Alien Girlybrain

Take a listen to this song (5/10 - sorry, I took it down). It’s in AAC format, so if you’re driving a Mac or Windows with Quicktime installed, you should be good to go. That file was encoded using HE-AAC thanks to a sweet little app called XLD. It’s apparently some sort of super AAC. That file is encoded at 64k/s, which is as high as HE-AAC goes. I’m listening to the album right now. I encoded it from a lossless source file just a little while ago, and damn Sam, am I impressed. I really cannot hear much of a difference between this and the original. Granted, I’ve got lousy ears, but I can still pick up encoding artifacts even in very high resolution MP3s. These? Not so much. The entire 43 minute album compressed down to 19 megabytes which isn’t surprising for 64k audio, but to achieve resolution at that filesize...it’s amazing. I’m not giving up on MP3 and lossless audio anytime soon, but when it comes to making files for my iPod...I think I’ve found the perfect format. And yes, these files are 100% compatible with iTunes (and, I presume, FooBar and Winamp and most other important audio players on other platforms).

The song I linked to there is a great little jpop tune by a defunct girl pop band called Boystyle*. They had one, maybe two albums and a bunch of singles and then broke up. It’s a pity, because as these kinds of bands go they were really, really good. Good songs, good singing, and of course they were all really cute. Oh well. Better they broke up on a high note than dragging on for ten years releasing progressively weaker material, the way some bands have done.

*Japanese Wikipedia run through Google’s translator. I make no promises for the accuracy of the translation, but it’s sure to contain more than one really, really funny bit.