May 9, 2003 - After many years of not touching a single bit of this site, I've got back to it. Even though it was not updated in a while people were visiting these pages expecting to find media files, etc. However, realities of the modern world are touch and web-traffic costs money hence I can't afford to pay for 20-30Gb of traffic per month (as it was back in 1999) getting no profit out of this venture. Also a lot of music was released officially since then and therefore publishing it online would be totally illegal. Internet is now full of beautiful Queen sites which have plenty of information inside; Official Queen Web Site is also updated daily now compared to 90th when it was updated only once in several years. Even though this site is dead as it was in 3 years ago, I do have plans to write a good open source Queen DB program which will have plenty of information to read offline. No deadlines yet, however, now as I've graduated from the University I will have more free time until I find some job. By the way, complying with popular demand, I have removed that midi file :) which some of the visitors liked but others hated so much. Fortunecity now places many banners and popup ads on my pages, therefore if you hate them you can try using Mozilla browser that blocks unwanted popups and has many other wonderful features.
Today is ten years as Freddie Mercury is no longer with us. And it is approximately ten years as I listen to Queen. Many things changed since then, now we have legal hi-quality Freddie Mercury Solo Box Set and can enjoy his voice even more than we did before; but no new songs can be written, no more songs can be sung. All attempts by Queen members to create something new, in my opinion, were mediocre, compared what Queen did together with Freddie. Talents are rare nowadays and we never know when the next one will appear, so those of us who still remember, love and listen to Queen and Freddie are among the elite music listeners and since we didn't abandon our tastes for the last ten years we will still love Queen and Freddie as they were back then. [November 24, 2001]
Latest news: for 4 years Fortunecity was hosting Golden Queen and I was able to provide my visitors with lots of multimedia content by Queen and I'm really thankful to them. However, a year ago they changed their policies and now they prohibit all media files - no matter what, even those small WMA files are also unavailable. I promised to come up with new site in June 2001, but for some reasons it is not yet out. I hope, that by Jan 1, 2002, I will finish some preliminary pages. Probably, I will no longer use name Golden Queen and it will be separate project, I already own a space on a commercial hosting site, so now I what I really need is to put all info I have into MySQL database and make it available through web pages. See you. [November 24, 2001.]
Microsoft has released final version of its Windows Media encoder engine. Quality of sound is superb! 64Kpbs is really very close to the quality of MP128, but not everywhere though. It is hard to tell the difference on my RioVolt CD/WMA/MP3 player and I can fit now almost 24 hours of music on one cd. On the other frontier there is a new 'beta' version of LAME MP3 encoder, which with some parameters creates the best sounding MP3 files on this planet. Vog Orbis hit the 'beta 4' stage and soon to be final. These developments in audio compression take my breath away and I don't know what to expect the next day. CD quality @ 16Kpbs? :-) Please take a poll, to share your ideas on the future of compressed audio, which standard do you prefer?
I was wrong when some time ago, announced here that RealAudio is dead. On October 23rd, 2000, Real Networks announced new standard RealAudio 8. What can I say? It is amazed me. Magically it sounds better that Windows Media 7 on low speeds. I checked all possible encoding options, and all of them give great sound. For high end encoding they licensed Sony's ATRAC algorithm used in MiniDisks, so you may encode with bit rates up to 352Kpbs and get quality, which theoretically will sound even better than MP3s compressed with LAME. Therefore, I may try to use RealAudio 8 for some songs on Golden Queen and any comments from my visitors are very welcome [Please note that quality of RA8 is worse than that of Windows Media 8].
I've added Brian May's page. There it is possible to find his full concert in Moscow, Russia on Nov 7, 1998. The page is still kind of beta version, since I want to improve it even further. For the first time, I use Windows Media 7.0, the most advanced encoding algorithm, however, quality of original was not fantastic this time.
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