Friday, September 07, 2007

MyTunes, MP3s, and fertilizer

(They really are related. I promise!)

Found something cool on Wired while reading my "news blogs". Someone figured out how to compress MP3 files even smaller. The product is called ShrinkMyTunes and compresses the file through a patented algorithm. Although I can hold quite a bit of music on my nano, I need to pick and choose from my iTunes collection (actually most is from my music lover husband's collection).

I was telling my husband and read part of the article to him. I came to the sentence, "To the trained ear, the converted MP3s sound like they have a medium amount of variable-bitrate (VBR) compression applied."

Well, I learned to read using phonics, so when I got to the word "bitrate" I pronounced it bi-trate with a long /i/. My funny husband (while looking over my shoulder) said, "bit-rate. It's not a fertilizer."

Ha! See the subjects really do tie together. :)

2 comments:

Nina said...

Ha-ha-ha!! That's funny.

But, does that mean that your music would sound different enough to be distracting? My dh has been pointing out recently that music played on the mp3 players and computers is already of lesser quality. I wonder, if that is the case, what the kids of today who are heavily reliant on the gadgets to hear their music, will think when they finally hear some of it on a good "stereo" system.

Small Glimpses said...

Good question. I think there is a little bit of degradation in the sound quality which I suspect for the trained ear would be noticeable and irritating.

I remember when we got a subwoofer (I just had to look up the spelling) for our main stereo in the house. Wow! What a huge difference it made. All of the sudden songs just came to life in a whole new way.