635.0 – audioblog entry

And now, for the Fuck Yourself To Hell audioblog.

I waited until after I was pretty sure the whole idea of an ‘audioblog’ had come and gone, passed almost entirely out of the consciousness of the blogging community, and THEN I decided to start thinking about doing it.

But none of that RealCrap or WindowsMediaCrapper. Not even the “open source” Ogg Vorbis, which is only playable on a fraction of players. No, I’ve decided to go with the format I know can be played on any platform and nearly any player, the format that has no way of being “digital rights managed”, which certain organizations (RIAA) blame for lagging CD sales (despite vastly fewer CDs being made available one year after another), the MP3! Most modern browsers will play the common MP3 without even bothering to launch an external player, and the rest of you can right-click the link and save the MP3 and … open it in your player of choice.

Tomorrow, when/if iTunes for Windows becomes available, and AAC audio becomes easy-to-use cross-platform, I’ll probably switch over to AAC. So there.

Oh, and for those of you at work and/or without sound capabilities on your computers…. you didn’t want to listen to it, anyway. I mostly just ramble about love and emotion and … Laura… I don’t remember, even though I’ve heard it over four times through now… yeah… don’t remember…

I’ve saved the file at a low-low-low-bitrate, because upon my testing, you can hear me just fine.

The length is 00:11:45, which means it’s eleven minutes and forty-five seconds. The file is only 2.6Mb (encoded@32k), which means that if you were using my ISP it would take you approximately three and a half days to upload or download the file, or if you were using broadband, your computer has probably already downloaded it before you even finished reading this. Because of the low quality it has been encoded at, there is some occassional distortion of my voice. If you are an audio-quality-snob, I’ve also created a version (encoded@128k) that is 11Mb. Again, those of you on broadband will probably find yourselves listening to both versions to try to tell the difference. Wheee! I just spent fourteen weeks uploading it! Anyway, here are the links:

The 2.6Mb file (actually took me 00:15:15 to upload)
The 11Mb file (don’t even ask… over an hour on dial-up)

And yes, there is music playing in the background. I had a heck of a time getting my audio recording software to NOT cancel that out, so it would be audible in the background. It was not as loud as I’d have liked in some places, and too loud in others. It may or may not be present in future recordings.