Do you copy all/some of your music to your computer?

from now i'm gonna rip everything to 64kbs MONO but at 44Khz which gives a suprisingly clear quality and keeps the file size super low - dont need stereo thru my pc really

It reproduces high end stuff like cymbals infinitely better than mp3, although mp3 encoders have gotten light years better in the past 4 years. A lot of people still use shitty encoders.

I agree about Ogg Vorbis. It's much better than MP3. The sound quality is much richer (it could pass for a CD), and also the files are much smaller (I once accidently ripped a single CD in both MP3 and Ogg formats, at comparable bitrates: the MP3 CD was 110 mb, and the Ogg was 54mb, and sounded better).

I have to check out this ogg format though as the sound quality is rather awful, especially over my shitty 10 € speakers.

At the moment, I can't do that because my cat bit through the cord which connects the external CD-writer to the computer. So I've got two CDs' worth of mp3s which have piled up, and am patiently waiting to replace said cord :)

The only downside right now is that I can't find any portable CD/MP3 players that have Ogg support-- which sucks since you could probably fit 1.5-2 times as many Ogg files on a CD compared to MP3s. But, I expect that someone will soon make one that has Ogg support.

I'm no expert on the issue, so I can't tell you how the compression is different, but you know how in MP3s, it can sometimes sound kind of tinny and flat? With Oggs it just sounds richer and fuller-- like you've got a nicer set of speakers. Also, it seems that Oggs don't cut out nearly as much from the extreme upper and lower frequencies as MP3. These are only my personal observations, so I can't promise that they are technically accurate statements-- but I'm sure other Ogg users will back me up here. :)

cool but i cant believe people are gettin this anal about digital file formats already!

I don't consider myself too anal about this. I mostly use Ogg to save disk space-- the fact that it's open source, unlike MP3, is an added bonus. But yeah, there are really some scary obsessives out there. I talked to a guy on Soulseek once who refused to listen to any MP3s that weren't at least 192kbps because, he claimed, they sound like shit. I know several other people who feel the same way to a lesser degree. I dunno, it doesn't make that big of a difference to me. For me, the whole point is so you can enjoy the songs, and I sure as hell don't need 192kbps to do that. I have no need to take it that far.

Other than downloading some home producers music and a getting a few raritys off of Napster back in the day, I haven't even listened to mp3s. I'll occasionally download something from a label to check something out that I am not interesting in purchasing, like Interpol.

Other than that, I have enough lps & cds that going after mp3s gnerally seems like a waste of time to me, especially on a dial up.

earlnash: is that relevent?

As for ripping cd's to my hard-drive, I never ever do it. I bought the thing, and I like the whole ritual of getting my ass out of my chair, putting the disc on and looking at the object, liner notes etc. Ripping it means reducing the psychological value.

Also, all of this compression business will be over in a few years as storage and bandwidth increase and everyone shares .wav files. Then I'll have to reconsider the whole value of a real CD.