Much Ado About Everything

If you are serious about music, you are probably storing it in a lossless format. Most popular choices are FLAC, Apple lossless (M4A) and Windows Media Lossless (WMA); there is also Monkey’s Audio which isn’t as popular. All of these choices have advantages and drawbacks. Both WMA and M4A are proprietary and the only tool [...]

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If you want to encode video on Linux, you’re in for a world of pain. Let’s compare encoding a video file to crossing a river. Expect to have to generally learn how to build a bridge to cross to the other side – and then build it. As opposed to – at the very worst [...]

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On July 22, 2007 Intel executed massive price cuts on their entire processor line. I decided that enough is enough and finally bought myself one of those new processors. The best value for connoisseur right now is quad core chip – the Q6600. I even managed to get the new-as-of-July-16th G0 revision, but that’s a story for another day. The story for this post is about what can be done with such a power. Of course, I buy new hardware just because but there is one reason which does make sense – and that is video encoding.

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If you often have a need to extract audio from CDs into any sort of digital audio file on your computer, and you know a thing or two about audio and computers, you’ve probably heard of Exact Audio Copy (EAC for short). At least if you use Windows. If you use EAC for this task, you are probably interested in which optical drive will provide you with best quality and highest extraction speed.

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Today I was randomly reading Head-Fi, which I do extremely rarely (a few times a year at most) and I ran into some interesting new information. Well, it probably isn’t as much new to others as it’s to me, but this is my webblog after all, so news it is. Anyhow, it seems that a lot of people use or are advocating the use of RockBox firmware for iPods. What I find interesting is not that, but one of the alleged reasons for using RockBox – namely, hiss that can be heard when using iPod original firmware. The other reason – allegedly better sound quality – is another puzzle that is worth exploring.

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