St. Paddy’s Day

Ugh, it’s St. Patrick’s Day for Hoboken. Yeah, we hold it a but early. I tend to avoid going out into town on this day (other than for the parade) because it’s just plain awful. Seriously, it’s all just an excuse for everybody to get disgustingly drunk and stumble around in public like a bunch of frat boys. I think I went around once a couple years ago and that was more than enough for me. My neighbors are having a party (complete with keg), but I’ve got a bit of a headache and really don’t feel like participating. Instead I’m just sitting around with Teddy and Jessie, listening to some music, and debating whether to continue ripping my CD collection to 192kbps mp3s or switch to 128kbps AAC. I’ll probably head downstairs in a little bit to either watch a movie or win the Super Bowl.

2 thoughts on “St. Paddy’s Day”

  1. What are the pros and cons of MP3 vs. AAC? I’ve gotten back to converting some of my albums to MP3 but I use an outdated encoder, so if I’m going to switch to something new, I may as well pick the best one out there…

  2. I’ll try to keep this simple as it can become a very complicated subject (especially if you swing by the forums at Hydrogenaudio). The main advantage of mp3s is how common they are. More hardware supports them and more programs are written for them. They’re all over the place, and acceptable quality can be reached at 192kbps CBR or even better with the –alt-preset-standard setting.

    AAC, however, can achieve comparable quality at 128kbps, which means much smaller file sizes (I ripped that SSX Soundtrack to both formats – 75MB for 192kbps mp3s vs. 50MB for 128kbps in AAC). It also has, IMHO, a better tagging format than ID3v1 or ID3v2. The big disadvantage is only a few players support it at this time and there aren’t as many utilities out there for retagging and renaming.

    I have an idea I will probably end up switching to the –alt-preset-standard setting while sticking with mp3s simply because I can’t find replacements for ID3-TagIT or MP3Gain. But for now that means I’ll have to go back to ripping with CDex since Winamp currently does not support the a.p.s. setting.

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