Spinning-off my geekery

Unfortunately I don't have the willpower to totally cut off my technological ramblings, but I can at least keep them somewhere well away from all the other stuff.

Today's topic is, once again, audio encoding. Hey, I run into it all the time with my iPod/Zaurus. It's something I tend to think about.

There's basically two new contenders in the encoding world for me: lame and faac. My opinion of lame is actually pretty high, but unfortunately it still falls short of the mark. It's the best MP3 encoder I've encountered, but at 128kbps it sounds... wrong. On some tracks (especially string instruments) I hear a good deal of squealing, and on just about everything there's a sort of "wobble". Vibrato. Faint, but present. Vorbis gets the same sort of wobble, but at 64kbps, so lame loses.

But we are, however, stuck to formats the iPod can handle, and this is where faac comes in. There's still something wrong with AAC, but I can't put my finger on it yet. Pehaps someday there will be a digital media player that plays Vorbis, has gapless playback, and is the size of a pack of gum...