3rd August 2005, 2:59 PM
Well I wasn't really talking about any of that. I just had never seen those sound formats before. What purpose they have in sub cultures is fairly irrelevent to me.
The thing is, it's just annoying to deal with so many formats like that. If the issue is compression, there are plenty of lossless compression formats out there. They take up a lot more space than an MP3, but they are there are it's better than wave. A format can easily be lossless. Think zip files. Write as complicated a text file as you please, zip it, which compresses it, and then unzip it. Since it uses a standard compression of just replacing common repeting bits with a number telling how often the bit repeats (instead of "dog dog dog cat cat dog dog dog dog dog", just state "Dx3 Cx2 Dx5" and you have conveyed the same info using less data, though the solution does need to be on there, some sort of zip program :D), there is zero data loss. This can be checked with simple bit comparison. Anyway, they can do that with sound and video just like any other data format because it's all stored the same way. Data is data.
So anyway, yeah I can say I would prefer MP3 or something lossless (and really the loss from MP3s isn't noticable to me) to needing to download an unending stream of players or plugins. It's nice and all, but hey if I'm playing a directly ripped sound captured from my sound card it's even better than if it's emulated, right?
The thing is, it's just annoying to deal with so many formats like that. If the issue is compression, there are plenty of lossless compression formats out there. They take up a lot more space than an MP3, but they are there are it's better than wave. A format can easily be lossless. Think zip files. Write as complicated a text file as you please, zip it, which compresses it, and then unzip it. Since it uses a standard compression of just replacing common repeting bits with a number telling how often the bit repeats (instead of "dog dog dog cat cat dog dog dog dog dog", just state "Dx3 Cx2 Dx5" and you have conveyed the same info using less data, though the solution does need to be on there, some sort of zip program :D), there is zero data loss. This can be checked with simple bit comparison. Anyway, they can do that with sound and video just like any other data format because it's all stored the same way. Data is data.
So anyway, yeah I can say I would prefer MP3 or something lossless (and really the loss from MP3s isn't noticable to me) to needing to download an unending stream of players or plugins. It's nice and all, but hey if I'm playing a directly ripped sound captured from my sound card it's even better than if it's emulated, right?
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)