles' third album Holy Grail. From a technical standpoint the album is great. From an accessible standpoint, the album is trash. The album lacks inspiration and motivation - the band seems bored playing the music and that makes me as a listener bored to listen to it. No matter how technically proficient Hizaki's 8th guitar solo in Faith and Decision is, the lack of feeling in any of the songs reduces it from "wow this sounds amazing" to "wow this sounds amazing...ly boring".

On the other hand if a band has a lot of soul but can't play their instruments to save their life, then their music sounds equally as terrible. You can want to make great music until your fingers bleed and you turn blue in the face but if you can't wrap your head around the concept of making a half-decent riff you will always be bad. You can't make good music if you can't play your instruments. Insert any indie-VK band as an example and you'll probably get very close.

This may be the Toasted Waffles forum but watch what it is that you choose to link to here. Pr0nz, even of the pooping variety, is still not allowed.

^ It also doesn't help that America itself is a huge place. I've heard American bands talk about how hard it is to tour here because of the sheer size of the country. I couldn't even imagine how the average Japanee band would handle it without losing a ton of money in the process. I wouldn't doubt if that also factors into the GazettE's decision to not tour here.

A joke that someone in my class made today:

Professor: Well it looks like we are without a clock in this classroom from now on.

Student: Yeah, it's those computer science budget cuts gone to work.

It would be funnier if it wasn't so true. They're already moving things out of our department. They'll keep the million dollar computer lab they gave us but they'll take our clocks away >___>

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAGGI AND CHAMP-SAN!

YES! Looking forward to it.

The main problem with all zombie apocalypse plans would be food .____.

if there is shortage with food, and so urgent,

i would not mind to eat anyone in my reach.

I know i will be hunted down by both side in the end,

zombies and hungry people. Kill or be killed

Tell me more...

Well if that's true great for Hizumi! I wonder if their relationship also had any bearing on D'espa's disbandment. [/fanningtheflames]

Updated the list again!

I'll leave this open a bit longer so more people can get their thoughts in for the last minute.

Also, I guess Champ is saying that I should listen to Ensiferum?

so, the main problem i find with zess's plan is that it only covers the beginning, it's nothing that'll last too long,

because obviously you'll run out of food-clothes-air-newmusic etc. sometime and a small team has to gather new supplies, which may work for sometime,

Yep. There was more but I figured that it was long enough already and that no one would want to read more ^__^

Also thought of an improvement to my plan - barricade the stairs, cut the elevator and use the ladders within the elevator chute to move between floors. Zombies can't climb ladders. This makes your building almost 10x more secure if you're on a higher floor (that's assuming they ever break in though but shit happens and when it does you want to be able to get them in one place and burn them out).

The main problem with all zombie apocalypse plans would be food .____.

Hey! I hopped on after .neon

Although yes, I do get what you're saying. The only four "blackgaze" bands I listen to that fall into that "genre" would be Alcest, Heretoir, Lantlos and Amesoeurs. I'd throw Les Discrets in there but they're mostly post-rock. I have little incentive to go deeper into the scene because the rest of it sounds like people trying to redo Alcest's Souvenirs... and failing at it. Hell, even Neige sounds like he's beginning to repeat that formula because Tales of Wandering failed to do anything remotely interesting. It sounded nice...and that was it.

I still don't think that the new Lantlos sounds all that bad but it's still not as good as .neon. I need to listen to their first full-length sometime soon.

That's great for them! They're actually quite talented. I'm just wondering how big of a presence they'll be able to command in those countries since I'm not too sure how "popular" they are. I guess we'll see.

While this is cool news for the fans and all I don't think the album is coming anytime within the next year. It's cool that they're trying something different this time around. God knows they've released enough singles with TOXIC.

I just finished listening to GENEVA and I think I'm in love. Russian Circles is the type of band that I've been looking for to not only fill the void left by ISIS but to also bridge the gap between the instrumental intertwining melodies of acts like Mono and the crushing heaviness of bands in the post-metal scene like ISIS. The only track I don't like is Philos because it lacks any sense of immediacy but the only thing that song is missing is a climax. Just when you think it is going to get started it meanders some more and then ends, making me feel like there was something more to that track that RC missed out on. Geneva (the song) is pretty sick and I'm loving the overall contrast between the cellos/violins and the crushing heaviness of the guitars. The different textures that the guitarist can wrangle out of his instrument is equally as impressive.

Afterwards I looked up some more information about the band to learn more about them and I found out that there's just one guitarist. It makes you wonder if bands like Godspeed You! with their 20-something band ensemble really need all of those guitarists when RC has shown that you can achieve greatness with a solitary guitarist. I'm also loving the crunchy bass I hear and the drummer is just fantastic. The tracks are a little short but they almost all make up for it in sheer energy and goodness.

I'd give this a solid 8.5. I'm listening to Empros now. Ito told me to keep an open mind about it so I am but a lot of reviewers are calling it their most solid effort to date. I'll report back and tell you guys what I think so if anyone else is interested they'll know whether or not it's up their alley.

Whomever recommended this album is awesome.

Cool points to anyone who can guess what OS I'm running.

I tried looking for something online that could maybe help you or at the very least feel better. Most of what I found was from a few years back and referred to low quality as the 128 DRM'd AAC files that they were selling years ago. It really doesn't apply much to this situation. I can tell you though that you're not going nuts and that those files are indeed faulty. They're usually good about replacing them once they find them, so hopefully they'll refund you appropriately.

My dream is that one day either we'll be able to either increase our download speeds or increase our storage to the point where buying lossless becomes practical so we don't have this problem anymore.

Time to write thoughts about Wintersun:

Totally bought this album on a whim a year ago because I vaguely remember reading that they were a good band and it was in the middle of a drought of releases so there was nothing coming in from the visual land at the moment. It took a little to grow on me because I wasn't into as many Western bands as I am now but then once it clicked it took off. I love the extreme majestic technical epic melodic metal that the album has, I love the way the tracks get slightly longer and longer all building up to Sadness and Hate at the end, I love how it's kick-ass and metal but it's still easily digestable. I played this for a friend that doesn't even like screaming or harsh vocals in his metal and he liked it too! So yeah, this album definitely is a good showcase of whatever genre it's supposed to represent. There's too much variation to pin it down to just one.

I can't give it a good rating because I've heard it before but it never gets old. It's really good and I hope everyone else enjoys it just as much as I do.

I know she had a second child about a year ago so that probably attributes to it a little. I watched it as soon as I woke up though so I wasn't paying attention to that at all.

Her singing got much, much better! I'm impressed a lot right now.

I downloaded yesterday DIAURA's mini album DICTATOR,

and it seems that when I re-encode them to MP3 they're all 16.2 kHz's , which means transcode. xD (normally when I re-encode them, they shows me 20.0 kHz+)

Even on the original m4a files the sound is so off. -.-'

So my question is: does this happen often & how does it sounds on the original CD? xD

'cause I think it also could be a recording problem.. but don't know..

You are still transcoding, even if it is from one file format to another while still keeping the same bitrate. While that could be it, I'm not too sure. Based off of the other information you gave it's probably not something you're doing. iTunes sometimes has bad rips. I don't know what the hell they do to it to get it to be that bad but sometimes it's just horrible. I bought a horrible pre-production mix of D'espairsRay's BRILLIANT that was almost inaudible from them. I also bought 9GOAT's Tanatos from them and the quality was fucking terrible but the upload here was fantastic (and at a lower bitrate haha). It's most likely a problem with them, not you. While on that note, if the original file is indeed faulty then it can explain why your resultant file is even worse. Is the M4A file at 16.2khz as well?

Already? Keeping my eyes peeled for it.

I....what?

Aw man, I was hoping I'd get to hear it. Then again, I want to hear the whole song so I suppose it's not a total loss. 3 days until the single release!

^ Agreed with this.

The only reason why that number is as big as it is in respect to how much of the nation has Internet percent-wise, it's because the metropolitan areas have ridiculously fast Internet speeds. A lot of firms and companies need that speed, so the ISP's give it to them and then extend their services to the areas around them to keep competition away. I'm at a college right now in the middle of nowhere. They're considered technologically advanced around these parts and we get maybe 20~25 MB/s. Back in New York City, I can easily get 100~150 MB on a bad day, 400 MB if I'm on in the middle of the night. If you don't factor in the big cities like New York and Los Angeles, that number would drop a lot.