Thursday, May 8, 2003

The couple of people who sometimes read this may have noticed a big gap in April. Stuff happened then, including some incredible backcountry skiing in Utah, but work and a possible Utah-acquired bug kept me from posting. Read some good books, including Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism and Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches, and listened to some good music, including Brad Shepik's Drip. More on which later. 5:42:30 PM

Apple downloads ring sour note: "All hail Apple’s iTunes Music Store. It’s very well thought out, and beautifully executed. If only as much thought had gone into the sound quality, which is far from beautiful." I don't pretend to have a golden ear, I've found AAC @ 160kb a significant improvement over 192kb MP3 and pretty close to the original, at least on the few CDs I compared. Several differences from the experiment described in the article: I use 160kb rather than the store's 128kb; I listen directly to AAC on an iPod with Etymotic ER-6 earphones, while the writer or the article relied on transcoding to DVD. Someone who knows how to do these things should run a serious blind test. 10:30:49 AM