New glasses and Music Compression
Topic: Technology
So today I picked up my new glasses. They are a fashionable pair that cost a bit of money. Now I find that it is weird wearing them. I suppose I'm much more used to wearing contacts so the new perspective of the glasses is discomforting. Well, we'll see how the glasses work out. It is complicated when I trade quickly between the two I think.

On another note, I've taken to converting all of my music files to mp3 and 128 kb/sec. This seems to be a fair compromise for listening to music at reasonable quality while maximizing disk space. For your information, the compression of mp3, or any digital format, is a complicated process that can have a significant impact on the sound quality. Lots of formats for compression are out there (AAC from iTunes and Atrac3 from Sony) which claim to be the best; however, the standard has been for some time mp3 which means that almost all players will recognize them. The problem is that the conversion technology is getting pretty old so you would be losing info by converting your CDs to mp3 and then throwing out the discs. The other issue is the compression rate. The goal with compression is to be as lossless possible, which, in simple terms means to keep all the original information. For music this includes the high and low range frequencies. This is pretty exhaustively discussed elsewhere but worth thinking about when compressing your music. Just for your information, CD audio quality is 1400 kb/sec so anything less is giving up something. This is usually the ends of the frequency spectrum but that can be an issue when you have complicated music such as classical. The graph at the right gives you an idea what I mean. By using 128 there is no dramatic drop off but you can see that a lot of info is loss. Using 256 lowers the info loss but doubles the file size. Different compression formats can have a different effect and the example is for MP3. Anyway, worth doing your homework on. A great compression conversion program is dBpowerAMP and I endorse it enthusiastically.

Hope your music is lossless!