3 posts tagged “mp3”

Hallalujah! As some of you probably know, my main source of music these days is iTunes. I've downloaded hundreds of tracks from the service and I'm pretty happy with the deal I'm getting. However, I'm all for competion and was excited when Amazon announced that they where going to opening a DRM-free store. However, as with most things it was only availible in the US, starting in September. I applaud Amazon for jumping on the DRM-free bandwagon. But the fact that it's probably going to take 6 months to a year to get the store here in Canada. We've had iTunes in Canada over 4 years now. And we just got TV shows back in November. Bands, that I would be happy buying are not on the iTunes store in Canada probably due to "licencing issues". I can only hope that Amazon is much better at this. I really hope it's not a half-assed attempt at robbing me of my .99 cents. Please Amazon, please, bring it here soon.

    Answer me this: Why does Radio suck?. I listen to one program on the CBC before I go to bed each night. Been listening to it since the fall- and now they decide to move the program to Sirius Satellite Radio. There basic subscription service is $12.95. And that's in the USA. I don't even want to know what it is here in Canad

a. And would I dish out that amount of Cash- a month for a single radio station? Heck no. But this raises an important question. Why does gold old terrestrial radio suck? In the past few years, I have listened less and less to the radio then I normally do. And that's saying something. Normally, I would only listen to radio when I was in the kitchen or the car or something. We lack a good CD player in the Car or the kitchen so radio is the only form of entertainment. I enjoy listening to some of the talk shows and the news- but I really don't like the music stations. All they play is rap crap (and I do emphasize that word CRAP.) There's no good music on the raido these days. That combined with the fact that people are getting more and into personal meda. Podcasts provide this. Instead of waiting and waiting and waiting on the radio for that one song or lugging around CD' and a bulky Discman, you have your iPod or your Mp3 player that holds only the songs that you want it to hold. Nothing more, nothing less. And that's the death of radio. Radio is dead, except for the talk shows and the news. And even those are sketchy. What will happen in 10 years? Will we have Wifi all over the place that will update us on the lastest news and let us stream stuff while we wanter about town? That's looking to be an increased possibility. With the possibility of Gigabit or even 100 Gigabit eithernet and High-Speed wireless netowrks, Radio's death looks to be only a matter of time.

    So Dad just got home with my old set of Jensen JHH-110's. He told me the other day after I bought that set of Senn's o

n eBay that he was taking them to a guy at his work to fix them. Personally I didn't think the guy could do it. But he did. They work. But the Senn's are still on the way from San Fran and should arrive in a few days. These Jensen's will be used for a set of backups. I've been looking to get a better set of headphones for a while now as these Jensen's are not really the greatest. I mean there fine for the listening that I do but in the next little while I hope to get a second SATA drive for my computer here and drop all my music on to it. Why get another HD just for Content? One word: Lossless. See when you rip music from a CD, you are actually taking away part the file away to make the file the size of an MP3, which degrades the quality of the audio. This is called Lossy audio Most people don't notice it (for that matter most people could care less) but for those who do its' a major pain the but (think nails on a chalkboard.) (read: Audiophiles)  If you want the files to sound better, you convert the files to something called Lossless. What this file type does is doesn't remove any data from the file to make it smaller. It sounds a lot better. However there one big down sides. What makes mp3 the most used audio format used in the world? Size. Mp3 files are tiny. When you have a lossless file the file is HUGE. Compared the 3-5 MB for a regular mp3 file a Losless file is huge. It can get into the 60-80 MB range if your not careful. That's a problem when you have a large music collection. That's why all the drive space. That and uncompressed video files. But that's another post. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to getting my new Senn's in the next few weeks.