MP3 put out to pasture

I’m old(ish) and I miss cheap vinyl (One dollar per disk, which meant that Electric Ladyland was 2 bucks), tho I have no records to play now. But I can definitely remember being in college and thinking: “Man, it would be so cool to have your own music to play while walking around”. Then the Walkman came out. They were kinda flaky, but you could learn about magnetic tape drag! Then CD’s! Oh boy, this puppies were gonna last forever and never get scratched [Hahahahahah]. But I do rather like the fact that you can still play some of Edison’s original cylinders and no electricity required! Er with proper equipment as always.

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Hey, don’t forget the hilarious Saturday Night sketch where they mercilessly mocked razor companies with a fake ad for a three blade razor :slight_smile:

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I’m oldish too, and sometimes bought secondhand records just for the cover art or name. There was serendipity to it. I wanted to rip some old albums but they were pretty damaged from decades of negligent storage. Sadly, some of my favorite 80’s stuff was never reissued in digital.

Now when you can have a 128gb SD chip in your phone, nothing in size of collection or fidelity is out of reach. But I listen mostly to podcasts and books. Old.

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Nope, not surprised. The Onion really has a tough job. It’s really hard to mock the already stupid.

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Why would you re-rip them? If you’ve got the MP3s just run them through a bulk converter into the format du jour.

Now what? I just got rid of my tape deck. How am I going to listen to my tunes?

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Because MP3s are a lossy format. Granted for 90% of your listening it is enough but you lose quality by doing that and you lose more by converting it to something else after that. If you wanna go to say FLAC or some other lossless format the way to do that is go rip the source audio again.

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What the hell was that image over the small bit of text?

I see a market for an MP3 player with vacuum tubes

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Heh - I wear hearing aids. I doubt I can tell the diff :slight_smile: That said, I wonder what CD rot does to music CDs over time?

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Ahh, remember all the fervor 'round about fifteen years ago with the BURN ALL GIFS because if you used GIF, then Compuserve was going to own your soul, and so on? How quaint.
https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20010402095217/http://burnallgifs.org:80/

Fifteen years from now I bet all this fuss about DRM in Web standards will seem just as cute.

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Yeah, the popularity low point for the format was when better formats came out but you still had to pay to license it. I can see it flowering, now, at least relative to that. DIY mp3 players got easier to put together.

“Buy our new, possibly worse product rather than that cheap generic stuff!”

Man, you never see those anymore!

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FLAC does make a difference. You can hear it in the pixels.

:wink:

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Is this a problem with commercially produced CDs? I thought this was more of a CDR issue.

That said I’ve had pretty amazing results with EAC and it’s error correction. I’ve used it on CDs with massive scratches and in some cases literal holes in the substrate have come through the other side with largely perfect rips.

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Yes.

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I go to a lot of art sites, and honestly, I wish GIF died out or got extended years ago. As it stands, if you want anything animated on the web, and want to absolutely ensure that everyone will be able to see it, then you use GIF. Which is crazy. That’s a bit like using .WAV for all audio files on the web.

.GIFV works, but is a real hack and requires whoever’s hosting it to supply the Javascript necessary to actually decode it. Otherwise it just falls back to GIF again.

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Eh, I rip to FLAC because I spent a lot on decent playback equipment and original CDs and I just don’t see the point in losing any quality at all for the sake of disk space, which at 350MB per album in FLAC vs 120MB in decent MP3 is really no big deal, given hard disks are in the terabytes now. I have a separate folder with all my rips converted to MP3 for portable devices with small storage capacities. There’s not a huge difference between MP3 and FLAC, just some loss of deep bass and a slight harshness/artificiality to cymbals.

The other good thing about FLAC is that it’s really fast if you want to transcode and there’s no generation loss if you need to format shift. I still burn mix CDs for DJ gigs and the speed of FLAC-CD burning is unbeatable.

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As a guy who’s been playing with codecs for 15 years now, I gotta say it is beatable. But the catch is that it’s only beaten by PCM files. Which are completely uncompressed.

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Ha! Yes, although technically that’s not really “transcoding” as it’s uncompressed LPCM - uncompressed LPCM.

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