Chuck Guzis wrote: ..and anyone who remembers shellac records is a prehistoric fossil, Nope. WFMU FM has your VERY classic music tuesday nights 7 pm EST. http://wfmu.org/ Live or web cast. The 4 of july looks to be a great hour with music from the turn of the century.

Chuck Guzis wrote: I'm under 30, and I still buy vinyl. Hell, there are still small production runs in 78RPM Victrola records and I buy those too. And there are all of those club DJ types still buying vinyl, many of whom are young'uns. Peace... Sridhar

Zane H. Healy wrote: You need to get to know your local independent record store owner. Not just the employees. The proprietor. They hear about new pressings long before they happen, and they can reserve copies with the label if you're interested. If you know them well enough, sometimes they'll even stock a copy of a disc if they think you'll like it. A good repeat customer is worth more than gold to them. I pay about $50/disc, and they're usually recordings you can't get on vinyl or CD. And I would guess that you're probably right in that many of them go to jukebox owners, although there are also some pressings that might not "fit in" in a jukebox. I mostly buy old recordings of classical music. The other music I'm interested in, I can get on FLAC, CD or Vinyl. Peace... Sridhar

If you're messing with 78's and only 18, you obviously have unusual taste in music for someone your age. :^) Having said that I must confess to having a strange affection for them, still odd at over twice your age. I realize that the audio quality isn't as good as LP's, or even CD's, however, it is possible to get music that never made it onto LP, let alone CD. Unlike my LP's which I prefer to listen to on the turntable, I do rip my 78's to audio files. In part to protect them from further damage, and in part to get the equalization right. Once you've got them properly equilized, and drop out the noise, it is amazing how good some of them can sound. Zane

Gary Sparkes Jr. wrote: Quickly reads ... re-reads -- I thought it said 'bald men won't get you' So where do you hide your Edison cylinders? :) PS. WFMU also plays them every other tuesday.

???? Vinyl is dead. CDs are dying. Did anyone notice that the DJ at the wedding party next to the unofficial VCFeast Friday dinner was spinning mp3s? He was not ahead of his time. He is in it. I am not going to waste anymore time with this religious fight. -- Will, the other radio DJ on this list.

Zane H. Healy wrote: I suspect it because a few people have the time for music and/or quality equipment. I want to know if "Listener Fatigue" is on the rise and that stops people from listening to music often? PS. Cheap CD's often have lower quality music on them. So does everybody have EARTH SHAKING 5 CHANNEL systems for YOUR MOVIES? The other reason music is going down hill.

Well, personally, I don't. Just a few days ago I replaced a "200G" (actually more like 186G) drive with a "400G" (ditto 372G) drive to hold ripped CDs - the first thing I do with a new audio CD is to rip a copy. (No, I don't distribute the result.) But I speculate that people do it for many reasons: (1) habit; (2) not everyone can afford hundreds of gigs of disk for their machines; (3) mp3 is good enough - or at least is perceived as good enough - for many people, who don't have playback systems capable of exposing the difference between the original and the mp3, or who don't have ears capable of hearing the difference. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Hi, Because if you're only listening to the .MP3s on your computer or via an MP3 player/jukebox you really can't hear the loss in quality - even 128Kbps-VBR is perfectly acceptable under these circumstances, to my ear at least (BTW I said "acceptable", not "fine"!). Also, .MP3 is about the only format capable of being played on pretty much everything from an MP3 player, to a mobile phone, to a DVD player. The same cannot be said of .WMA, .FLAC, etc. I currently have 16 devices (other than my PC) which play .MP3s, just THREE of those will also play .WMA, and only one of those will also play .OGG and .FLAC! Also, only my mobile phone will play .AAC in addition to .MP3. So, if you're into digital music, you haven't got a massive amount of room in which to manoeuvre. Incidentally, a hi-fi magazine here in the UK (I forget which one) performed some blind listening tests a few years ago. To cut a long story short, the upshot was, that once you hit 224Kbps it was impossible to tell the difference between a CD and an .MP3 of that CD....no matter how good the equipment it was being played through. TTFN - Pete.

Hi, LOL, actually I collect "classic" MP3 players as well as computers.... ;-) I don't think I have a 300, I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure I have the "Rio One", which looks very similar to the 300 (but is a different colour). I also have a 500, which is pretty nice. I did also have a "Riot", it's sound quality was quite awesome, but in the end it was just too big an unwieldy. I sold it after 9 months and bought a "Karma", which was great until the Hitachi "Deathstar", well, "Deathstarred".... :-( I've had real problems getting my 500 to recognise SmartMedia cards, seems rather picky. The trick I use is to encode at 128Kbps VBR, rather than the usual default of CBR. You get noticably better sound quality and, often, slightly smaller files. I understand that encoding to "Joint Stereo" rather than the usual "Stereo" can also help a little with file sizes, but I've not experimented with that yet. Quite. My first MP3 player was a 10GB jukebox, quite why the supplied ripping software defaulted to 96Kbps I'm yet to understand...? That wasn't from Argos was it? LOL. It's amazing how cheap these things are getting nowadays, about 2 years ago 512MB players were commonly selling for between ?130 and ?160 (or around ?200 on the "high-street"). I've seen 4GB players on eBay recently for under ?20! Or if you want to spend a bit more, .MP4 players (with colour screen) for under ?30.... TTFN - Pete.

At 8:04 AM +0100 6/27/07, Rob wrote: Actually I'm not sure what the stance is on peripherals, but if it was a computer it likely would be fully on topic. IIRC, it was the first commercially available MP3 player, at least it was the first widely available one. I bought one new as well, though I paid $300 and got it when it first came out. I was able to get almost a half hour of music on it. Minidisc's made more sense at the time. In fact I finally gave up on Minidiscs at work this last Christmas when I received a iPod from my Mom. I actually had my Rio working with WinXP at one point, and I believe I also had it working with Linux. While it can handle very low bitrate audio (I have some spoken word MP3's that cram 30 minutes of audio into about 3Mb), it seems to have a hard limit of two hours audio. I still have the original box, and should have everything that goes with it. My intention is that one day it will be a museum exhibit along with a lot of my other computer equipment, that is the only thing it has ever been good for. Personally I wish I'd never wasted the $300 on it. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On 27/06/07, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote: Hmm... 1TB USB drive (LaCie) ?179.99... a burger and a pizza .. ?180... <http://www.mirror.co.uk/tm_headline=go-on--spoil-yourself---&method=full&objectid=18065833&siteid=94762-name_page.html> Of course, that's paying a /little/ over the odds for the food ...