Why can't new equipment play old material

[mandrix]

Wow. I've read more BS in this thread than I ever thought I'd see on QQ.

Many have good points, but a lot of angst is because time, and formats, marches on. All of us of a certain age range have dealt with it, and it's seldom kind.

I rip everything to .iso format, when possible. It completely reserves what is on the disc. Keep the tools you need to, but I see no dearth in tools to rip most formats, especially on BD.

I could personally give a rat's ass about DPLII, but that's me. I'm not tied into any one format, though my focus at present is on Atmos. I also don't spend hours ripping my discs and then converting it all to FLAC, with the exception of the few CD's I get because I had to get the damned CD's to get the BD. Right? I also care not one whit to use software to display pretty pictures while I listen to music, rip, tag, all that stuff. Who has time? You? More power to you, then. I have upwards of 2000 discs, (excluding non-surround CD's) and I'm sure not going to start ripping them all to FLAC, or wavpack, or APE, or whatever at this point.

Wow. You can't get XP or Win7 working on your brand new shiny machine? Really? How about a virtual machine? What? No? Well then get up with the times, if you can't figure it out/Google.

Playback from the pc is not perfect. Windows has a way of interjecting it's odd things, that's for sure, and software, being what it is, like websites, seemingly written by some 12 year old genius, sometimes sucks.

Do I like that old software is getting harder to use on modern versions of OS's? Hell no. I've been a pc guy for decades. New software doesn't always run right either. I've personally spent hours waiting in que on MS support that did absolutely NOTHING for me...even after they take over your machine and piss around with stuff, then reboot it and disappear as surely as they were never there but in reality on the other side of the world. "Don't worry; rest assured we'll fix your problems" yeah right.

You have to be a problem solver, and I admit the older I get, the harder it seems. Such is life. So goes the formats.

 

[Owen Smith]

My wavpack archive of 7.1.4 mixes will keep playing in whatever simple media player I'm using

Are you sure about that? Is the .4 in your wavpack a copy of the object data in original form plus the commanded movements for those objects? That seems unlikely since Atmos supports up to 128 objects. If you've rendered the Atmos to a 7.1.4 speaker layout, that is all you'll ever be able to play it as (properly).

 

[mandrix]

I'm not sure that once Atmos has been converted to channel based output that object movement is preserved. i.e. wav, flac, etc.
The exception may lie with capturing the output while it's being decoded, such as from the Dolby Reference Player; I am aware some do that.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge could clarify.

 

[sjcorne]

I'm not sure that once Atmos has been converted to channel based output that object movement is preserved. i.e. wav, flac, etc.

The objects would essentially be 'locked in place' in this scenario, so the Atmos mix can no longer expand-or-contract to fit a speaker configuration other than 7.1.4.

 

[MidiMagic]

Unfortunately we're at the start of Dolby Surround encoded material joining those old matrix formats in the land of obsolescence and needing old hardware or computers to decode them properly.

Not necessarily. I am building my own decoders - even one for Dolby Surround. I also built an encoder for RM, QS, DS, EV-4, and DQ.

"They will make a new computer that can't run the computer based home theater."

I haven't been hit by the computer gaslighting yet! (Knocks on wood.)
Post-Jobs Apple sure goes hard with this now. Probably why I stopped buying any hardware from them. (Also because I already have a Mac Pro and Macbook Pro that can't get much faster!) The Mac Pro can't go back much earlier than High Sierra now because of the newer metal graphics card. Still runs up to the latest MacOS. My laptop currently boots Snow Leopard thru Ventura. I have 3 bootable partitions right now: 10.6.8, 10.13.6, & 12.6.7. (Not a fan of Ventura so far.) Bring it on, you gaslighting planned obsolescence freaks! You're not going to win this one. Your restrictions make it seem like you stuff is simply broken.

I have been hit many times. Over 90 percent of the software I have written in my life can't be run anymore because the computers no longer exist.

The biggest hit was when Windows came along and displaced DOS. Very few of the items I created would transfer beyond Win3.1.

I had another hit when punch cards went away. I had no way to transfer the files to new formats.

When Microsoft creates a new file format, the old format ;lasts for one version, and then they deprecate it.

I have so many phonograph records that I will never be able to leave that format. Fortunately I bought many spare parts. And I have only 2 records my player will not play.

Wow. I've read more BS in this thread than I ever thought I'd see on QQ.

Many have good points, but a lot of angst is because time, and formats, marches on. All of us of a certain age range have dealt with it, and it's seldom kind.

I rip everything to .iso format, when possible. It completely reserves what is on the disc. Keep the tools you need to, but I see no dearth in tools to rip most formats, especially on BD.

I could personally give a rat's ass about DPLII, but that's me. I'm not tied into any one format, though my focus at present is on Atmos. I also don't spend hours ripping my discs and then converting it all to FLAC, with the exception of the few CD's I get because I had to get the damned CD's to get the BD. Right? I also care not one whit to use software to display pretty pictures while I listen to music, rip, tag, all that stuff. Who has time? You? More power to you, then. I have upwards of 2000 discs, (excluding non-surround CD's) and I'm sure not going to start ripping them all to FLAC, or wavpack, or APE, or whatever at this point.

Wow. You can't get XP or Win7 working on your brand new shiny machine? Really? How about a virtual machine? What? No? Well then get up with the times, if you can't figure it out/Google.

A virtual machine will not play a recording in real time. I had a complete studio in XP.

How much time do you waste ripping materials? Will you ever get to them all? And eventually, threy will deprecate your format.

In 1992, my employer told me to get out all of the 12 years of required archived annual records because of a lawsuit. We could not read most of them because the software they were written with no longer existed: MS-DOS, Lotus 123, Quattro, DBase, and Wordstar, Two years were on 8-inch floppies, which we had no drive for. The judge was steaming mad - not at us, but the industry.

The US Census Bureau almost lost all of the data they collected in the 1960 census. It was all recorded on 9-track magnetic tapes. The government had just replaced all of the 9-track drives with 7-track drives.

All of the software I paid good money for in XP will not install on Win10. And the Win10 "replacements" leave out some features I need. Two of the companies were driven out of business by the constant upgrading by Microsoft.

 

[mandrix]

Not necessarily. I am building my own decoders - even one for Dolby Surround. I also built an encoder for RM, QS, DS, EV-4, and DQ.



I have been hit many times. Over 90 percent of the software I have written in my life can't be run anymore because the computers no longer exist.

The biggest hit was when Windows came along and displaced DOS. Very few of the items I created would transfer beyond Win3.1.

When Microsoft creates a new file format, the old format ;lasts for one version, and then they deprecate it.

I have so many phonograph records that I will never be able to leave that format. Fortunately I bought many spare parts. And I have only 2 records my player will not pl;ay.


A virtual machine will not play a recording in real time.

How much time do you waste ripping materials? Will you ever get to them all?

All of the software I paid good money for in XP will not install on Win10. And the Win10 "replacements" leave out some features I need.

I too used to write programs for DOS, back in the day.
I thought the purpose of using older software was not for playback, My Bad. But you can certainly run old versions of Windows in a virtual machine.
How much time do have I wasted ripping? Just one time when I get it. Every piece of surround music I have is ripped, when possible, to .iso format to preserve a full copy and for playback on my pc, which has 12 HDD's/4 SSD's run from an LSI board/Lenovo Expander board.
In other words, all my Surround music is ripped. Every bit of it. I just don't bother with flac and such but very seldom.

 

[jimfisheye]

Are you sure about that? Is the .4 in your wavpack a copy of the object data in original form plus the commanded movements for those objects? That seems unlikely since Atmos supports up to 128 objects. If you've rendered the Atmos to a 7.1.4 speaker layout, that is all you'll ever be able to play it as (properly).

I'm only really interested in mixes that were created in 7.1.4 originally (which is a thing). Atmos is being used to deliver these. I'm interested in preserving these mixes 1:1. I have very little interest in how they might scale up to a larger speaker array. Again, the original mix I'm interested in was mixed in 7.1.4 and the mix decisions were made by listening and reacting in 7.1.4. This is the niche use of Atmos but it's genuinely the only part I'm interested in.

No one is making random object element content but not actually listening to what they're doing. Then they finally hear their mix on different speaker systems and part of the charm of their mix is how objects let them morph it to different speaker arrays or something weird like that? I mean, maybe someone is doing that... (in music and not some movie mix). I'm less interested in anything like that. But if someone creates a random mix with 128 discrete channels that really truly is 1:1 with how they mixed in on a 128 speaker install with full object channel compliment, I'll make an exception and grab that mix with all 128 channels. (You already see where this is going by now.) And of course I'll archive that with wavpack format too.

A lot of the comments suggest people are more interested in hearing how a mix morphs differently between different speaker arrays. That's fair enough! Are some of you really going between different rooms and being entertained by how the mix adapts to different speaker arrays?

Can someone doing this comment on how you like the accuracy of the object elements vs previous traditional speaker management? What mixes (music centered, not movies) that use object elements beyond the height channels are you all listening to? The 7.1.4 mixes for example, just place the 4 height channels to the 4 height speakers. The mix is baked into them already. The 7.1 bed is still static. A mix would need to use additional object elements to take advantage of the system. And again, it would be mixed on a like system to begin with if it was important to the program. There's an original channel configuration it was originally mixed on where the original mix decisions were made. Again, unless the aim was to make something that changed in an interesting way between different systems. (The Flaming Lips might do something like that, right?)

I can't imagine anyone is really doing that and chasing that. But I guess I'll ask since some of the comments seem to be defending such a thing! I'll just ask this: What's a 128 channel mix that I just really have to hear with a full theater install speaker array?

PS. I do tend to put stereo to only two speakers, quad to only 4 speakers, and 5.1 to only a 5.1 array. I don't upmix or gang channels together for these just because I have a 7.1.4 array available. Maybe this is considered weird now? I'm always interested in hearing the original mix. At least as a starting point to hear what someone intended. Of course I've also remastered things and tweaked around before.

 

[mandrix]

The objects would essentially be 'locked in place' in this scenario, so the Atmos mix can no longer expand-or-contract to fit a speaker configuration other than 7.1.4.

Thanks.

 

[mandrix]

I'm only really interested in mixes that were created in 7.1.4 originally (which is a thing). Atmos is being used to deliver these. I'm interested in preserving these mixes 1:1. I have very little interest in how they might scale up to a larger speaker array. Again, the original mix I'm interested in was mixed in 7.1.4 and the mix decisions were made by listening and reacting in 7.1.4. This is the niche use of Atmos but it's genuinely the only part I'm interested in.

No one is making random object element content but not actually listening to what they're doing. Then they finally hear their mix on different speaker systems and part of the charm of their mix is how objects let them morph it to different speaker arrays or something weird like that? I mean, maybe someone is doing that... (in music and not some movie mix). I'm less interested in anything like that. But if someone creates a random mix with 128 discrete channels that really truly is 1:1 with how they mixed in on a 128 speaker install with full object channel compliment, I'll make an exception and grab that mix with all 128 channels. (You already see where this is going by now.) And of course I'll archive that with wavpack format too.

A lot of the comments suggest people are more interested in hearing how a mix morphs differently between different speaker arrays. That's fair enough! Are some of you really going between different rooms and being entertained by how the mix adapts to different speaker arrays?

Can someone doing this comment on how you like the accuracy of the object elements vs previous traditional speaker management? What mixes (music centered, not movies) that use object elements beyond the height channels are you all listening to? The 7.1.4 mixes for example, just place the 4 height channels to the 4 height speakers. The mix is baked into them already. The 7.1 bed is still static. A mix would need to use additional object elements to take advantage of the system. And again, it would be mixed on a like system to begin with if it was important to the program. There's an original channel configuration it was originally mixed on where the original mix decisions were made. Again, unless the aim was to make something that changed in an interesting way between different systems. (The Flaming Lips might do something like that, right?)

I can't imagine anyone is really doing that and chasing that. But I guess I'll ask since some of the comments seem to be defending such a thing! I'll just ask this: What's a 128 channel mix that I just really have to hear with a full theater install speaker array?

PS. I do tend to put stereo to only two speakers, quad to only 4 speakers, and 5.1 to only a 5.1 array. I don't upmix or gang channels together for these just because I have a 7.1.4 array available. Maybe this is considered weird now? I'm always interested in hearing the original mix. At least as a starting point to hear what someone intended. Of course I've also remastered things and tweaked around before.

My take on it is, Atmos is being delivered as a complete surround package. I don't understand wanting to deconstruct it when it can be played as is with a proper decoding device.
But I certainly believe that everyone should do with their music playback and/or archiving in any manner they see fit. Regardless of methods, I'll always say that, though your way is not my way, and that's perfectly fine.

 

[MidiMagic]

I too used to write programs for DOS, back in the day.
I thought the purpose of using older software was not for playback, My Bad. But you can certainly run old versions of Windows in a virtual machine.
How much time do I wasted ripping? Just one time when I get it. Every piece of surround music I have is ripped, when possible, to .iso format to preserve a full copy and for playback on my pc, which has 12 HDD's/4 SSD's run from an LSI board/Lenovo Expander board.
In other words, all my Surround music is ripped. Every bit of it. I just don't bother with flac and such but very seldom.

I HAD an entire recording studio in XP. Gone.

How many surround recordings do you have? I have over 200 matrix quad recordings. To rip all of it would need about 200 days when I have nothing else I have to do, How long would all 4000+ records I have take?

 

[mandrix]

I HAD an entire recording studio in XP. Gone.

How many surround recordings do you have? I have over 200 matrix quad recordings. To rip all of it would need about 200 days when I have nothing else I have to do, How long would all 4000+ records I have take?

As I said, I rip things as I receive them. I didn't start at 1000 discs. How many surround recordings do I have? Counting DTS-CD/DVDA/SACD/DVDV/BD probably at around the 2000 mark or higher.
I do this for both archival purposes and for pc playback, or streaming from my network to my Oppo. I've also had discs succumb to unknown ailments over time...call it disc rot or whatever term applies.
This was my plan early on, to archive everything in digital format. Of course I had some backlog because e.g. ripping SACD was not always possible. But I never spent hours and hours at a time on it.

That you have so many items you apparently have not already ripped, well you either never wanted to or you didn't have a plan. To each his own.

I understand completely how OS's have screwed a lot of software. For example, Neil Wilkes, to complete a full blown DVDA using Sonic, has to keep an XP machine functioning. discWelder is still working fine for me on Win11, although it does not have near the capability of Sonic, but fine for my purposes. Will it still work when the next Windows comes down? Who knows?

All I can do is move forward. Looking backward is not going to gain anything but allow us to vent on times gone by.

 

[ArmyOfQuad]

I had to replace a failed XP computer and the new computer cannot run XP or any of the XP programs. They changed the hardware so the old software can't work.

I'd never use XP as a daily driver anymore, but I'm at a point where I'd never be without an XP machine. I currently have 2 - one out of commision due to a mobo failure, with the ebay replacement sitting on top of the parts pile waiting for a rainy day, the other a quick build when the first died to get a VHS capture machine up and running. I guess I actually have 3 XP machines if I count the Sony VAIO laptop I saved from the scrap pile at work.

Although vintage computer collecting has raised the value of these things, and it may seem expensive to buy computers and parts that we've lived through a time of people being unable to give them away and finding them for free in dumpsters, XP era parts really are relatively cheap, and it isn't that hard to build a quality XP machine these days. Certainly cheaper than it was when this stuff was new.


Did you keep the failed computer? What part failed? I have various spare parts - we could probably revive that machine.

 

[jimfisheye]

It's a little too easy to call out some of the gaslighting in tech nowadays. Computers with soldered in hard drives. New OS releases that blacklist older but fully compatible hardware in planned obsolescence moves. New copy protection gone wild schemes that tie music listening to require new hardware purchases to get at hidden decoding software. All artificial software spoofing and serious desperate behavior.

At the same time, the tech available nowadays is kind of amazing. And you can find used tech from the last 10-15 years for pennies on the dollar and do quite a lot! It's the golden age of audio right now and nothing short of it. 24 bit audio and fully discrete multichannel in full lossless original studio quality is happiness and light.

It's pretty fair to call out the scammers especially with the bar raised as high as it is now with tech, software, and audio quality and delivery. The defense of some of the worst case behavior and products is... special.

 

[jimfisheye]

My take on it is, Atmos is being delivered as a complete surround package. I don't understand wanting to deconstruct it when it can be played as is with a proper decoding device.
But I certainly believe that everyone should do with their music playback and/or archiving in any manner they see fit. Regardless of methods, I'll always say that, though your way is not my way, and that's perfectly fine.

Again, I'm truly only interested in Atmos to deliver mixes made with more than 8 channels. And I'm interested in listening to the original mix 1:1. 7.1.4 channel format has landed as a format. I'm only interested in retrieving those 7.1.4 mixes from Atmos files.

I don't listen to anything where the aim is to hear different effects by listening to different speaker arrays and playing around with that. If someone releases something to change that, then I will! Then I'll keep those files in mlp (Atmos) and play them with the reference player and amuse myself with different speaker arrays.

Some of the 7.1.4 mixes I'm after happen to be delivered in Atmos but they're still 7.1.4 mixes.

So I know I don't have to explain this around here!
Are a number of you genuinely playing with listening on different speaker systems? Sort of like the ones that mess with upmixes? It's all good and you do you with that! I'm not doing any of that so I'm just not interested in the Atmos abilities that cater to it. I'm not deconstructing anything. That feature is unused in the content I'm ripping. I would and will save anything that comes along with higher channel counts in its original intended format.

 

[Owen Smith]

The biggest hit was when Windows came along and displaced DOS. Very few of the items I created would transfer beyond Win3.1.

You must have been writing pretty specialised software then. All of the DOS command line utilities I wrote still run on Windows 10. One of these days Windows will stop executing 16 bit DOS binaries but for now they work.

 

[ArmyOfQuad]

For a fun exercise in wasting time, I found I was able to complete an upgrade path from Windows 1 to Windows 10 on a later Pentium 4. The later OS's were the 32bit versions. Running Windows 95 and 98 on "newer" hardware requires some tricks and patching. Windows 10 on a Pentium 4 is excruciatingly slow.

There is no 32bit Windows 11, so now, as far as I know, it's no longer possible to do a full upgrade path up to the most current.

It is an interesting exercise seeing at what point what apps stop working.

 

[mandrix]

It's a little too easy to call out some of the gaslighting in tech nowadays. Computers with soldered in hard drives. New OS releases that blacklist older but fully compatible hardware in planned obsolescence moves. New copy protection gone wild schemes that tie music listening to require new hardware purchases to get at hidden decoding software. All artificial software spoofing and serious desperate behavior.

At the same time, the tech available nowadays is kind of amazing. And you can find used tech from the last 10-15 years for pennies on the dollar and do quite a lot! It's the golden age of audio right now and nothing short of it. 24 bit audio and fully discrete multichannel in full lossless original studio quality is happiness and light.

It's pretty fair to call out the scammers especially with the bar raised as high as it is now with tech, software, and audio quality and delivery. The defense of some of the worst case behavior and products is... special.

Well some of that is probably true, but some of it patently not.
Older cpu's are being left off inclusion in new OS's are because the f'kn idiots that try to exploit every single vulnerability are rampant today. If you'd rather be hacked than upgrade, so be it.
At the same time, I have a 6th gen cpu/mobo that runs just fine, but is not allowed to run Win11 (well it is, but that's another story) As it's my backup pc used mainly for archiving purposes, it's not a big deal. Until it is, and I find myself hacked. I've already had people trying to hack my PayPal and Amazon accounts.

I build my own computers. No soldered in drives here, and I seriously don't know other than laptops where that's even a thing.

I recently upgraded my wife's motherboard/cpu because I wanted no problems, and it runs Win11 just as my main rig does.

"The defense of some of the worst case behavior" explain please, by whom. Be clear.

 

[sjcorne]

Are a number of you genuinely playing with listening on different speaker systems? Sort of like the ones that mess with upmixes? It's all good and you do you with that! I'm not doing any of that so I'm just not interested in the Atmos abilities that cater to it. I'm not deconstructing anything. That feature is unused in the content I'm ripping. I would and will save anything that comes along with higher channel counts in its original intended format.

It's your prerogative to store music in your personal archive as you see fit, but I take issue with the format being disparaged as "copy protection gone wild".
I'd wager pretty much the only reason we're seeing such heavy investment in Atmos is because of its adaptability feature, and in order for that to work the music has to be kept in an encoded container. Like it or not, HDMI pass-through to an AVR is how most folks interested in speaker-based Atmos playback are experiencing these mixes.

If the goal was to cut out 95% of the listening audience with a difficult-to-play format, selling music in 7.1.4 WavPack files would be the perfect way to do that

 

[mandrix]

You must have been writing pretty specialised software then. All of the DOS command line utilities I wrote still run on Windows 10. One of these days Windows will stop executing 16 bit DOS binaries but for now they work.

Mostly, I'm guessing. Thank you Owen.

Please forgive my deviation from the general thread.

I wish I still had any programs I wrote. I did not do any commercial work like Point Of Sale programs. I got my start with line basic, then QuickBasic, then the "MSDOS Professional Development System". The advantage of the old PDS when you only had a finite amount of memory to work in, as it all was back then, but it could move modules of code in and out of active RAM. Actually I think my best program, was one exclusively for programmers in the PDS and QuickBASIC, it would let you select stubs and other options for compiling with easy drop down lists. I spent a lot of time on it...started at 120K and refined down to 100K in RAM. In those early days I was active on the Compuserve Basic forum, (pre internet) learning from others. About the same time or later on AOL I won a free BASIC programming package from a company that allowed machine language inserted into code, for whatever little that gained over the compiler. All I had to do was answer programming questions in a rapid fire manner. Never got into machine language programming, though I tried. Gave me a headache.
Other than that, I wrote programs to operate the lab equipment I used at work, specialized for each set of machinery.
At some point, after Windows had appeared but was still in it's early stages, MS came out with "Visual Basic For DOS". didn't do anything I could not do but was an interesting novelty to build "windowed" apps in DOS a la Windows.

As I probably stated before, I was in line to MS to purchase the new Visual Basic for Windows, stayed on the phone a long time in que on their WATTS line. I was stoked! I was excited to try my chops in Windows! Still have the 3.5 floppies for sentimental reasons.
Later as needs changed when I had to parse thousands of lines of data from my testing machines in R&D, I started with Access but eventually switched to VB for Excel, as it suited my BASIC programming sensibilities. Besides I think Access was limited to around 50000 lines of data in those days.

All you old Borland C/C++ and Pascal (is that still a thing?) programmers can sneer. But I got it done. Would it (the old BASIC programs) all work now on Win11? I honestly don't know.
BASIC, in it's line form, was included in MSDOS. For quick and dirty programming it was OK, if not super capable. What do they give us now? IDK. All you young bucks have so much more to work with now. On a glance I don't understand much of it, but it no longer matters. Gives me a headache in my old age.

 

[Owen Smith]

Visual Basic is still a thing. Indeed the reason Data Execution Prevention is by default only enabled for core Windows services is because Visual Basic relies on executing code it just generated in data memory. Personally I turn on DEP for all programmes and then specifically exclude the very rare Visual Basic thing I find myself running.