simont | (no subject)

(no subject)

Ho hum. World of Computers has furnished me with a replacement hard disk, but were sadly unable to recover any of my data from the old one (not actually surprisingly), so now I get to start the CD-ripping process all over again. What joy, what fun, what an absolute pain in the wossnames.

After a weekend of generally bad sleep, I managed to outdo myself last night with what felt like an all-night-long extended dream which made no sense at all. It involved plots, intrigue, a murder mystery, a lot of driving the wrong way along traffic ramps, at least two parallel universes, and a whole section of the night sky that nobody but me could see (at least partly because it was kept in a cupboard, but even when I opened the cupboard other people denied seeing anything inside it). I was almost disappointed when I woke up, because I wanted to know what would have happened in the end! Silly subconscious.

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If you want to send me mail, and are prepared to live with my rather chaotic archive (I attempt 128k, ID3-tagged, but fail in a number of places), I can give you access and you might be able to copy stuff off aragorn rather than ripping it yourself?

I think I'd prefer to do it myself, if I'm going to do it at all; I initially encoded stuff at 160k and wasn't quite convinced I couldn't hear artifacts in a few places as a result. Possibly that was just psychological, but I recoded everything using LAME's "--alt-preset standard" (VBR averaging in the region of 192k), and that did wonders for my peace of mind (he says, carefully leaving open the option of real artifacts and the option of pure psychology :-).

Of course, it was moments after I did that that my disk blew up, so I didn't get to give it as much of a listening test as I'd have liked :-/ But I did manage to test a few of the problem tracks at both bitrates, and did feel happier with the VBR versions.

So, thanks, but I'll manage. (Though I'd be idly curious to know how much of our music collections overlap, if nothing else...)

I'm clearly more paranoid than most, or listen to more entropic music than most. I encoded my CDs at nominal 256kbps VBR Ogg, the most extreme case is a 2½ minute track that averages 306kbps (to be fair, it is ATR).

Some stuff is still full of artifacts and unintentional distortion; Crowbar's Odd Fellows Rest is notably bad.

Well, I certainly don't think I'd have trouble believing that you listened to more entropic music than me! When Ian and I were discussing lossless audio compression the other week, he said something like "the state of the art is about a factor of 2 compression on most music, but obviously that gets worse if it's Mobbsy music" and I nodded because I knew exactly what he meant by that :-)

That said, your results sound pretty extreme even by that measure, particularly given the (supposed) extra quality-per-bitrate of Ogg over MP3...

I've actually got Odd Fellows Rest myself; I'll have to give it a more critical listen and some more rigorous testing once I start re-doing my MP3 collection.

a whole section of the night sky that nobody but me could see (at least partly because it was kept in a cupboard

I want one! Just think of the astronomy...

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