Dark Angel

Webpage Notes

For want of a better location, I've collected miscellaneious notes about the webpage and Dark Angel related items in this notes page.


COMBAT Records

A major heavy metal label in the 1980's, COMBAT Records eventually had all of its assets sucked-up by Relativity Records. For a while the COMBAT label persisted but with Relativity handling distribution and the like. Then COMBAT pretty much ceased to be an entity.

While there is no official webpage for this defunct label, there is an unofficial one. Check out Deadfoot's COMBAT Page. You'll also find this and other external sites in the Links section.


Relativity Records

Relativity Records used to have their own official webpage at http://www.relativityrecords.com/ but recently (I.E. sometime around October or so of 1999) the entire site disappeared. Even the domain name is now unregistered. E-mail to Sony Music, the parent company, has not given me any sort of response. I suspect that the label has been absorbed into Sony and is pretty much history. Deadfoot told me he checked with Sony when the Relativity Records website disappeared, and they told him to check with their "legacy" group.

Go figure.


Christianity

I'd just like to take a moment to say something about Christianity. I'm not a religious person (literally; I'm a happy athiest) yet my father is an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church. But I was never really forced to follow in my parents religious beliefs. I've developed my own beliefs, opinions and ideas on life, just as pretty much everyone else has.

It's easy to be intolerant and hostile to devout believers (I.E. Chriatians, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, etc). It's not like Christianity doesn't have it's heaping helping of screw-ups through-out history. I could go on for paragraphs about the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, etc.
But I'll jump right to my point. No matter what your beliefs are, tolerance of others and their beliefs is vital. I can't emphasize this enough. I have friends who are Christian, Jewish, Pagan, agnostic and all sorts of interesting blends. My late father-in-law was born Jewish but died a devout Catholic. While sometimes I have to just nod my head and ignore some overtly religious remarks from people around me, I've never, ever been forced to do anything against my will or change my beliefs by any person. By respecing the rights and beliefs of others, my own lifestyle choices are respected as well.

I wish this were true for others. Sadly, some Christians parade around in public bearing signs saying "FAGS BURN IN HELL!". Clearly, they missed the point that I got a long time ago...

And remember folks... It doesn't matter what the religion, race, age, gender, sexual orientation, political membership or other minority factors are... ANYONE CAN BE AN ASSHOLE! :)


Sound Samples

How To Play

In order to play the Dark Angel samples, you will need a program capable of playing audio files in the MP3 format. For Windows users, I strongly recommend the excellent WinAmp program. For those on other computing platforms (including Linux, BeOS, and MacOS) check out this MP3 World page which lists players for many different platforms.

Once you have an MP3 player installed, you should be able to just click on any of the sound sample links on the Dark Angel webpage. Please note that this webserver does not have support for streaming audio, so it will probably be necessary for your computer to download the entire sample before it will start playing.

How They Were Made

When I originally setup this webpage, I used RealAudio for the sound samples. Back then, the MP3 format didn't exist and I was very concerned about disk-space usage, as well as bandwidth. I wasn't able to provide a RealAudio server but I had samples that were a few hundred kilobytes in length, yet played for well over a minute. I made the samples myself using a tape-deck, 16-bit SoundBlaster audio card and the Dark Angel audio casettes I owned. Since the original sampling quality wasn't the best to start with, the RealAudio format made sense.

Now that we're out of the 1900's I felt it was time to re-do all the samples. This time I ripped them directly from CD using EZ CD Creator Pro (straight Digital Audio Extraction, thus no sampling involved). Next I cropped the samples, normalized them to non-clipping levels and added a fade-out to each sample using SoundForge 4.0. I took the result and encoded into a lower-than-usual quality MP3 form (Specifically: 96 kilobits per second at 44KHz, true stereo) using CodAxe and the Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec (professional edition).

The result is samples of about a megabyte in length each, but of much higher quality than before. You can distinctly hear the stereo and there's far less distortion than in the RealAudio samples. While the file size pretty much quadrupled, nowadays the 56Kbps modem is the lower end of household Internet connections. More and more people have some form of DSL, cable modem or digital microwave access to the Internet.

Legality

All of the samples are only portions of songs, not entire songs. I don't want to deal with the insane fools in the RIAA, nor do I have the space or bandwidth to provide entire albums worth of samples. That's another reason for the lower-quality MP3 encoding, since I can not be accused of providing near-original quality copies.



Last Modified: June 22nd, 2000
Jeff The Riffer aka Jeff Mercer / riffer@afn.org