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Seriously, if the OP had wanted a lecture he would've asked for one. The purpose of the topic was to discuss the album.
I haven't heard the leak myself, but I'd bet you 5 bucks that if it sounds like it's mastered too loud now, the CD release will too. I'm assuming the leak comes from a promo copy as usual.
Musically, I'm sure it's awesome.
by your logic...
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Seriously, if the OP had NOT wanted a lecture, he wouldn't have mentioned that he was trying to judge and ask production and sound quality opinions based on a leaked/pirated copy of an album.
And you are assuming wrong. A leak doesn't always come from a promo copy. Some people pirate streams of the album from other sources. And if you would have read (or perhaps understood) what I mentioned in my previous post, you can have someone rip a shitty leak from the source promo copy, and still have it ultimately sound like shit by the time someone might download it. Say the original person makes a copy and passes it around the net. Everyone wants their download link used and blog or torrent site visited, so they decide to change the kbps to a higher bitrate from 128 to maybe 320. So then someone downloads that at 320, but is then like "zomg it's too big to fit on my ipod, lemme rip it down to 128 or 192 to make room" and then maybe ends up sharing that copy with a buddy or other torrent friends. After a day or two, there are hundreds of "leaks", but none of them are the leak source quality. Just because it's digital, doesn't mean there isn't any loss each time those packets are passed around, and re-compressed or changing kbps, or zipped, unzipped, unrarred or unrarred, etc. etc.
People like this (and perhaps you as well defending him) are just asking for trouble coming here to a (what used to be) somewhat professional audio production forum and wanting to have a "serious" discussion about the mix and master, when you're judging it off of a leaked copy. If this just doesn't scream "dumb" to you or your friend that you're defending, then you obviously don't belong in this industry. For those of us who take this seriously (even as a hobby), we do expect to make money off of this at some point... so for us who are in bands that want CD sales, or we have production credits so we want royalties, you really expect us to look the other way? Of course we are going to try and explain the error of their ways and point out why it doesn't make sense. Just because you might be too young to have a job, or living with your parents and still in high school, or doing this as a hobby, and just because you're used to downloading stuff for free, doesn't make you right, nor does it justify the means to the end.
If he wants to quietly download a leak to see if he likes the songwriting before he buys the album, then that's his prerogative. This isn't a confession zone for stealing albums. You will find there are those on here defending it, and those of us against piracy. But if he (or you) want to have a serious discussion, then you both should take this seriously and realize the error in your arguments.
There are a lot of hard working people on this forum that work hard on raising money for hardware and software, the last thing they want to hear is someone is downloading commercial albums/software that they worked hard for/produced. If you're going to pirate music/software keep it to yourself. Or send private messages to one another. No one wants to support it.
This.
)_/ I'm guessing the OP got a low quality bootleg.
