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Thanks to my bottomless pit, I’ve had the wonderful liberty of keeping all my audio in lossless format. This means that I store it on my computer like you would an mp3 album, but without compressing it. The audio is identical to the CD. For those who are technically interested, I use FLAC to do a little compression (about 50-60%) to get the albums down to about 400MB.

I just wanted to say how nice it is to listen to uncompressed music casually. That’s the excuse most people give when they make their mp3s — “I’m just listening to them casually, so I won’t notice any compression”, which is usually true. But I actually think your ears get used to listening to compressed music, and forget how nice the real thing is.

189 Gigabytes (left) isn’t unlimited, even though I’d like it to be, so I’ll probably continue to encode in Ogg Vorbis, probably at quality 7 or something. But for those deserving albums like the one I mentioned yesterday (which keeps getting better every listen), no bits will be spared.

These days, Starbucks has some pretty mediocre coffee. They’ve replaced all their real espresso machines with automatic ones that always spit out the same thing regardless of what idiot’s operating them, which is great if you never take the lid off your drink, and get shots of syrup injected into it, and blend it with with chocolate and carmel and other crap, and call it a “macchiato” even though it isn’t anything close to a real Macchiato.

That was me being a coffee snob. I don’t go to Starbucks for the coffee, even though it is pretty decent when there’s no other option (for instance, when you’re in Dixon, California, between hicksville and Davis, don’t go to the local coffee shop and order a cappuccino), no, I go to Starbucks because I have gift cards for Starbucks. Lots of them. So the best thing I’ve found to use them on is the music. Last year, Starbucks bought a small Berkeley record label called Hear Music, and they’ve put out some great collections of great music since then. Today, I picked up their “playlist volume 2, a quarterly guide to music”, after thouroughly enjoying the first volume. I highly reccomend it. The album is nearly a perfect mix of eclectic, thoughtful, diverse music, concluded with my new favorite song of the week, Alexi Murdoch’s “Orange Sky” [iTunes]. So if you’re a Starbucks regular, or if you just have some extra gift cards, don’t miss the music. It may just be the best thing there.