The Pensieve

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...