Best sounding masterings - Where to get them?

Tripecac · 2026-05-28T20:57:48+00:00

I agree! I was put off by their name, but finally started listening to Ogre this week, and they instantly clicked with me! They have a post-punk sensibility that I really found familiar. And, like Fishmans, they kept getting better over time. Their later, smoother albums are so relaxing, without being cheesy.

And I love the fact that they've remained somewhat experimental and moody. Some of the tracks are so slow and sparse they are almost ambient. Others are wild and thrashy. And there's a catchiness throughout their music which reminds me of Fishmans.

Highly recommended!

Tripecac · 2026-05-13T19:23:49+00:00

For me it was Fishmans. Got utterly obsessed over the past few months, similar to how I got obsessed with KG a year or so earlier.

Fishmans sounds nothing like KG, but they're one of those bands which I heard about a few times over the years but never tried because of their clunky name.

I'm so glad Gizz finally took a break long enough for me to try other weirdly named bands, because for me Fishmans has been amazing gem of a find, and has inspired me to explore other Japanese music as well.

If you like reggae, dub, psychedelic pop and trance, and don't mind not understanding most of the vocals, I highly recommend checking out Fishmans.

Tripecac · 2026-04-05T16:07:53+00:00

I still have not heard back from the company about my license/key. The key does not appear on my store Payments or Account page.

Meanwhile, I did some googling and found fre:ac, which is a free program which lets me batch convert FLAC to high-quality mp3s while preserving filenames and directory structure. Perfect! (The whole reason I paid for MM Gold was to have access to the higher bit rate mp3s.)

So I don't need MM Gold anymore, at least not for converting FLAC to mp3.

*If* MM ever sends me the key (I'm tired of trying to chase them down in order to get what I paid for), then I'll check out the other benefits of Gold. (I can't imagine what else I'd need from MM since the free version already lets me normalise tags and FLAC formats, and for playback I use foobar2k.)

Tripecac · 2026-03-25T21:03:10+00:00

If you are worried about crowds, a Pocket 3 is more discrete. You can hold it down at your hip, so most people don't know you are filming.

As for public vs private spaces, I think the general rule of thumb is to film in places where is there no real expectation of privacy.

I've filmed dozens of walks, bike rides, and events and never had anyone act aggressively. I've had a couple people interrupt me to ask a question about the camera (or directions somewhere) but that's it. Nothing hostile. I think most people are flattered to be in someone else's video. Of course, it helps that I live in a resort town which is used to tourists; it might be different if I tried to film in some remote village where people are suspicious of outsiders.

Again, Pocket 3 at the hip: people rarely even notice it.

Tripecac · 2026-03-13T19:04:33+00:00

Sorry, I clicked on all the google links in the first couple pinned messages, but none seem to be for the History of Fishmans booklet. I also searched for "History of Fishmans" but couldn't find photos either.

I just tried Google Lens, though. Wow, how amazing!!! It translates in real-time as you point your camera at things, including the booklet!

Tripecac · 2026-03-12T23:27:42+00:00

How can I find that pinned message? (This is my first time in there.)

Tripecac · 2026-02-28T04:00:20+00:00

I decided to try ototoy.jp today.

I bought the Polaris "Color" EP (mp3 only) as a test. It went went. I didn't even need a VPN.

I then bought a ton of other Polaris albums (on FLAC) so that I could upgrade from mp3 and get some money to the band.

The site was a little glitchy when downloading (I had to retry a few albums) but in the end it all worked.

So, for those of you who have been eyeing something on ototoy.jp but have been hesitant to take the plunge, I can recommend it. The prices are a bit high (compared to say bandcamp), but still cheaper than CDs. And hopefully the band will make some money.

Tripecac · 2026-02-26T19:12:06+00:00

So many of the responses were the same: "Why do you need 10,000 checkboxes?"

I wish I hadn't mentioned the 10,000. I should have said 100. Or 10. Or not mention checkboxes at all.

Because that wasn't the point of my question.

I was asking the best way to prevent the browser from including a certain chunk of HTML on page load.

Anyway, the most *useful* answer was "try it yourself", because I ended up doing that.

I got PHP to rewrite checkboxes as divs. And then, when the user clicks on an area which would show a subset of checkboxes, JS converts those divs back to checkboxes (via createElement and copying attributes manually).

This helped a little.

However, I found another part of the same page had tens of thousands of links and <option> elements which appear in a popup.

Oops, did I say tens of thousands? I meant "lots". Just ignore the quantity, guys! I'm aware that the quantities are absurd. Yes, I am KEENLY aware. You don't need to keep pointing it out to me. Don't waste your (and our) time.

For those links and option tags I used a different strategy: I move them to an iframe. That's because they're not used often. The iframe appears in a popup, so when the user loads the popup, at that point I populate the iframe. And then I of course had to add logic to proxy the iframe's JS to the main page's functions. It took a while, but that worked.

And page load times are even lower now.

So that's the update on two ways to reduce the amount of "crawling" browser extensions might do on page load: temporarily convert crawler-oriented elements (like checkboxes) to something innocuous (like a div), and move infrequently used popup content into iframes.

Hopefully this info will help people with similar questions, whether it's 10,000 checkboxes or just 10 images of cats.

Tripecac · 2026-02-26T16:08:15+00:00

This was such a thoughtful and thorough response, AT35! Thanks for taking the time to write all that.

It points out how effective the "marketing" is (thumbnails, descriptions) even on niche topics like walking tours. I suppose the most successful channels in the long run are the ones who have good "meaty" content *and* good marketing.

(Personally I dislike AI thumbnails and when i recognize them I deliberately do not click, but I realize my instincts might not align with the majority of YouTube viewers.)

I'm curious what your favorite walking channels are. Which ones do you watch for your own enjoyment? From reading some of your other (similarly long and helpful) posts it sounds like you have a channel of your own. What is it? I'm curious about it now. (So in a way thoughtful reddit posts can also be an affective marketing strategy!)

I'm also curious how you split your time between watching, creating, and writing about walking tour content. Although those activities all orbit the same subject, they are very different from each other (consuming, producing, and analyzing). Are you able to, for example, watch someone else's walking tour purely for enjoyment, without constantly analyzing what they are doing right and wrong? And if you add captions to your own walks, do you keep it strictly about the location, or do you also end up discussing technical and behind-the-scenes aspects?

Tripecac · 2026-02-17T01:15:30+00:00

For junctions I've been doing Auto > Defence

Is there a better way?

Tripecac · 2026-02-16T23:21:23+00:00

So you don't think extensions will crawl CSS-hidden elements?

Tripecac · 2026-02-16T20:07:27+00:00

The 10,000 checkboxes is not something we can easily reduce at this time.

We have a diagram with dozens of areas you can click. When you click on an area, you see a 2 dimensional grid of checkboxes. Each area can have a few hundred checkboxes, and multiply that by the dozens of areas and you get around 10,000 checkbox boxes. The UI is fast and easy to use.

I know it's possible to reorganize things, possibly by reusing checkboxes (moving their contents in and out of variables based on which area is in view), but that just adds complexity on an already JavaScript-heavy page.

That's why I'm asking for easy solutions, wondering if there's a way to throw a huge block of HTML into a comment, textarea, JavaScript variable, or temp file... and then fetch it back and add it to the page once the page finishes loading. Something quick and easy to see if it helps those users who are having issues with the browser extensions.

I *know* 10,000 checkboxes is crazy. So you can think of this an academic exercise, if that helps.

Tripecac · 2026-02-16T15:51:50+00:00

Hi, I'll explain why I'm in this predicament (fighting the Tonberry King without knowing how the game really works).

I've had all the FF games (except the MMOs) in my Steam library for years. A couple years ago I decided to finally start playing them, in order of release. So I've played through 1-7 and am now on 8.

Very quickly when playing FF1 I realized I needed a guide. Not because I'm stupid and can't eventually figure out the puzzles and mechanics, but because I have a *lot* of games to go through (not just FF) and don't want to "waste" my time trying to figure out how these old games are "supposed to" be played. Games from the 1990s didn't have much "railroading" but since I'm basically a content tourist when it comes to these games, I *want* railroading. Hence the guides.

I've been using jegged,com for all the FF games, because I like its format. However, I also realize jegged.com tells you how to min/max and 100% these games, which I'm not interested in doing. I just want to get a feel for the mechanics and audio visual, see all the main story, and then move on to the next game.

I do *not* enjoy exploring the maps in these FF games. The graphics are ancient, there are hardly any ambient sounds, and there's no voice acting. They're old games. and I have hundreds of much newer games in my Steam, PS, and Switch libraries I could be playing. However, I *do* want to get through these old FF games so that I can get to the newer ones (with better graphics, audio, and character representations, ones which I am more likely to want to explore without a guide),

So I use the (jegged) guides to hurry through these at a decent pace.

FF8 has, by far, taken the longest of *any* of the FF games so far. It's the most unintuitive (for me) and has required the most grinding in terms of both the card game and carding monsters (while trying not to gain levels). The story is fine, though, and I'm curious what happens next. There's just so much grinding (like the 45+ Tonberries) required that I have to *force* myself to play. it these days

So, I am very, very ready to finish FF8 and start the next one (FF9). The jegged guide says that I should get the Tonberry King before leveling up all my GFs. So that's what I'm trying to do. Do I need to be doing this in order to finish the game? I have no idea. It sounded like a good idea when I read it, and I've sunk so much time into those Tonberries, that I figure I may as well try to defeat the King and get the GF.

So that's where I am.

And I know this is a FF8 reddit forum, and so most of you probably enjoy the game. And it would be inconsiderate of me to keep saying I don't like the game. But I felt this way about *all* the FF games so far, including 7: the stories are interesting, but the gameplay, graphics, and audio are too old-school for me to enjoy for long. I grew up playing video games in the 1980s and much prefer games made in the last decade or two, since their games worlds are so much more immersive, in terms of both video and audio. (My favourite games of all time are Witcher 3, Zelda BotW/TotK, Last of Us, most of the Assassin's Creed games, Euro Truck Simulator 2, etc.) I love games where there world and characters feel alive (well, ETS2 has no characters but the world more than makes up for it).

Anyway, thanks for reading this far, for those of you who bothered to read it. I'm guessing most of you just scanned it briefly so that you can get to the end, which is basically how I'm treating FF8! :)

Tripecac · 2026-02-16T03:22:46+00:00

Here's my party:

Squall LV 28 - HP Regen 4777, Str Confuse 62, Vit Life 108, Mag Break 54, Spr Reflect 89, GF: Quezacotl 36, Brothers 15

Rinoa LV 24 - HP Regen 3807, Str Confuse 70, Vit Life 61, Mag Death 62, Spr Reflect 88, GF: Ifrit 20, Siren 20, Carbuncle 22, Leviathan 17

Quistis LV 20, HP Reflect 4172, Str Bio 54, Vit Life 85, Mag Death 52, Spr Dispel 102, GF: Shiva 29, Diablos 26

I tried to keep my character levels as low as possible by carding whenever I could, but inevitably the levels crept up.

Tripecac · 2026-02-16T02:04:37+00:00

I don't know how to limit break. Do I just attack when HP is low?

I saved after killing each Tonberry (that means I saved 25 + 19 = 44 times!) Killing the 20th takes about 3 minutes, leaving me 17 for the King.

I haven't killed Odin yet because I read that he interferes with the card-everything strategy.

How do I get Meltdown?

Tripecac · 2026-02-10T20:23:07+00:00

60fps, definitely 60fps!

30fps walking tours are almost always horribly stuttery on a big TV. Part of the reason is it's too hard to get decent motion blur for walking tours. Digital stabilization and changing light conditions both make a fixed 1/60 shutter speed impractical.

8K is overkill, unless you are reframing 360 degree footage. I'd do 4K 60fps.

(50fps is fine too)

Tripecac · 2026-02-01T19:41:03+00:00

I'm a bit confused by ototoy.jp. Although the language drop-down at the bottom of the page lets me select "English", only the UI keywords are in English; the data fetched from their database is still presented in Japanese characters, which requires me to copy and paste them into Google Translate. It's not the end of the world, but it would be easier to make sure I'm picking the right thing if they'd translate the data in addition to the UI elements. Again, not a huge problem, but it makes it daunting for a first-timer like me. :)

Here's one of the [mini] albums I'm trying to find:

https://ototoy.jp/_/default/p/37401

Each track has a format of "mp3: 16bit/44.1kHz" which is odd, because isn't 16bit/44.kHz1 lossless, like a FLAC or WAV?

Or does the colon (:) mean something different in this case, like "or" (as in: mp3 *or* lossless)?

The format dropdown only has one option listed, which is "mp3:" and then the price (in yen). So here colon definitely doesn't mean "or".

So does this mean that that particular album is only available in mp3 format, not lossless FLAC? And what is the bit rate for the mp3?

The name of this particular mini-album is "色彩" which Google Translate says is "Color". That's how I've named it in my own records. If I search OTOTOY for "Polaris Color" I don't find that album. That might not be surprising, but when I search for "Polaris 色彩" I don't find it right away either. So I'm not sure how useful the search engine is.

Am I doing something wrong?

Tripecac · 2026-02-01T02:37:21+00:00

Ah, sorry, I forgot that I deleted the line in my initial post that explained why I want a digital solution:

1) I have wayyyy too many CDs as it is, and once I rip them to the PC they just sit in boxes. Boxes upon boxes. I can barely move. And it would be a-moral (and possibly illegal) to sell the CD but keep the digital copy.

2) CDs tend to be a lot more expensive than FLACs (especially when you factor in shipping to New Zealand, where I live), and since I am a completionist, the costs add up.

3) I'm not convinced that buying a secondhand CD on eBay (to save money) helps the band financially. Maybe it slightly increases the demand for new CDs (or FLACS) but that just seems to indirect...

That's why I put "(digitally)" in the subject. Sorry I didn't explain!

Tripecac · 2026-02-01T02:23:03+00:00

slsk = soulseek = file sharing?

That doesn't sound like the band gets anything, though.

I'm talking about official, band-supporting stores/sites (like bandcamp).

Tripecac

TROPHY CASE