The Pensieve

The new Honday City comes with an audio player that takes your portable player, collections of memory or USB sticks. Though a good option that gives flexibility allowing you to carry your music and listen to all of them, the minus point is, they now lack a CD player. I see this as a disadvantage. Guess where I will play a newly purchased CD? In my car, on my way back home! The same goes for CDs purchased during a long trip. I might not have my laptop handy to rip and transfer songs on the go. The music download scenario currently in India is not good either. Amazon and iTunes do not offer song downloads here. So, purchasing online music which is likely to happen during your home or office are not it atleast in India. With these audio system, I will have to hold on until I reach home, rip the songs, copy them to my USB stick and only then, I will be able to listen to them in my car. Though most cars offer to add a CD as an option, for the cost, I feel this should be standard.

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...

iPods? Nahhhhh Ever since the pod hit the market, it had created a big industry of other wannabe players. Agreed that Apple's iPod is not the first of its kind, but the quality and simplicity the product made the world sit up and notice. As with most of us, I had also been tempted to get a pod of my own, but somehow been unable to justify the need for a music device, at least while at India. Unless you are jogging during the mornings or commute using a public transport, I do not see a big reason to use an iPod. If you have your own 4 wheel transport (My opinion is, it is unsafe to listen to music on a two wheeler), chances are, they have a port to read in from your music device. But, do you need an expensive music player for that? With the advent of mass storage devices, high capacity flash pen drives, all you need is a medium for storage, not a music player. I just saw at a computer shop at Spencers, creative mass storage harddisks with the capacity of 120+GB (great for lossless F...