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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Just for interest’s sake, my means of burning from FLAC to CD is to load up all my music in foobar2000 and slecting all the tracks I want, then right clicking and converting to WAV via a preset that sends them to a directory on the burning device and renaming them so that I can see exactly what’s what artist-wise by looking at the filenames. Given this is done by my laptop over wi-fi, the fact that it’s sending a compressed stream to foobar from my NAS actually makes it faster than if I’d stored it as WAV on the NAS, as the local decompression is marginally faster than a straight uncompressed file transfer. My laptop is pretty old and doesn’t have an ac card. 
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That’s the way to do it.
I used FB2k on Windows, and it’ll be my main audio player if I ever go back. Also, my main “basic” transcoder (dBPowerAMP is for more complicated transcodes, and I tend to use MKVToolNIX’s standard GUI as well as MediaCoder for muxing stuff.)
Foobar2000 is the ONLY audio player I’ve found that has a decent spectrogram built in. It’s magic. I love being able to actually see the sound over time.
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I’m very fastidious. All my rips are from CDs I’ve bought (they’re pretty cheap compared to anything else now) via Exact Audio Copy. I use foobar200 with columns UI and all my artwork is natively 600px x 600px, which is lovely on a big screen. I can’t believe how tiny the RAM footprint of foobar2000 is.
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Foobar2000 is also the fastest ReplayGain scanner I’ve ever seen. A real skookum choocher.
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Yeah, it’s amazingly fast. Heats the CPU something terrifying, mind.
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Only in short bursts though…
“The longer I spend driving through this school zone, the more likely it is I hit a kid. Ergo, I should drive through it at 120mph to minimize that risk.”
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I had to throttle my CPU and confine transocding duties to 2 cores to stop it overheating on long jobs. I need a desktop at home again.
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If you’re in the US, you can cobble something together using PCPartpicker.com that’s decently fast for like, $500. If you’re doing mainly audio and not video, your most expensive part of the base package is going to be your CPU.
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Oh, I mean to build a gaming PC eventually. I keep putting it off because the tech changes so rapidly, but I reckon when 4K stereoscopy is achievable by a budget rig it’ll be time to get around to it.
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Heh, I bought a rig off the shelf years ago for like, $1200, water cooled, case lighting, the works. And like, a year later, I helped my brother build his own rig that had 4x the ram, and a proc 3x as fast and a video card 2 generations newer for like, $800. I was kind of jealous. But I bought my rig in a pinch and just needed a machine at the time. So I dipped into savings and grabbed while I could.
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Earlier ones, mainly. CDs from the late '80s onwards are generally pretty stable.
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That’s why you transcode them to .WAV first, to get back the data that was lost when you encoded them to .MP3.
Like photocopying a black and white photo on a colour printer to get the colour back.
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The prescription stuff, for sure, but the non-prescription stuff that’s best is almost always off-patent/generic. I mean, look at how useful aspirin and tylenol is, to the point that they are still one of the most commonly “prescribed” real drugs.
For antihistamines, the patents for Flonase/fluticasone expired a while back and now it’s OTC – and it changed my life. I went from being rather allergic to furry animals, and having rather atrocious seasonal allergies, to never having a runny nose ever. It was an amazing quality of life change for me.
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“Yeah, it is totally old and obsolete now that we don’t own the technology any more.”
