Music files and such
Previous theory regarding ripping music to my hard drive: Balance quality with file size. In practical terms, this means going with WMA files at a 128K bitrate. What does that mean? Well, to my ear, I can't tell the difference on most songs. The bass is full, the trebles are smooth; basically the song is essentially duplicated with very little loss of quality from the original track. You get a minute's worth of music for less than a megabyte, too, which is a major plus (and it makes calculating disk space real easy).
Current, changed theory: Record the music at the highest bitrate possible because hey, I've got the room to do it. If you bump your bitrate up to 192K for a WMA file, you only add about 0.4 megabytes for every minute of music, and you end up with quality that seems to be totally indistinguishable from the original track. Figure four megs for every three minutes of music; the math is still pretty easy to figure out.
So, let's do the math for my Nomad jukebox (actual hard drive space: 19GB):
19000MB / (4MB / 3 minutes) = 14250 minutes of musicThat's a lot of music. You'd have to recharge the ten-hour battery over 24 times just to listen to it all. Moving on:
14250 minutes / ~55 minutes per album = 260 albums.So that's a lot of full albums I could have on my Nomad, at a full bitrate. Which makes me think: "score!"
Why the change in theory? A piddly little audiophilic gripe. On a particular track by none other than my favorite musical artist of the last six years, one Mr. Ben Folds, some of the cool background effects got scrambled. By scrambled, I mean: they sounded digitized and very reminiscent of the Moog sound effects from a Styx album. It sounded like what all the sci-fi screenwriters of the fifties thought "The Future" and "Outer Space" would sound like. Does it ruin the song? Of course it does. So back to the original point of all that math, I've got the space on the damn thing -- which, if you remember, only cost me, net, about $5 -- so it's time to stop living like a miser.
As one Mr. Bob Collins once said:
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"Get the good gas, this time. Don't skimp like usual."
</insidejoke>
Posted by Matt at May 29, 2003 9:41 AM
