The Pensieve

When I had attended a course for GW BASIC. I already had a computer at home, and it was called the ZX Spectrum with, wait for it, 48k memory. Before formally learning the BASIC, I had restricted myself to a few prints and beeps and meticulously typing out program listings off computer books which eventually resulted in a star walled winding road with a car in the middle. The beeps always allowed you to specify the frequency and duration to compose a simple tune of your own. The I/O was innovative with the ability to use standard audio cassette tapes to record your programs and load it back. Hmmm. The good old sequential storage medium. And mostly, I was using it for playing games. There was one called DLAN, a space simulator which I had spent countless hours trying to save the Earth and solar system from menacing alien fighters which featured a 3D environment along with a full solar system map, portholes and docking to a planet to refuel and carry out simple maintenance activities. La...

Happened to buy a set that promised over 100 songs in a single CD. Should have looked at the small print or made some mental calculations on what bit-rate the songs might have been compiled. But, those were the moments where you have the 'urge' to buy (like shopping for food when you are hungry!). After buying, I realized all songs to be compiled at the rate of 128kb which usually sounds bad using the laptop speakers! The collection that I maintain through legal CDs purchased over the last ten years were meticulously encoded at 192kbps and when VBR (variable bit rate) came into play, the ranges that I supplied were 32 to 320 kbps which sounded quite good. But with diskspace available for a few rupees / MB, no, infact much less than a rupee, I have moved to using FLAC. Most encoding techniques are lossy, which means that you loose some information from the original music which cannot be recovered at any cost. FLAC is a loseless compression technique where, if you were to decode...