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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

If there's something that could drive me back to CDs or maintaining a collection of MP3s it's this. The word "remastered" on Spotify or Youtube now fills me with dread.

Stop. Please for the love of all that's good in the world, just STOP.

"Remastered" would be fine if it was just cleaning up the sound and improve the quality but it's not. So many are worse versions of the originals because someone decided to "improve" the original by adding stuff just for the sake (it seems) of "making their mark".

Outside of music it just reminds me of the terrible changes to the original Star Wars trilogy (can we get the originals, Disney, PLEASE?).

If you really feel like you need a different version, do it. Just don't hide, destroy, delete and otherwise eliminate the original.

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I assume they are mostly referring to the video and not the audio. Some old music videos only have a 480p option. If you could find the source material and re-render it in 1080p or better and then add those resolution options without even swapping out the pre-existing resolutions I think that would be great.

That's 100% what this is. The company is going back to the video masters and remastering at higher quality levels than was done back in the day. The old master videos are of high quality but were only mastered to a certain quality level for release back in the day because of the state of consumer technology (size and quality of TV screens essentially). This is just going back to the original video masters and remastering for the current state of the art in consumer technology.

The edited masters were all 4:3 SD, at least until the early 2000s when HD became prevalent, and were all mastered to the highest levels of quality available at the time. To truly re-master to higher quality would involve telecine/scanning of the film, if shot on film, and completely re-editing and this is unlikely at best.

Perhaps they are re-sampling, upscaling, enhancing color and filtering to get rid of NTSC color artefacts, etc., contained in the original edited masters but they are almost certainly not re-mastering using the original sources or even submasters (such as might be done when re-mastering audio from the original multitrack master).

Here is the remastered Petty Free Fallin' and although it is presented at 1080 it is still 4:3 aspect and is clearly not at HD resolution; it looks very soft by today's standards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lWJXDG2i0A

One thing I really hope they don't do is altering the aspect ratio of the restored music videos. By altering the aspect ratio of the video, you are also messing with the cinematography of the video and putting your own "spin" on it.

To make things even worse, sometimes companies will even crop 4:3 footage to be 16:9, resulting in less things being visible than in the original.

Thankfully judging by the videos linked in the blog (at least the ones I've looked at), they've left the restored videos in 4:3.

For a good idea of how bad things can get when a company doing restoration messes with aspect ratios, this video highlights the bad restoration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

Hmm I see your point with Star Wars, but I don't think this is what's happening here. I see no indication that anything has changed other than upgraded quality of older classics, which seems like a good thing.

I don't agree with your Star Wars point. Regardless of how I feel about it, George Lucas made the changes to his film. I believe that is his right as creator. Making changes to other people's work crosses a line for me.

Disney owns them know, all of it, all the intellectual rights. Plus it was a team effort and from what I've read much of the best aspects of Star Wars can be traced to people other than George Lucas.

> Regardless of how I feel about it, George Lucas made the changes to his film. I believe that is his right as creator.

I learnt a while back that George Lucas allegedly did those edits to prevent his wife from earning her royalties as editor: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7g5gfr/til_m...

This drives me crazy, especially on Spotify. I've been uploading some of my collection to Google Play Music to get around this, but I'm probably switching to Plex in the near future.

For an extreme example of this, check out Blind Guardian on Spotify and compare some of the songs to the versions on YouTube. Some of them don't even sound like the same song.

Plex doesn't have the best mobile clients.

Google Play Music is awesome, but beware that they'll do weird merging and drop/replace albums associated with the music you upload, especially if the title is fairly generic, or is semi-niche.

Great option, however.

If anyone is looking for a decent self streaming system, Ampache[1] is a great option. Stream all of your music for free, and has the option for a Subsonic backend making it compatible with lots of clients.

[1] http://ampache.org/

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