While computing is one of my main focuses, Music plays an essential role in my life.
I've got a pile of music that I listen to all the time, and I've almost always got
a song in my head. Sometimes I feel sorry for my poor girlfriend, who comes from a
very non-musical background. Barely a day goes by that I don't ask her: "What would you
like to listen to?"
Any way, eventually I'll add more to this section. For now, I'll list my favorite
established bands, and some links to where you can find more info on them.
While I've got you, I'd like to bring to your attention the best format for
listening to music on your computers. I know, you're thinking MP3, right? Wrong.
I'm talking about Ogg Vorbis.
What are the advantages of this format? The
files are slightly smaller than MP3's, the sound quality at lower bitrates is better
(so a 160kbps .ogg file is roughly equivalent to a 192kbps .mp3 file.) and most
importantly, it's free.
MP3's are covered by some rather nasty patents, and the
Thompson Group, who hold these patents, are now starting to tighten their grips.
The most obvious alternative is probably .WMA, but this is owned by Miscrosoft and
isn't an open standard of any kind. Ogg Vorbis files, on the other hand, are better
quailty and all of ths source is available under the LGPL, meaning that it will stay
free.
.ogg files are already natively supported by Sonique, and Nullsoft has released
an official plugin to bring support for ogg files for WinAmp. You can get the
WinAmp plugin
here.
For creating .ogg files, on Windows you can use CDEx with the lame or oggenc
encoder. On Linux, try Grip with the same encoders.
While I haven't been converting my existing MP3's to .ogg format, all of my new
ones are going in that way. It really is the best format I've found.