*clickety clickety* *clickity* Yes! Success.

[railenthe]

So I'm running around online right now for lack of anything better to do.  The other week, just looking around for obscure music—because my hardcopy alternatives have run out now that most of the stuff on my wishlist is out of print, I looked around for a site that offered mp3 files

(that wasn't iTunes)

so that I could get my mitts on this music at long last.  Sure, it won't be as high a recording quality as it would be if I went and found a hardcopy of the tracks, but some of these have turned into collector's items and are now hard to get.  People who have found the album are less than likely to let go of it for less than fifty dollars, so instead of running and looking for something that could be ultimately futile, I decided to just go for digital.

I will say it like this right off.  I don't like digital.

Not like that. I think that digital technology has revolutionized much of what we do today.  The internet, computers in general, and soon television will be the harbingers of an all digital age.  Digital radio is catching on a lot slower than television, mostly because the shift into digital televsion versus analog is a federal mandatory thing.  But, I digress!  Where was I?

Oh.  Right.  Now I remember.
I don't like digital.  If I had to label it, it would be because I'm an audiophile.  I like my music, and I like it to be the best that I can get it.  If I can't get it live, then I get it on vinyl.  If I can't get it on  vinyl, then I insist on a CD.  I wouldn't even touch a music file that didn't have something that it had come off of that I couldn't get my hands on directly.  But, with the untimely death of my CD player, I had to get my hands on a decent mp3 player.  After that, I had to submit to the digital revolution.

Thing is about digital music files:  they aren't as clear and crisp as an analog.  Even a CD can't get the same effect as a vinyl record—comes from trying to code a wave (a soundwave that is) into little bits—the ones and zeroes that a CD has to translate into audio data.

It's kind of like the way a TV creates an image from stil pictures.  Although…it is a lot easier to fool the eyes into thinking that they're seeing a fluid, unblinking image than it is to fool the ears into thinking these little bits of sound that are being presented to them are a single unbroken wave (which as what it SHOULD be mind you.)  Unless you've spent your life listening to high-rate media and straight-out vinyl, most probably can't tell the difference right off.

People, I'm not talking out of my arse here.  A magazine, I think it was Maximum PC if I remember right—they did a double-blind about this very thing, comparing iTunes' 128 kbps media to their non-DRM 256 versions on the same tracks; in the study, most of the participants were easily able to pick out the higher bitrate track.

In all the above cases, the listeners reported the same differences that I cite when I mention why I don't like digital/low-qual files in general.  I've slowly warmed to the digital versions when I found out that there are programs that allow you to encode with something less lossy than an MP3 format and still be able to play on a standard device, or jump the bitrate up further so that you can actually get a better quality sound.

The thing is, when you encode a file into something like an mp3 file, you get the problem of compression.  The file has to be made smaller so that it can actually be managed and stored practically.  To that end, the process takes prequencies out of the file selectively.  Half the time the majority of the frequencies that get tossed out are things that human ears can't sense.  But the rest of them are on the edges of range of both normal, infra- and ultra-sonic, so after a decent compression—here I'm thinking of 160 and lower—you start hearing this sort of scratchy, tinny, quality to it, kind of like listening to an FM radio that has been tuned to just short of the proper place on the dial.  It's bearable, but after a while, it will grate on your ears.  I can't stand that!  :P

192 kbps is the barest low that I will encode a file at.  Any lower than that and the difference is jarringly obvious.  Though I prefer to encode at 320; it preserves as much as you can get out of a compressed file.  And the better the song's quality, the better I can get into it.

It doesn't sound all that important, I know.  But, I listen to a lot of ambient/nature music, so when frequences get tossed, it often happens to be that river in the background or the birds, or even some of the instruments themselves.  If you don't believe me, take a favorite track on a CD.  Rip it at 128 and listen, then listen to the original, and do it again with a rip at 320.

You'll notice it.  Big time.  o.o!