Back around Christmastime, when everyone around me seemed to be receiving iPods and gift certificates to the iTunes store, I thought I should give my loved ones
The MP3 Talk. Now, John Atkinson, has prepared another version of
The MP3 Talk—live and in color with all sorts of cool graphs and stuff!
JA sweated over this one. He'd walk up and down the long hall from his office to mine, come in and show me some graphs, point out a few things, laugh, scratch, curse a little bit, walk back to his office, work some more. It went on this way for a couple of days. "Look at this!" he'd say. "MP3s are
stupid," I'd say.
It would be dark out. Others would already be home, preparing dinner, having a beer, whatever. JA stayed in the office, measuring his words, examining his graphs, being careful, revising and revising and revising, searching for clarity and purpose.
"Do you think you'll be able to explain those graphs in such a way that they'll make sense to someone who's never seen your graphs before?" I ventured.
"I hope so," he said.
JA slapped his forehead, grumbled and sighed, went back to his dark office. It was really troubling him. But it was also exciting him, I could tell.
"It's going to be great," I told him.
"I hope so."
If you've ever wondered why we don't pay much attention to MP3 and other compressed file formats, John's article will explain. If you want to know more about the differences between lossy MP3s and losslessly-compressed formats like FLAC, ALC, and WMA lossless, John's article should help. Read it as carefully as it was written, and it should all make great sense.
