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  #1  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 06:59 AM
Xenofan 29A Xenofan 29A is offline
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Default The Loudness War - a new RPG by Square Enix

Huh. I hope there weren't any translation errors in the list of names I gave for Evangelion I. Someone might have to check them over.

Anyway, the worst example I've found of overly-compressed music (which definitely affects anime more than VGM, in my experience) is the Hikaru Utada song for Rebuild of Evangelion.



That's just insane. It hurts my ears just looking at it, let alone listening...

(That is a compressed MP3, though, but on the macro level you wouldn't see much difference if it weren't.)

Last edited by Xenofan 29A; Jun 18, 2010 at 07:04 AM.
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  #2  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 07:09 AM
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Here's one of the worst I've seen.



ORANGE RANGE - Fever!
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  #3  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 07:12 AM
Xenofan 29A Xenofan 29A is offline
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Wow...that has no form whatsoever...
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  #4  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 08:00 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dag View Post
That's a pretty sad trend indeed. Perhaps a note should be added in their albums so nobody falls for it.

Are all their albums like this or just older stuff? I assume newer Japanese anime albums are already loud enough and maybe Geneon didn't taint those.
Tell Blah to make posting sample waveforms for every album mandatory, and people will know what not to buy. :P

Of course, there would need to be an explaination what the images mean, a lot of people are clueless.
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Old Jun 18, 2010, 08:42 AM
LiquidAcid LiquidAcid is offline
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Holy sh*t!!
Just by looking at these plots I'm fearing for my audio equipment...
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  #6  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 09:08 AM
Xenofan 29A Xenofan 29A is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cam View Post
Tell Blah to make posting sample waveforms for every album mandatory, and people will know what not to buy. :P

Of course, there would need to be an explaination what the images mean, a lot of people are clueless.
Not to mention that the standards are different between different types of music. Although what has happened in the last 10 years or so in Pop/Rock mastering is ridiculous, no one thinks that a Rock album should be mastered the same way as a Classical album. Furthermore, a lot of VGM is built upon samples of varying quality, and the attack/decay of such things is different and must be handled differently from live recordings.

So there are different standards for different genres and styles.
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  #7  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 12:07 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cam View Post
Of course, there would need to be an explaination what the images mean, a lot of people are clueless.
Lots of people don't care about if some audiophiles think that album x is mastered badly. Especially if it's not under the annoyance of Metallica's Death Magnetic, which is the only album I own where I've noticed how bad it sounds thanks to mastering.
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  #8  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 12:23 PM
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Well first of all, the mandatory posting of waveforms is ridiculous, nobody's going to go through all that work, especially when Razakin's right, most people can't even tell the difference. In fact most people won't even know what that waveform means. And then there are those of us that know what it means and just don't care. I personally don't care if something was even mastered from a lossy source, it's an official release and worth part of a collection.

It's not like we're supporting bootleggers when we're buying something from Geneon, it's a legitimate publisher. I don't think there's any need to say "Hey we think this sounds really bad so you shouldn't buy it." Then we might as well link VGMdb album ratings to some function that tells someone on the main entry: "This album was rated really low so nobody likes it and you might as well not buy it", even though not everyone's going to agree on that too.

And also, not every Geneon album is bad. Loudness war has a point but I think it's being blown a little out of proportion when we want to make it mandatory to shun legitimate publishing companies because of it, especially because doing so will not make the loudness war go away. It's just a fact of life.

Oh, to add: Geneon isn't the only one that does this, and more will do it over time. In the future we would be posting so many waveforms up that we practically wouldn't have albums to buy, and you know it's true. Unless you think loudness war has gotten better over time (but it's obviously gotten considerably worse).

Last edited by Medina; Jun 18, 2010 at 12:26 PM.
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  #9  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 01:15 PM
LiquidAcid LiquidAcid is offline
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I still think adding this information to an album is valuable information. E.g. I didn't buy the reprint of Vagrant Story because I knew that the remastering was actually just compression of the original data and lots of clipping that wasn't on the original DigiCube album. So I waited for a original DigiCube copy to surface and eventually bought it.

Mastering _is_ import and I have quite a high-quality audio setup, so it makes a huge difference for me. So if I've got the choice to buy a better mastered version of the album, then I buy it -- even if it's more expensive. I don't collect VGM just because I want to collect, I collect because I listen to the music -- and listening to heavily compressed music is just no fun at all. IMHO it's all about dynamic range -- anyone who has listened to a good live orchestra concert knows that.

'loudness war as a fact of life' <- this is not acceptable for me. I paid a lot of money for the original RCA Victor releases of the first three Star Wars soundtracks, simply because the mastering of this specific release is best. All other are heavily modified (compressed, filtered, etc.) and I just refuse to buy something like that.

I'm all for spreading the word and punishing the publishers which screw up the mastering (or whoever does it for an album). Tolerating this trend is not going to help us....
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  #10  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 04:09 PM
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Look, arguing is fine and all, but please try not to carry over previous drama from other sites.

I think this topic needs its own thread.
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  #11  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 04:50 PM
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Yeah, requiring a wav file to submit an album is not very practical (but I assume that was a joke.)

There is always a possibility of opening up to the submission of some more technical details for the tracks. Collecting the whole waveform would be silly, but maybe there are some simpler metrics we could archive, like the Max and RMS levels in each channel. This is something that would have to be discussed, and is probably on a pretty far timetable compared to some of the other improvements that we need.
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  #12  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 06:34 PM
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Why must these apathetic trolls be everywhere?

SS: Posting the waveform is no more difficult than posting a cover scan. Just make sure it's from the loudest track on the album. Doesn't need to be sourced from lossless to get the general idea.
RMS power, etc, is useless, I can tell you right now even the best sounding albums I have don't really have over 6db of dynamic range - they just aren't clipped and/or were passed through a better compressor.

Last edited by Cam; Jun 18, 2010 at 06:37 PM.
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  #13  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 06:48 PM
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Cool it on that stuff. There will always be people with differing opinions, and you need to learn to just accept that and move on.

I think this kind of data is better aggregated at the track level. Summary or average statistics can be aggregated at the album level. This would allow a cross comparison across all printings of any particular track. I'd rather boil it down to a small set of numbers that can be played with in lots of ways. I can't query for the album that contains the best rendition of track X unless I have some kind of metric that doesn't involve eyeballing a graph. Maybe percentage of points that are at max (or min) of the range.
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  #14  
Old Jun 18, 2010, 11:27 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cam View Post
The loudness war will go away when the companies don't fear losing money: and this means educating the retarded masses.
VGMDB can do its part.
I wouldn't know where to start quoting but it all comes down to the above line. Are we actually talking about boycotting albums due to bad mastering?

Of course it's going to make a difference to the publisher if 20 audiophiles (4 of which will purchase the album) will voice their opinion about the mastering quality. In the the end, big publishers will actually move away from game music.

Back to reality, game music is still a niche, and reprints with different mastering (Vagrant Story) are an exception. I assume most publishers do have a contact form for feedback, so why not use that?

This info could be valuable at some point in the future, but right now it's an excuse to implement audiophilistic features to the benefit of trading boards and lossless collectors.

There are many ways to sample an album before purchase, but there's no alternative if you don't like the sound.
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  #15  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 02:58 AM
LiquidAcid LiquidAcid is offline
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I just want to clarify some things:
I'm not voting for mandatory inclusion of waveform snapshots when submitting albums, this would be a bit too much.
However if someone already has done some analysis of the tracks and he has proof that the mastering is bad (in the examples above it sticks out a mile), why not include this data? Especially when two different releases are available I think this is some very neat info. Of course we should like two or three articles on the topic, so the newcomer can understand why mastering matters and why the loudness war destroys music.

Next some facts:
1) VBR V0 encoding with a recent LAME version isn't ABXable from the lossless source, except for some test samples that are used to check the encoder implementation. So talking about lossless vs. lossy compression in this context (it's about 'dynamic range compression', and NOT data compression) is nonsense and anyone who does it, is missing the point.

2) You don't have to be an 'audiophile' (and please give me a definition of this term) to spot clipping and dynamic range compression. There are some very nice examples on the problem on Youtube, with showing the waveform and playing it back (just search for 'loudness war'). Youtube's media containers probably use something like AAC (with low bitrate) to encode the audio, so this _is_ lossy compression of the audio part.
And even then you can see and hear the (bad) effect that dynamic range compression has on the original waveform. You don't need a hifi setup, even crappy laptop speakers are able to reveal the difference between 'compressed' and 'uncompressed'.

3) You don't need hifi equipment to spot the difference. I can hear clipping even on my portable player with some cheap Sony in-ears.

I'm amazed how many people here just put this loudness war problem in the audiophile corner and don't care at all about the music that might be good in principle, but ends up in a heavily distorted version on the disc. How is this acceptable?! How can we just ignore the problem, when we're all here because we love music?

@Teioh: I did this a lot in the past. Used to buy a lot of movie scores from Varese Sarabande back then and there were more and more releases that compressed the source to sound louder. I filed a lot of complaints on the problem, but never got any replies. Eventually I stopped buying VS releases.
And now I only buy something from them once in a while (and only after making sure that the mastering isn't that bad). Now my point is, if more people were aware of the problem, then the record companies would have to start rethinking the whole mastering.
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  #16  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 04:33 AM
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I'm also against posting waveform snapshots. (Believe it or not!)
However, I think there must be something we can do to encourage people to speak up against brickwalled music.

I honestly can't hear the difference between 320 MP3 and FLAC, but I can spot albums ruined by the loudness war, easily. The people in this thread who say they can't tell the difference, have either been lucky and avoided the really bad ones, or are just flat out lying. I'll try and post some samples later if I can figure out how to do it.. (I assume 30 second samples are allowed?)

It's true, it does mostly effect newer music (in particular the last 2 years have gotten extremely bad) however, there is even some 90's albums that have this problem. They are few and far between though.

Anyway, it's not all bad news.

http://www.gatewaymastering.com/gate...udnessWars.asp

So Guns ‘N Roses should be congratulated for choosing a more dynamic version. I honestly want to buy the CD just to support their decision. (even though I have zero interest in their music)
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  #17  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 04:41 AM
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I love it when someone disagrees with some people it's automatically trolling.


Also, what's this about Vagrant Story reprint sounding worse than the original? I only have the reprint so I obviously can't compare.
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  #18  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 04:50 AM
LiquidAcid LiquidAcid is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lowe View Post
I honestly can't hear the difference between 320 MP3 and FLAC, but I can spot albums ruined by the loudness war, easily.
Yeah, that was my main point in the other post.

When having this sort of discussion with other people (friends, colleagues, etc.) I usually end up explaining the term 'compression' (in this specific context), because everyone associates 'compression' with MP3. A common misconception -- everyone knows that MP3 decreases sound quality, but apparantly nobody knows that DRC (dynamic range compression) does affect the sound quality a _lot_ more.

I suggest everyone interested in this topic to read this three Wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(audio)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

Music lives from its dynamic range, reducing this range to a few dB destroys the feeling (it simply gets boring). The ignorance of this issue really makes me sad...

EDIT:
@Mika: The remaster of the Vagrant Story album is using DRCed versions of the original waveforms from the DigiCube release. However the main issue is that now a lot of the tracks clip, and once a waveform is clipped the information (contained in the clipped part) is lost.

Last edited by LiquidAcid; Jun 19, 2010 at 04:55 AM.
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  #19  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 05:04 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LiquidAcid View Post
@Mika: The remaster of the Vagrant Story album is using DRCed versions of the original waveforms from the DigiCube release. However the main issue is that now a lot of the tracks clip, and once a waveform is clipped the information (contained in the clipped part) is lost.
Is it possible to hear the difference? If anyone has a good example track for this, help a brother out and upload it somewhere so I can compare.
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  #20  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 05:12 AM
LiquidAcid LiquidAcid is offline
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I used to have some pictures on my system displaying the most obvious differences in some tracks. Sadly I can't find them at the moment. Maybe I deleted them after finally purchasing the DigiCube release.

Anyway, what you can easily do is to feed the extracted (from the disc) tracks into Audacity and use the 'Show clipping' feature (I think it was called like that). This should show you some positions where the sound quality suffers.

Keep in mind though that Vagrant Story isn't that bad with DRC, the examples by Lowe and Xenofan are a lot worse.

EDIT: Checking the average tracks loudness is another way of identifying tracks that are mastered 'too loud'. Replaygain e.g. proposes a reference level of 89dB.

Read here to understand why this is a good choice:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...howtopic=12315
http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/
http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/calibration.html

Last edited by LiquidAcid; Jun 19, 2010 at 05:19 AM.
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  #21  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 12:46 PM
LiquidAcid LiquidAcid is offline
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@Hellacia:
Sorry, but I'm not going to lower myself to your level and respond to these insults. Only this much:

Artifacts by data compression and dynamic range compression differ a lot. DRC results in lower fidelity of the signal and possibly clipping, while data compression introduces quantization noise, pre/post-echo and can also reduce stereo separation. These artifacts types are _not_ comparable, so my point is valid.

I'm not an expert on audio compression, but I know at least the basic (mathematical) background for most techniques, so I can claim this with quiet conscience.
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  #22  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 01:23 PM
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Seriously, take the personal disagreements to another forum.
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  #23  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 01:23 PM
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Quick note: if the artists intention was a sound with less dynamic range but more compact, does that make the mastering worse? A great example is "You Know What You Are" from NIN's "With Teeth". Just compare to the track before it and you realize Trent knows what's up and it's intentional.

The only way I can accept "clipping and distortion is objectively bad for music" if it's actually a re-master of a track originally intended to have no clipping and all it's dynamic range intact. This most likely applies to orchestral music and other recorded music. Personally I think the "sound" achieved by modern mastering is not at all bad, it's just a different approach to achieve a different "sound" that's most likely what both the artist, producer and listener wants with very few exceptions.

Also just to take things further I'd like to point to artists using the compressor/limiter as an instrument and sound shaping tool (like Justice, Boyz Noize and so on). There is never a right or wrong in music, it's about what sounds good and to most people, artists and producers modern mastering sounds good. Someone should've asked The Who not to cut holes in their amps, should've asked the guy who invented fuzz distortion not to have done that, should've started a worldwide campaign against the bitcrusher etc. etc. etc. becasuse it "destroys the musical expression" ... really?

That's me. I usually don't have a problem with any mastering, compressed like hell or a delicately captured orchestral performance with it's loudest peak well under 0db, I just really really hate the "THIS OBJECTIVELY SUCKS" attitude.

EDIT: Oh, also, it's fun to note that you're all talking about LOOKING at the waveform and not listening! We should hold a blind test session for fun.
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Old Jun 19, 2010, 01:49 PM
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At least your music (except that damn track 7) sounds decent, anosou.
But then it also looks decent, too.
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Old Jun 19, 2010, 01:54 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cam View Post
At least your music (except that damn track 7) sounds decent, anosou.
But then it also looks decent, too.
I beg to differ, load up track 1, 2, 6 and you'll see the peaks are clipping. This is what you're all saying is "killing music" by the way, all clipping! Somewhere there's part of my track YOU JUST CAN'T EXPERIENCE!
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Old Jun 19, 2010, 02:21 PM
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You're a baddie anosou, but I still love you.
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  #27  
Old Jun 19, 2010, 05:24 PM
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@Another Soundscape: In the cases of streamed game music it's often easy to compare the original dynamic range with that on a CD.
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Old Jun 19, 2010, 07:05 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Another Soundscape View Post
I beg to differ, load up track 1, 2, 6 and you'll see the peaks are clipping. This is what you're all saying is "killing music" by the way, all clipping! Somewhere there's part of my track YOU JUST CAN'T EXPERIENCE!
Lawl, I must have checked one of the tracks that didn't clip then.
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  #29  
Old Jun 20, 2010, 03:27 AM
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@anosou:
Using distortion and clipping for 'artistic purpose' is an entirely different thing and not something that falls in the category of 'loudness war' (I'm shortening this to LW), where the DRC is abused to artificially increase the overall loudness of the track beyond the technical limits imposed by the media (audio CD, redbook standard).

The main problem probably is that we don't have any 'medium' for music with infinite dynamic range. Even analogue media like vinyl has it's limitation and I remember some badly mastered vinyl records that had too much bass which resulted in the needle changing the groove (which is worse than clipping). The normal audio CD (redbook standard) only offers a range of 96dB (16bit samples), mastering (before transfer to disc) probably still happens with 24bit resolution (144dB) though. So we always have implicit DRC due to the change in bitdepth. (You probably know this things already)
And yes, I know that these dynamic ranges vary with the amount of tricks (oversampling, noise shaping, etc.) applied.

So DRC isn't bad at all in principle. It becomes bad when it's used for things that it wasn't designed for (e.g. to annul the technical limits imposed by the redbook standard).

I have nothing against DRC and clipping in general, if the artist intended this sound. But in the context of LW the artist isn't aware of that, probably because it's the record company / mastering company that makes this decision. Here the credo is 'louder is better', regardless of the sound the artist originally intended. Take again a look at the waveform examples from the Wiki (Link). Sound gets compressed beyond recognition and I really doubt that this change over time was intended by any of The Beatles.

EDIT: Nice FAQ about vinyl at HydrogenAudio: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....le=Vinyl_Myths
Also discusses the dynamic range that one can get out of the media.

Last edited by LiquidAcid; Jun 20, 2010 at 03:31 AM.
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Old Jun 20, 2010, 01:57 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Datschge View Post
@Another Soundscape: In the cases of streamed game music it's often easy to compare the original dynamic range with that on a CD.
That's true, but to be fair I wouldn't hold one in higher regard than the other. Many times the mastered CD sounds better than the streamed in-game music. Also, for obvious reasons, the music can't occupy the same "space" in game as it does on an album where it's the ONLY sound.

And yeah Liquid, you've ofc got a lot of points and obviously know what you're talking about. Can't see how increasing the loudness beyond the technical limits is bad though unless it sounds bad. You still all talk about pictures, theory and tech but most of the times I think moderately->heavily compressed albums SOUND good.

Anyway, I know right now we won't get anywhere with this, all I wish is that everyone stopped believing their way to look at things is RIGHT and that everyone else needs to ADAPT. Thanks
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