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Re: [tlug] [C&C] AAC is lossy, FLAC is lossless



On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, Josh Glover wrote:

On 24/07/07, Brett Robson <tlug@example.com> wrote:

People often say they can't hear the difference but that's wrong. Even
if they are not consciously aware of it the music sounds different, it
has lost air, shine, sparkle and pump. That sounds like weasel words but
these have real meaning to audio engineers.

No, I know exactly what you mean. Good code also has these properties, and sometimes it is very difficult to qualify *how* it is missing in bad code, just that it is. :)

Having been both a recording engineer and a computer programmer, I'm going to respectfully disagree with this. Even outside the crazy audiophile thing, the audio world is filled with an amazing amount of woo-woo. And while there are a number of people who really do know and understand the technical details about audio in its various forms, most of the people in the industry have ears influenced more by predjudice than by reality. (By the way, don't take this to mean that you ought not hire them if you want to produce an album that sounds really, really fantastic. They can do that.)

Good code is much easier to measure. There are no metrics for it that
are more than marginally useful, of course, but if you plop it in front
of a group of decent programmers who have some sort of understanding
of the problem and know the idioms of the language, their level of
mystification or understanding will quickly tell you how good it is.

On 24/07/07, Godwin Stewart <gstewart@example.com> wrote:

However, how do you know that your HD won't fail between now and
next time you need to re-encode your audio stuff? Will .wav still be
supported then? Will your HD's interface for that matter?

1. Failure: I back up.

Right. In fact, I expect that both the HDs on which I have my CDs will fail before I have to re-encode. Which makes worrying about the interface unnecessary; the data just moves from drive to drive over the course of time as the interfaces change.

I want to pay Amazon[1] a pittance to store my data for me, but I
don't want them peering inside.[2]

What, you think you have CDs that they don't already have? :-)

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com


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