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[kstuart]

All lossless file formats should produce identical results.

However, it is unhelpful to tell people they are "crazy" when...

... all they are doing is believing something they read on the Internet.

A very large majority of people believe at least one false thing they have read on the Internet.

So, it is better to explain why their viewpoint is false, rather than simply ridicule it.

[fitbrit]

Are you referring to a particular incident?

[kstuart]

Are you referring to a particular incident?

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=99354.0

(I did not list any of the "false beliefs that people acquired by reading on the Internet" that polling shows a majority believe at least one of, because that would obviously derail the thread.)

[AlexS]

What's crazy is locking thread just when a discussion can start to get sensible. That's censorship. I started a thread recently on windows certification whereby people were darn right hostile.

No actual discussion took place about the actual benefits for consumers, rather it was dismissed as marketing nonsense rather than what it actually is... an excellent QA tool. Apparently though because M$ hadn't created a website to advertise certified apps it demonstrates their total priority is marketing ...

However the whole point was simply to get JRiver to run the parser to see if it comes up with any outstanding issues. We didn't even get round to discussing the benefits it was just immediately dismissed as nonsense. M$ certification was a bit of a scam in the past but it's now pretty useful and legit. I'm sorry people can't see it for what it is...You need to take a look at it again.. Even if you don't list your product for some reason, the parser is still a great tool.


 Or maybe I need to be certified.. Must have imagined it.

[glynor]

That's censorship.

That's right, it is. Which is completely normal. This is a private forum owned by JRiver.

If you come to my home, you also can't just say whatever you want with no consequences. If you offend me, or start a discussion I don't want to have, I'll ask you to stop or leave.

Same deal here. In that thread, you asked a question, it was answered. Further discussion was not going to be helpful, so the topic was closed.

That's the deal. If you want to have a site where you can say whatever you want, there are plenty of web hosting companies that would be happy to help you out.

[AlexS]

No it's not normal. I frequent many forums owned by many companies and I've never seen this much moderation. Well there is one antivirus company beginning with Z where the mods spend their days deleting posts.


As customers we should be able to have a sensible discussion and debate going on here providing we are polite. However I get the feeling that this is a forum run by the mods for the mods. It does not feel friendly here. You guys don't seem polite. Just read the last thread I created.

I apologise but that is my opinion. I hope this does not get me banned.

[DarkPenguin]

I wasn't trying to be helpful.

[DocLotus]

If you come to my home, you also can't just say whatever you want with no consequences.

I can accept that; however this is more like a Bed & Breakfast or a hotel where the guest pay money to use the facilities.  Also, the guest are part of the public at large which must be treated with a little more respect. Locking threads, changing titles, deleting parts of the thread that the moderator may not agree with is not a good thing and in most societies that is the heavy hand of paranoid censorship. Does JRiver have the right... YES, absolutely. Is it right all the time... absolutely not.

Just my thoughts.

[glynor]

We weren't being unfriendly.  We disagreed. That isn't the same thing.

But once the question has been asked and answered by the developers, as yours was, then further discussion only leads to trouble, and isn't "helpful".  I was the one who locked that thread. That is why.  We were rehashing the same arguments over again, which accomplishes nothing.

We try very hard to be friendly here, and to have relatively open minds. But this is a moderated forum, for a business, to provide support to customers. Sometimes threads about tangential topics, or those that go on and on without accomplishing anything can confuse other observers.

Sorry if you don't like it.  I don't have any intention of banning anyone who can behave and has polite conversation.  But that doesn't mean we will let "anything go" even if it is reasonably polite (and I somewhat disagree that your tone was completely polite in the last thread, but that wasn't why I locked it).

[mwillems]

As customers we should be able to have a sensible discussion and debate going on here providing we are polite. However I get the feeling that this is a forum run by the mods for the mods. It does not feel friendly here. You guys don't seem polite. Just read the last thread I created.

I just re-read your thread, and I'm not sure why you think people have been impolite to you.  Your ideas certainly did not get a warm reception. You might get a better reception in the future if you made concrete suggestions and explained how they would be beneficial, instead of repeatedly linking to a 4,000 word certification spec that doesn't articulate any specific benefits to receiving the certification.  An example of one such post:

Standard responses...

So none of this will be of benefit obviously  :
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/hh749939.aspx

The benefits of the certification obviously seem self-evident to you; they clearly are not so self-evident to anyone else in the thread (or to me for that matter even after reading the link twice).  Several of the participants in that thread who were confused about what you were trying to say were not mods, just users like you and me.  Take that as a cue that perhaps you are not succeeding as a communicator and should explain yourself a bit better and more concretely (as Hendrik suggested).  

Not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps rather than pointing out the speck in your neighbor's eye-rolling emoticons, remove instead the beam from your own eye-rolling emoticons.

[Blaine78]

I wasn't trying to be helpful.

yes, everyone can see that and is the title and point of this thread.

[Awesome Donkey]

Crazy or not, some of the beliefs that go around in audiophile circles is pretty 'out there'.

[Blaine78]

Crazy or not, some of the beliefs that go around in audiophile circles is pretty 'out there'.

Was the 'out there' ideas which are now common place. To think, the world is round, just crazy. Science has explained a lot, and began with an open mind, but the unknown is much more vast. The ideas maybe 'out there' but not crazy.

[AlexS]

I just re-read your thread, and I'm not sure why you think people have been impolite to you.  Your ideas certainly did not get a warm reception. You might get a better reception in the future if you made concrete suggestions and explained how they would be beneficial, instead of repeatedly linking to a 4,000 word certification spec that doesn't articulate any specific benefits to receiving the certification.  An example of one such post:

The benefits of the certification obviously seem self-evident to you; they clearly are not so self-evident to anyone else in the thread (or to me for that matter even after reading the link twice).  Several of the participants in that thread who were confused about what you were trying to say were not mods, just users like you and me.  Take that as a cue that perhaps you are not succeeding as a communicator and should explain yourself a bit better and more concretely (as Hendrik suggested). 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps rather than pointing out the speck in your neighbor's eye-rolling emoticons, remove instead the beam from your own eye-rolling emoticons.

The eye rolling emotions are in responses to quotes like this:
"MC works just fine on Windows 10, there is no reason for anyone to worry about any certification."
"It is a marketing scheme."

These are just point blank rejections/statements which really don't exactly grasp at anything.

In response to asking for specifics in the article, do you actually expect me to discuss every single test the certification process goes through? Do you know how many threads that would take?

Win developer/s should well know, there is a certification parser that goes through the code and does a number of tests, here it is:
https://dev.windows.com/en-us/develop/app-certification-kit

if you look through the large document I previously quoted (which I don't expect everybody to understand) the tests do appear extremely useful, none of the tests seem frivolous to me. Now I'm a MS developer myself so I really don't expect those who aren't developers to understand this. But I do expect developers to.

When I read the statement "we probably fullfill 90% already", I tend gasp in amazement over this. That's sort of crazy to say so if you don't mind me saying.. There are many tests if you look at the document, and JRiver I assume is an app with a huge amount of code. How would anybody know exactly how it stands until you run it through that parser?

Once it has been run through (maybe QA would attempt to do this perhaps), there will certainly be some failed tests. From that the developers can decide what is worth fixing or not. I suspect pretty much all of it would be, if not all of it. But how would they know if they didn't just attempt to run the code through it... The other alternative is don't do anything, just say everything is great, we are perfect, the code is perfect and move on. That's just kidding yourself.

Now I might have got around to explaining this if the thread had not been locked. We could have discussed it further. But I wasn't allowed to.
I appreciate testing isn't a sexy conversation for most, so the reactions really don't surprise me. Many developers hide in fear when the word is mentioned as well, or get angry that their code is being questioned.

[astromo]

AlexS, I don't think you'll get very far trying to rehash a subject that's been locked down, by grafting your concerns into another thread.

But once the question has been asked and answered by the developers, as yours was, then further discussion only leads to trouble, and isn't "helpful".  I was the one who locked that thread. That is why.  We were rehashing the same arguments over again, which accomplishes nothing.

This thread is running the risk of going the same way.

[AlexS]

AlexS, I don't think you'll get very far trying to rehash a subject that's been locked down, by grafting your concerns into another thread.

This thread is running the risk of going the same way.

What I've written is not a rehash whatsoever, I never got a chance to discuss.

And that's why I don't find these forums friendly or helpful. The door is being continuously shut in your face here.
No problem I'm done now. I hope what I've written may generate some internal discussion. All they need to do is run the parser.
Thanks...

[Awesome Donkey]

I never got a chance to discuss.

Perhaps it's something that's just not up for discussion? They're obviously not willing to devote time (which in turn is money) in attempt at getting some sort of "official certification" as stated by Hendrik. As far as I know, no other media players have done this, so why would JRiver be any different?

Here's the better question... do any normal users of MC even care about the "certification" when MC just works on Windows 10 (and basically any other version of Windows)? I kinda doubt they do.

I find it mind boggling that people assume an company's Internet forum is supposed to be sort of democracy, when it obviously isn't. The question/concern was asked, a developer responded and an argument escalated from there until the topic was locked. How would any other company running some sort of forum respond? Some might just delete the topic(s)/post(s) and ban the users for getting argumentative with forum staff, which did not occur here. I personally thought it was handled appropriately here.

[RoderickGI]

Anyone who starts by questioning how good a FLAC decoder is;

Under what criteria do you define "better"?

Then jumps is a broad and unrelated yet controversial statement;

To my ears, and to many in the audiophile community who use JRiver, WMA Lossless sounds MUCH better.

Is deserving of more than just a little ridicule. That is a classic trolling technique.


Alex, anyone who keeps pushing a process or task (run the parser), while failing to define the benefits of that process, is also deserving of a little pushback, and closing down of their discussion.

I'm sure that if you could document actual benefits of certification to JRiver, then they would be more willing to listen.
A benefit would be, if Microsoft stopped all non-certified applications from running on Windows 10, and certification allowed MC to run again.

Benefits do not include;
Running software through a parser to see if it complies with someone else's coding standards.
Gaining certification with Microsoft.
Conforming to Microsoft's standards and values. ("Customers trust the Windows brand", and yet Microsoft is dropping WMC, and forcing many WMC users to look for alternative software, such as JRiver MC. Trust?)
Almost everything else on the Windows 10 certification page.

Now if Microsoft would endorse JRiver MC as the official WMC replacement application, if JRiver became certified, then you may be heard. That would be a real benefit. (Well, probably, depending on what JRiver really want.)

Alex, you seem to be missing the difference between doing something, and achieving some outcome. Businesses, such as JRiver, are driven by outcomes.

PS: Sorry everyone if this adds fuel to the fire.

[kstuart]

Instead of locking threads, how about moving them to a separate sub-Forum ?

This is not a new idea of mine, about half the Forums that I read, have such a sub-Forum.

It could be called something like "Peripheral Discussions Forum" (or come up with a better title).

(Although the sites that have these sub-Forums, where threads are moved, usually have more colorful names - one calls it "The Pit". )

===

By the way, you do realize that all the "Beta Team" comments in this thread all say the same thing - "Yes, JRiver customers DO deserve to be treated like dirt - if we do not like what they are saying."

[Awesome Donkey]

Instead of locking threads, how about moving them to a separate sub-Forum ?

This is not a new idea of mine, about half the Forums that I read, have such a sub-Forum.

It could be called something like "Peripheral Discussions Forum" (or come up with a better title).

(Although the sites that have these sub-Forums, where threads are moved, usually have more colorful names - one calls it "The Pit". )

I don't think this is a good idea for a couple of reasons;

1) It would look (and would be) unprofessional.
2) The topic(s) in question were already beaten beyond death with the developer(s) already responding.
3) Having such topic(s) open wouldn't only incite more trolling, flaming and arguments.

It'd be a lose/lose situation. This isn't 4chan or Reddit, it's an established company's support forum.

[DarkPenguin]

Was the 'out there' ideas which are now common place. To think, the world is round, just crazy. Science has explained a lot, and began with an open mind, but the unknown is much more vast. The ideas maybe 'out there' but not crazy.

Yeah, this isn't unknown.

[glynor]

I can accept that; however this is more like a Bed & Breakfast or a hotel where the guest pay money to use the facilities.

I think this is a decent analogy, and perhaps a more apt one than the one I made about my home.

If you think you can go to a hotel or B&B and hang signs up on the walls that say whatever you want (or even any signs at all of any kind regardless of message) without the staff coming and taking them down, and asking you to stop or leave if they catch you, then... Well, I don't know what to tell you.

I have done work in many hotels and conference centers over the years. I don't think any of them would have tolerated that from guests, regardless of the message. And, if the message was about the establishment's business practices (even if done "nicely")?!?

I am an extremely strong proponent of freedom of speech (some would even classify me as a crazy-pants proponent of it). But I know what it is, and what it is not.

But if you decry it as "censorship," you are weakening the term. You're using it to mean "this non-governmental actor is not exercising its rights the way I would in their place." You're helping to promote ignorance about rights and blurring the line between public and private. If you're calling it censorship, let me ask you: may I come over to your house at a time convenient to me and stand in your living room and explain why you're wrong in a sonorous and condescending voice? If not, why not? You censor.

And, of course, when you pay for Media Center, you're not "renting out space" on Interact (which is free, and requires no purchase). You're buying the product. Do they want suggestions from users? Yes. Do they want us to discuss them? Absolutely. Are they going to listen to or allow ongoing discussion of every suggestion? Heck no, that's crazy. It's Jim's business, not yours (nor mine).

[glynor]

Was the 'out there' ideas which are now common place. To think, the world is round, just crazy. Science has explained a lot, and began with an open mind, but the unknown is much more vast. The ideas maybe 'out there' but not crazy.

This is a particularly awesome example of a common pseudoscience trope. Science was wrong before, ergo maybe disprovable theory X could "become true" with additional evidence. This is not how science works (and you used perhaps the canonical example of it). In science, discarded theories aren't wrong, they fail to explain new evidence. In other words:

When used like this, the "science was wrong before" trope is effectively like suggesting that our observations that gravity is an attractive force are wrong, because one day in the future we might just see something go floating up instead of falling down, and therefore homeopathy works.

So while it is true that several believed-to-be-true theories turned out to be wrong, that doesn't mean that theories that have already been proven wrong might suddenly turn out to be right.

It is possible that another theory will come along that better describes the motion of objects in space than General and Special Relativity, as those theories came along and improved upon Newton's theories that were (at the time) provably wrong. But that doesn't mean that GPS will suddenly stop working, that all of our observations of all celestial objects were invalid, or that General Relativity will not still explain the things it already explains just as perfectly then as it does now. Just as Newton's laws still explain, perfectly, how a rocket lifts off from a launchpad. Something will just explain the edge cases better, perhaps unifying it with Quantum Theory or better explaining Dark Energy.

And two plus two will still equal four.

Your reference was made even more awesome by the fact that it is, itself, also based upon a myth. No one educated believed the earth was flat during the middle ages. This is a fable created in the eighteenth century, originally to impugn Catholics, which somehow snuck into our "conventional wisdom", that has more recently been adopted by a variety of pseudo and anti-science causes like Creationism, climate change denialism, and alternative medicine tomfoolery.

[AlexS]

OK as people commented. This is something that can be used in testing. There are benefits in testing apps for all sorts of criteria. If you want to know the real benefits read the links supplied. The main benefit is improving the code. However until code is parsed it would be hard to point to the specifics. That's the point of the parser is to list them. I couldn't give a toss about the marketing side myself.

Btw Sonar has run through the certification process and it seems the software has improved display, performance and reliability as a consequence. But comparing that to jriver is sort of futile as these are different apps.

Also I don't get the idea that just because other media apps haven't done it (btw stated with no references, just assumptions, and noting Win10 has only just been released) that there is no point in doing it. I do hope jriver takes initiatives. This testing applies to all commercially available apps. What the app is categorised as is irrelevant here. This is code and therefore not very sexy to most of you.

I am certain though the overall app will be improved when going through this process. It's just another layer of quality control.

[glynor]

Please stop. The other thread was already closed. Before I tried to explain and be polite, as did others above. This is a warning. No more about that for now.

[AlexS]

@RoderickGI as you can see nobody is willing to listen.

And now I have no choice now but to stop. Thanks for the warning. Consider me stopped.

[glynor]

Thank you. You've said your piece. We did listen. I did not delete anything you wrote. Hendrik didn't agree that it was right for JRiver, and I agree with him generally (though I have no power to do anything for or against the idea).

We don't know what Matt and Jim and John and Bob and the others think, because they didn't comment. But the discussion is still there, and here, for them to see and consider.

Disagreeing isn't the same as not listening.

[kstuart]

Your reference was made even more awesome by the fact that it is, itself, also based upon a myth. No one educated believed the earth was flat during the middle ages. This is a fable created in the eighteenth century, originally to impugn Catholics, which somehow snuck into our "conventional wisdom", that has more recently been adopted by a variety of pseudo and anti-science causes like Creationism, climate change denialism, and alternative medicine tomfoolery.

Actually the Flat Earth idea came from a popular 19th Century Novel.  The novel included "primitives" who believed the Earth was flat.

The audiophile and anti-audiophile groups are both entirely emotionally driven belief systems.  Neither side will listen to the scientific arguments of the other side (similar to today's political debates).

[glynor]

Actually the Flat Earth idea came from a popular 19th Century Novel.  The novel included "primitives" who believed the Earth was flat.

That popularized it in the 19th century, but there are historical precedents from the 1700s where it was used by protestants to insinuate that Catholic education was inferior, and by none-other than Thomas Jefferson.

[kstuart]

I don't think this is a good idea for a couple of reasons;

1) It would look (and would be) unprofessional.

This is an unsubstantiated assertion.  It certainly would be no more unprofessional than "Music, Movies, Politics, and Other Cheap Thrills" sub-Forum there.

2) The topic(s) in question were already beaten beyond death ...

Unsubstantiated assertion again.  In the lossless codecs thread, we had not even gotten to the point of clarifying the OP's actual intent.

3) Having such topic(s) open wouldn't only incite more trolling, flaming and arguments.

Unsubstantiated assertion again.  You seem to only have the same sort of argument.  Just loudly proclaim made-up reasons why the other side is wrong.  (Apparently you think that "open threads are a gateway drug" )

It'd be a lose/lose situation.

Unsubstantiated assertion again, you did not even bother to specify the losses.  Quite a lot of bullying going on...

[glynor]

This is an unsubstantiated assertion.

Yeah. It has worked out super-well for Reddit.  

Do I think the moderation here is always perfect? No. I've never, personally, edited someone else's post content (at least, not without a clear note and to add content to it, not to change what they said). I will remove posts that are needlessly repetitive or inciting, though I don't think I actually have done so. Sometimes Jim edits things. He usually adds a note, and I believe he tries very hard not to change the point of the original post, but to adjust the tone or remove topics that he doesn't want discussed further.

If it was my forum, and it isn't, I don't know that I'd do that, and would probably take an either (a) delete it, or (b) stop, block, ban it tack, but I don't begrudge him that right. I think, when he does that, he is trying to be more inclusive, in leaving at least some part of the central core of the comment or request up.

But, no, it isn't perfect. I'm not perfect. None of us are. But, we do try to allow people to, reasonably, say what they want to say. It mostly works and is mostly a pretty nice place with not many flame wars or never-ending trolling contests that plague all-too-many other boards, sites, and comment sections out there. So, some things are going right.

[ferday]

LOL isn't this fun

[JimH]

I'm on vacation now, so cut it out.

Audiophiles are generally nice people. Some people on both sides of the arguments can be obnoxious.

Darkpenguin has a "dry" sense of humor.  I thought his comment was very funny: "Love audiophiles.  They so crazy."  In this context, "crazy" can mean "cute".  You have to be a native English speaker, probably an American, to get it.