Give Me All the Bits, Dammit!
This will seem obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than a minute or two, but:
JPGs [and GIFs, and PNGs, and the like] are great for transport, as are MP3s [and M4A/AAC, WMA, etc.]: both trade fidelity for filesize. Good is the enemy of great, though. I’m sometimes asked why I don’t buy many digital downloads of music, or why I hoard hard disks like they’re gonna stop making them. The answer is pretty simple: I want all the bits. I believe in a future where our compressed copies are gonna be like the 8-track—we’ll remember them fondly for their portability, but we won’t have anything to play on them.
I am, also, the same person whose first act on opening a physical CD is to make a copy of it; after ripping, that CD goes back into its case and is rarely seen again.
Don’t make me cut you.
Update: Hunter smacked me later, noting that PNG is indeed lossless. I will now light myself on fire.
So is GIF. PNG was created to replace GIF when the whole patent thing was going on with the lossless compression algorithm in GIF.
January 17th, 2009 at 10:40“I am, also, the same person whose first act on opening a physical CD is to make a copy of it; after ripping, that CD goes back into its case and is rarely seen again.”
Same here, man.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:37:hangs head: I am learning. Heh.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:39[...] Editing”. And for what I used it for, it’s quite, quite true. Now, as a note, I’m okay with the lossiness here because 1) this is a transport medium and 2) I’ve already pre-ordered the CD. I am also that [...]
January 17th, 2009 at 19:39Yeah, but I do mostly the same thing with CDs that you do. I open them, rip them, place them in a flip folder, and throw the jewel case away (mainly because I do not want hundreds of these things around taking up space that is better taken up with books).
January 17th, 2009 at 20:23Oh, but CDs have artistic value!
I’ll be writing about the 2009-era Great CD Preservation Project soon.
January 17th, 2009 at 21:12