Random Babbling - 114

Remove all ads!

Oh joy... another snowstorm. We're expecting 15cm of snow for today, which means that, despite snow being normal here, and 15cm isn't that much either, people will become crazy . As if every driver on the roads will become convinced the snow enable them to forgo normal behavior. It also mean an increased use of the metros. Sigh...

Universities here never close because of bad weather. Oh well there isn't much I can do about that.

PS: I need coffee badly.

 

Ian Starshine from OotS makes me think of Herman Toothrot of Monkey Island... Now I wanna play the MI series AGAIN!

 

Oh yes, the turning .... I see, however, with satisfaction, that most of the snow has melted away during the day. I'll have at least a smooth ride back, with traction and controlled turning.

And then, isn't Groundhog Day today? And do they really speak Pennsylvania Dutch?

 

And I need tea badly. To the kettle!

 

Kev has discovered my old laptop works so I get mine back, yay! No more boyfriend wanting to check facebook obsessively on my machine

 

My preliminary attitude towards my psycholinguistic class is thus far:

bleeeeeeeeeeeergh* It is highly speculative, has little to do with linguistic if at all, mutually exclusive models apparently coexist, often requires huge leap of logic, A slight modification of experimental paradigm can often lead to different results. Needless to say I kinda hate this class, I'm mostly dissatisfied with it. Meh ! M-e-h I say !

* A low frequency sound mostly from the back of the throat, not unlike the sound made when vomiting, denoting a general negative attitude towards a given topic.

PS: As a snobbish audiophile I find the expression « high quality mp3 » (generally meaning 320 kb/s) to be utterly false and misleading. I'd call it
« bare minimum », I'm rather found of DVD-audio and FLAC, a lossless codec, far superior to mp3 (lossy) in my mind.

 

Well it can get good audio quality, but it's still at its core a lossy codec, but I must admit with similar size and bit rate, compared with a flac, an ogg file sounds roughly the same. It's also by far supported by more hardware and software, which makes it a bit more ubiquitous than flac. I guess in the end it's an ideological choice, will you chose a lossy or a lossless codec. Ogg vorbis is open source, while flac is freely distributed (i.e. no royalty) but is not open source , again this is a largely ideological choice.

Though one can argue that the frequencies eliminated cannot be heard by most humans or are at the very fringe of human hearing do it doesn't really matter. On the other hand, those who disagree will argue that those frequencies, while being at the fringe of human hearing, are still heard subconsciously or that they add the overall quality of sound.

But you've got to have good speakers to truly appreciate high quality audio file. In the end it doesn't matter if you have a 6000 kb/s flac file if you've got cheap speakers.

Being a snobby audiophile tends to be more expansive as a result.

 

Uhm

How do I start my own thread? I am in great need of asking some DnD related questions.

 

@Alorekent, is that a legitimate question or are you just mussing around? Anyway, you should see a "New Tread" button at the top and bottom of the thread list. You did find the "Post Reply" button... it's the same location, only one level higher.

 

Conan O'Brien is awesome. Hah.

 

@Ofelix -

Why not just stick with PCM via WAV or AIFF? Most music is still generally available on CD. If you want the audio on your computer, rip it from the CD to .wav or .aiff and forget about compression altogether. Storage is cheap nowadays. (I just got a 2 TB WD hard drive for 110 USD.) I personally almost never enter the compression domain - not because I'm super cool ... I just don't see the need.

I'm not an iPod guy so I don't know how that would work out, but for mobile audio I copy .wavs to a USB drive and plug it into a car stereo with a USB connection. You can store quite a lot of uncompressed audio on an 8 or 16 GB USB drive, and even if you have to switch out 2 or 3 drives from time to time, that's nothing compared to carrying around all your CDs. Plus, no spinning discs, seek times, vulnerable moving parts, wear and tear on your originals, etc. AND NO MP3s.

(I actually know of a couple people who have a grand plan to convert all their CDs to .mp3s and then do away with the CDs, believing them to be obsolete. Somehow they don't really understand what it is they're doing.)

/end pitch for lossless audio

 

Computer almost died because of viruses... but this morning they were all gone

 

Usually I get annoyed by the misuse of religious terminology but that one just got to me.

 

Ouch, it certainly is. I suppose this is all a result of the ubiquitousness of mp3s and iPods and the dominance of iTunes and related services in the music industry these days. I hope that bandwidth will catch up sooner rather than later so that downloading large files is not such a big deal, but by that time (probably already) it may be moot. The current teen generation seems to equate MP3 or AAC with 'music,' period. I think many of them don't even know what a WAV file is, or what it is they're not getting with mp3s. We may be doomed.

Then again, professional audio is never going to start life as some lossy codec (recording, mixing, and mastering is generally handled in the 32 bit domain), so at least there will likely be archives of the masters lying around in vaults somehwere. Maybe in 2015 when everyone realizes the error of their ways, and when high bandwidth is cheap and common, lossless audio will re-emerge as the standard.

 

Having cake tonight. German-Choclate Cake to boot! I'm salivating just sitting here thinking about it. Gonna poor me a tall glass of milk to go with it. Then I will loosen my belt and sit on my recliner near my wood-burner and blissfully fall asleep. Heaven!

 

Of course I generally rip CDs in PCM using the wav container, that is the preferred method however, my android phone only has got an 8go SD card, so 700mb / album fills that pretty quick plus I want to hold other stuff in it, eBooks, movies, pdf, stuff. So I end up using FLAC, with andLess an awesome android app that let it play flac.

Well CDs are kinda obsolete as a mean of distribution, more and more people are using online distribution be it the iTune, amazon mp3, etc. Plus there's ton of internet radio. But CDs aren't obsolete in term of audio quality, which is still superior to those silly mp3s. Shame DVD-audio never became ubiquitous with 24bits, 96 kHz in full glorious surround sound or even 192 kHz in stereo.

PCM = cool.

That is quite pathetic indeed ! I long for the day when the world realize the glory and benefit of lossless !

Which reminds this of this cool Xkcd strip

 

My husband is 35. I'm his second wife. He has 2 children and we're trying for number 3. He's the oldest person in his college course (the next oldest is 21) and older than some of his tutors.
Despite all of the above, today he has to go to a class and be taught how to put a condom on.