Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler MP3 incoders?

Why bother compressing music at all? I can easily have over a thousand Gigabytes of storage in my computer with just a stop at Be(a)st Buy for some new drives. I could store every CD I ever wanted in that much space. I'm thinking it's time to abandon all "lossy" encoders. In fact, I have.

Death to MP3!

TMan

I'm with TitaniumMan... or use FLAC - fully lossless (mathematical) 2:1 compression.

We wank on here about the a 2dB dip on a frequency response chart, then compress the hell out of sources? That's more than a little backwards, no?

Eventually the iPuds (Red vs Blue at Sundance joke there) and Rios and other portables will catch up with insanely high storage capacities.

Bren R.

Ogg Vorbis files are relatively transparent - I'd say a -q6 file would be transparent on most music even on M60s and a good sub. One of the reasons it's still widely used is because it's much easier to transfer a sub 100 MB album than a 450 MB album online.

Thanks for the input guys.
I'll be downloading LAME for Mac later today and might need some tech help.
kcarlile I hope you're around.

Never set up LAME; I use AAC and I am apparently not discriminating... but I'll try and give you help!

I intially used AAC, but found no improvement over MP3, and the AAC seemed to take a little longer. I might go back and explore that option again and listen a little more closely.

Don't know... I rip to AAC at 160 or 192, but I generally can't tell the difference. You could also do ALE, which results in a 2x size reduction from the original music file and supposed to be lossless. I don't think it will play in anything but iTunes or a full size or mini iPod (ie, no shuffles).

Brady
Let me know what you end up w/. My new Mac Mini will be arriving in a few days and I'll busy w/ that new toy. Now I have to network that to my Windows XP home machine. Hopefully, that won't be too hard...

Let me know if you have any issues. It's pretty easy, though.