In an interesting twist of fate, one of the master copyists featured prominently in the Scener section of that site has come back in the last few years to win graphics competitions again with both
- directly ripping newer, lesser known artists instead of the classic Vallejo/Sorayama from the 90s. https://ibb.co/GpDVf2r
- switching to midjourney from ~2023 to now, so the sources are near untraceable (this was also supposedly leaked).
It still takes some talent to do a good looking copy, but it's not the same talent - and very dishonest when such literal use of reference is not credited.
In fact it's been an issue in the 16bit demoscene with graphics (standalone and in demos) suddenly getting more plentiful, with subjects constructed and lit a lot better, etc. and people being called out for suspicious works (and usually getting away with it, "because the whole point was to support our insane image compression code with a ton of images" etc.)
Well that's a pompous headline from the author's PR dept. "Europe" as in, "The European Union", or just some marketing trick based on making you believe it is to give it more weight?
I'm european and can still easily confuse the "European Union" and "Europe the general area" when context is lacking, it's not a big stretch of the imagination for me that people _anywhere_ could construe this as "official" as well.
All that it looks like is backed by some emanation from the city of The Hague. No mention of the EU proper. It's european owned and backed, sure, but not EU owned and backed.
It doesn't. I "worked around" that by setting a 5 minute daily timer for youtube on my phone - just enough to mark a few regular videos as "Watch Later". Gives me an incentive to scroll past the shorts.
I have this on my backlog of Jams to go through, but peeked ahead hoping to see Alekswithak in there, and indeed, it's him.
He's already scored a few great SP mods : Alkaline, Dwell, Dwell 2 - which should also be checked out - and some of his tracks have been featured in various map jams as well.
He hasn't published the soundtrack for QBJ3 yet, but I assume he will eventually. Until then, enjoy the rest at https://alekswithak.bandcamp.com/
Pioneer DJ, I mean AlphaTheta, probably don't even know MusicBrainz exists. They're too busy selling subscriptions for RekordBox. And they do nothing to help you with the metadata on your files, besides filtering in browser mode.
I can relate to the problem of revising genre or energy ratings over time. I've gone with custom genre tags for ages, ie "dub/house/techno" or "funk/disco/edits" with a sprinkling of extra qualifiers in the comment field and do bulk updates from MP3Tag/Foobar2k. The extras only really help when preparing "crates" for export to USB for outside use, or when just playing off the entire collection at home. I'm fast, but still not much time to read the comment fields when browsing on the players, much less input any words with the scroll wheel.
I keep every purchase around in FLAC, and the part I might realistically play out stays in AIFF, for minimum fiddling of tags (ie stars map a bit differently between Traktor and Rekordbox) - because of course Rekordbox will warn you you're exporting files you can't play anywhere, but won't do anything to transcode them.
Lossless whenever possible because I just want to give the sound quality as much of a chance as I can when recording sets, especially if they might get posted online and getting lossy-transcoded multiple times. I've tried the mp3 of mp3 thing, and you do hear it at home (out at a gig, most of the time, probably not).
I don't suffer from track bulimia, so the numbers work out - and disk space has gotten a lot cheaper in the last 20 years.
I let this thread go for a while, but just saw your reply and wanted to say thanks for your insight! I am a hobbyist DJ for whom "playing out" just means "on a friend's equipment from time to time" so I probably don't need to fuss as much as I do, but your experience has kinda reaffirmed for me that keeping stuff MP3 is going to be the least hassle.
It really used to annoy me that bringing along just a USB left me with a useless "filenames only" view on old CDJs, and then even when they did read the file they only cached the metadata of a fraction of the tags, which is how I ended up same as you - custom genres with modifiers in the comment. It's not the ideal data structure for organizing your collection at home, but it seems to work the best for bringing music to go.
Most of the CDs we burned at home in the 1998-2005 era were still good in recent years, some DVDs in there too. Luck, I guess. No delamination or rot. Really, my main problems were figuring out file types without extentions (burned on classic Mac OS) and... appropriate programs to open them (old Painter limited edition from 1998 needs... the same thing, pretty much).
OTOH, some 12 years ago I worked IT at a newspaper and we were moving offices. The archivist got an intern in a room in our section of the building and together they spent a month or two scanning, then committing whatever physical media to burned CDs (maybe DVDs) before chucking the former to the bin.
Maybe a year after the move, a ticket was opened and I went to check the disks. None of them worked, CRC failures all over. I don't think they even considered testing them, or burning duplicates, or maybe they used a really bad drive which would produce media unreadable by anything else - although I'm only aware that this is a thing with floppies for example.
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"Ah, of course it is."
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