New Zarg Music site online!

[maky325]

[next to nothing]

Nice work

as a purist though, i would comment on the size of the pictures (for efficiency). The main pages picture of Qwave SE, for example, is 172 kb! you could easily have it down to around one tenth of that size, while keeping the same resolution and practically the same quality.

it might seem like nitpicking, but for an efficient site (client wise) this is sort of important.

[Warp69]

Easily below 20kb? Be my guest

But I do agree you could hit 40-50kb for that picture.

Great looking.

[next to nothing]

well i agree Did some quick experimenting and couldnt get it at a reasonable quality below 47 kb.

But to be honest, id rather scale it down, making it a smaller thumbnail so those interested would have to click it to get the full picture. It might be my foreign line, but the front page seems a bit sluggish to load because of the image size.

[johnbowen]

So....pardon my ignorance, but how do I do that?

-john b.

[netguyjoel]

Photoshop or another similar graphics program...save to 72 DPI & .jpg quality of 5 out of 12 should greatly reduce the size of the images... lastly, most monitors run 1024 x 768, or 1280 x 1024 so images saved at 800 x 600 will get image large enough from the thumbnail...

[johnbowen]

Ummm, will have to ask mpodrug to do this, as I do not have Photoshop or other graphics programs.
Thanks!
-john b.

[netguyjoel]

[maky325]

I agree, it was important about 4-7 years ago(depending on your geographical location) but today it is irrelevant! Today i could save it from 170kb to about 70-80 with not so obvious quality loss but IMO it's not worth it. One can do it even for free in some online service like:
http://www.imageoptimizer.net/

But as some of you are nitpickers i am too nitpicker I don't like to abuse image optimization because it is very clear and obvious. For example save this QwaveSE picture which is 171 kb. Run it through this online image optimizer(most of them are better or worse - depend on algorithm but difference is about 10% +- even in Photoshop/Nameit), optimize it (but it is already optimized), select quality Normal or Low (or High) and you will get optimized picture which is about 60kb. But if you look around letters (cutoff frequency etc.) or where there is clear fade of contrasted colors there is very annoying low bit pixel effect. Some will like it, some will not even spot it, some will say that they don't care and some... you get the point. i personally don't like it.

Again, i could do it with not so obvious pixel errors (sometimes, sometimes obvious) but best difference would be around 30-50 kb and IMO it's not worth it. One can do batch process but then again some errors will be obvious.

Keep in mind that some of the screens on this site are old, not scaled properly etc. so i could not do anything but this is reported to John and he is working on this. You just have to give him some time
I can't do it since i don't own every ZargMusic synth(yet) so obviously i can't take hi res screen shots but site is moving in better direction and we must support John Bowen work