The pesky thing about all those blasted iPod and other mp3 player storage capacities is that they’re based on relatively crappy song quality. When your music player says it has 4GB of space for music you have to assume you can fit only five hundred songs of decent quality…or 1000 scratchy, echoey (echo-ey?), digital shadows of songs. I exaggerate, of course, but the standard 128 kbps quality of my music library eventually bugged me so much that I took a whole weekend to re-rip my CD’s. I know, I know, you’re thinking “it must be nice…”. I’m going to ask you to stop looking at me like that now, I swear I’m productive on the other weekends.

So what am I getting at here? Well, I read a little piece over on Gizmodo about how Stanford Professor Jonathan Berger conducted some tests on students. They were asked to listen to some music at various bit rates and, apparently, the 128 bit rate was deemed the favourite overall – especially because of that scratchy, staticky sound with lower quality recordings. I’m not saying that music at 128 kbps isn’t music any more, but it certainly does lose out to tracks encoded at 256 kbps or even 192 kbps. It’s definitely a surprise to hear that students (at least at Stanford) like their music this way, but I’ve also always been so puzzled by the fact that so many of my music-loving friends will stick with the standard crappy headphones that come with most music players. 

You can check out the original article from O’Reilly Radar here [news from Gizmodo].

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