Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Discovering the Lost MP3s

Way back in the dark ages of 2000-2001 I dipped my toes into the developing world of downloaded MP3 music. With a particularly sluggish dialup connection at home, a fast work connection that blocked filesharing sites, and too much holier-than-thouness to ‘steal from the artist’, I looked into eMusic.com. What a friggin’ deal! Unlimited downloads, cheap ($12.95/month, now limited to 50 songs/month) subscription, and access to a wealth of mostly indie music. I started downloading with fervor, setting my work computer up in the morning to download piles of stuff on their T-1 connection, burn it to cd at lunch, then start again for the afternoon. Over the course of eight or nine months I pretty much downloaded all I wanted from their library. Then I didn’t listen to it.
Around that same time I was getting into vinyl and picking up the pace of my music collection in general. I was also starting to pay attention to sound quality, not from the audiophile point of view but rather just searching for good sounding playback of the music in my life. Often I would burn a 128kbs MP3 to disc for the drive to work, and I just couldn’t listen to it for more than five minutes, that shrill low bitrate MP3 sound literally gave me a headache especially with jazz or other music with a lot of cymbals and other natural high sounds. I played around with some ‘sound optimizer’ software to make things more tolerable, but basically I shelved all of that music, some 20+ gigabytes and 400 or so albums. I hadn’t even listened to many of them at the time, and downloaded based on the description.
Fast forward to 2006. I picked up an outboard AD/DA unit for our laptop so that I could make recordings of my vinyl (Edirol UA-EX1, works great). So while I had the ‘puter hooked up to the hifi, I figured I’d dump all of those MP3’s onto an external drive along with some select cd’s (in FLAC format, mind you). Suddenly those lost tracks were at my fingertips and playable on a better setup than my then truck cd player. They are still low-quality MP3’s, but they are good enough to sift through, play for background music, and look for higher quality copies of those that I really like. In future postings I’ll mention a few of these ‘lost tracks'....

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home