2023-05-13

I have been toying with ripping audio CDs again. I thought I had
given away most of my audio CDs a few years ago but I discovered
a binder of them a few weeks ago.

I won't bore anyone with the contents of those CDs. Suffice to say,
if you are a millenial from the US, you would know the bands.

One thing I have been investigating is changing up the audio codec.
The easy way would be to encode into MP3 which I've been doing for
more than 2 decades.

However, when I think of the use case for my music nowadays, it's
mostly being consumed on my PCs. Since my main PC is a linux laptop,
I've been looking into more of the opensource codecs.

I'm old enough to remember the first iterations of libre audio
(vorbis mostly) codecs but at the time MP3s were just the most
widely supported audio format for all devices so there wasn't much
benefit to not encoding to MP3.

however, no one really carries around devices full of songs and
hand curating songs to put on your devices is just as retro. So
the importance of music portability doesn't feel as important.
Afterall, you are probably using spotify or apple music or google
music or whatever on your smartphone nowadays.

In any case, I've been encoding to the opus format lately and I'm
quite liking it. The file sizes are indeed smaller for the same
quality as what I used to encode MP3s at. I don't recall that really
being the case for vorbis although that could just be the crappy
software encoders from the mid 2000s.

whelp that's it from me. away!