Representative Albums: "Short Bus," "Filter: The Very Best Things (1995-2008)," "Title of Record"
Representative Songs: "Take a Picture," "Welcome to the Fold," "Hey Man, Nice Shot"
Biography
Richard Patrick (vocals, guitars, bass, programming, drums) and Brian Liesegang (programming, guitars, keyboards, drums) both experimented with electronics early in their careers. Patrick was a member of the original touring incarnation of Nine Inch Nails. After NIN finished their lengthy first tour in the early '90s, Patrick and Liesegang met through a mutual friend and began to record industrial rock together. Their debut album, Short Bus, released on Reprise in 1995, was recorded by the two at a small house on the outskirts of Cleveland. Short Bus became a surprise hit, thanks to the MTV and alternative radio hit "Hey Man, Nice Shot"; by the end of the summer, the album had reached gold status. In order to tour behind the record, the duo recruited guitarist Geno Lenardo, bassist Frank Cavanaugh, and drummer Matt Walker. Liesegang departed in 1997 over creative differences, but Patrick retained the Filter name for 1999's Title of Record, which eventually went platinum and spawned another radio/MTV hit in the single "Take a Picture." The album also included new drummer Steve Gillis after Walker left to work with the Smashing Pumpkins. Filter's third album, The Amalgamut, followed three years later, after which the band went on a bit of a hiatus. Around 2005, Patrick announced the formation of a new band, Army of Anyone, which he created with former members of Stone Temple Pilots and David Lee Roth's touring band. However, Patrick did not abandon his original band -- Filter returned in 2008 with Anthems for the Damned. ~ John Bush, All Music Guide
A filter is a computer program to process a data stream. Some operating systems such as Unix are rich with filter programs. Even Windows has some simple filters built in to its command shell, most of which have significant enhancements relative to the similar filter commands that were available in MS-DOS.
Just as in Unix, such a filter usually gets most of its data from standard input (the main input stream) and writes its main results to standard output (the main output stream). The command syntax for getting data from a device or file other than standard input is the input operator ("<"). Similarly, to send data to a device or file other than standard output is the output operator (">"). To append data lines to an existing output file, one can use the append operator (">>").
The similarity with Unix extends to filters used as elements of pipelines. The pipe operator ("|") on a command line signifies that the main output of the command to the left is passed as main input to the command on the right. From the early days of DOS based computers, the two classic filters are find and sort.
Such filters may be used in batch files (*.bat, *.cmd etc.).
For use in the same command shell environment, there are many more filters available than those built in to Windows. Some of these are freeware, some shareware and some are commercial programs. A number of these mimic the function and features of the filters in Unix. Some filtering programs have a graphical user interface (GUI) to enable users to design a customized filter to suit their special data processing and/or data mining requirements.
