Help me make the ultimate iPod playlist!

[wildfyr]

I think I would agree, but perhaps it needs further clarification.

A library is good.

Collecting is bad.

Buying sprees should be reserved for education (what's this NWOBHM stuff, I must investigate!) and exploration (what are the different varieties of fusion?). People who know what they want and the grounding of that should be moving more slowly to absorb what they expose themselves to.



Now the question of how one's library is stored... the whole digital thing I suppose is just as good a way as any to store it for other people. I hate it. It's another brick in the road to getting rid of anything physical and putting everything in this vacuous pretend-it's-real digital realm. People don't clutter their house with CDs, they have tidy mp3s. Some people aren't buying books anymore, they have palm readers. People don't write letters, they email. Shit, they talk to each other less and less and just type to each other on their phones.

I feel (with absolutely no evidence to back it up... I feel... ) that this evaporation of actual-stuff is in turn eroding the quality of the content that's in the stuff. Low attention span, my-life-is-a-hurry-so-I-need-all-this-convenience bullshit inside and out.

This is why I have some interviews on tape that I did in October/November that likely will never get transcribed... they were intended for the web. Fuck the web. My work isn't real unless it's in print. It's why my reviews for the site are veeerryyy few and far between. It's one reason I was trying to get Burns to physically publish Impure Metal and False Metal (and he still should, that lulu.com stuff is really great).

I think I am one annoying event away from disconnecting my computer from the internet. I can go to the library once a week to process orders and shit I need to do. I keep telling myself I should kill my email address and just write real letters to people from now on. Except I can't - my handwriting is complete shit because I started on keyboards full-time at the age of eight.

Am I off on a tangent or is this all relevant?

That's quite a rant, Jim. May I have your permission to use this quote elsewhere?

I think I am one annoying event away from disconnecting my computer from the internet.

 

[JayKeeley]

For the record, I own thousands of CDs and buy an average of 4 new CDs per week.

Yeah, there seems to be general confusion in people assuming that if you migrate a digital file from one format to another, then it somehow extinguishes the original source.

Meaning, I have MP3s ripped from my physical media. One never ever negates the other. It's just a secondary format.

I also think mp3s sound like absolute crap.

Tell me more. I rip to a minimum of 192K and I hear zero difference on my headphones between that and the CD. Sometimes I rip to 320K but it seems to suck up battery juice quicker. Even then, I hear zero difference between 192 and 320 so I don't even bother with that anymore.

What do you do? Do you hear better than 192K?

 

[skeptik]

I rip at 128K and I don't notice shit. Maybe that says something about my hearing though.

 

[Farseer of the Benighted Land]

Tell me more. I rip to a minimum of 192K and I hear zero difference on my headphones between that and the CD. Sometimes I rip to 320K but it seems to suck up battery juice quicker. Even then, I hear zero difference between 192 and 320 so I don't even bother with that anymore.

What do you do? Do you hear better than 192K?

I rip to 192 only because it's the barest minimum of acceptability when you factor in all the noise the actual subway (Q train) and bus (B31) make. The iPod ear bud thingies are totally coloured sounding! Definitely NOT a reference product. And the D to A inside the iPod itself if crappy; after all, it's built to a price point, not for maximum sound quality. That's not what the iPod is about.

However, I'm comfortable with that truth if it means I can have hundreds of songs to drown out the constant Nextel conversations. (Thanks, Nextel ... now I can hear both sides of the idiotic conversation!!)

 

[Farseer of the Benighted Land]

Oh, closer to topic ... yes, I can hear the difference! After all, you're throwing away MOST of the bandwidth from the original waveform!!

 

[Jim LotFP]

Sound quality is really a non-issue in the long term, because it's only going to get better as technology improves and storage capacity gets bigger.

 

[DBB]

But the cigarettes to these songs must be rather long.

You are correct in a way, but not in this case.

If I was smoking a mass factory produced cigarette, yes. But I buy tubes and tobacco separate and use a machine to roll them up. These burn much slower and last longer than a Winston, Marlboro or Camel, so I can fit in those long songs if I'm not freezing my ass off and puffing like a steam engine roling along at a rapid clip.

 

[Occam's Razor]

I'm not a smoker, but a drummer friend of mine does the same. It's always a ritual for him to first make a couple of cigarettes, then pull his socks over the his pants to not get tangled in his pedals, and finally sit behind his kit smoking...have I mentioned that he's asthmatic?

 

[JayKeeley]

Oh, closer to topic ... yes, I can hear the difference! After all, you're throwing away MOST of the bandwidth from the original waveform!!

Fuck me, you hear the difference at 192K? I think that's the first I've heard anyone say that. Do you hear dog whistles too?

 

[Occam's Razor]

you can really train your ears the same way you can spoil them with extenisve listening to bad sounding music. It's no hocus pocus that some vinyl sounds better than cds, but people that have never listened to their music outside their computer room have never experienced that and do not know better. There is, however, really an audible difference between 128 and 196k. You hear it in the drums and cymbals, in particular.

 

[Farseer of the Benighted Land]

^Yep; high freqs turn to mush under 128k.

 

[JayKeeley]

Yeah, I absolutely can hear how bad things are at 128K, but I was asking if anyone could tell the difference between 192K and CD on headphones?

To be honest, if I could own all my favorite albums on vinyl, I would. Keep things in their natural state. Digital is all about convenience, even the CD is more convenient than vinyl, but the reality is, vinyl is superior over everything.

I listened to Warning's "Watching from a Distance" this evening. I listened to it about 3 times in a row, and it's possibly the best 'first impression' I've had of an album, well, since The August Engine. Anyway, this Warning release is absolutely mandatory for vinyl I have no doubt.

 

[BenMech]

I listened to atching From a Distance, and all I could get out of it was MEH.

 

[JayKeeley]

oh if I were you, I would drop everything and revisit that album like there's no tomorrow

There's obviously something pretty spooky going on in the Walker household when it comes to making the most perfect doom albums ever. "New Dark Age" and "Watching from a Distance" both born from the same gene pool??