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Azethoth

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  1. Well I have had champagnes from cheap La Scala Spumante (CDN$5) to Cristal, various Dom Perignons, and extremely expensive $500 - $1000 stuff. For me, since I exclusively care for sweet dessert wines, La Scala Spumante tastes fantastic. Most high end stuff is just too dry to even finish. I am aware of this disability and its implications. I blame beer shandies from my childhood during long trips to the beach for vacations. Also for taste there is actual genetic differences in taste buds: scientifically not everyone can taste the disgusting chemical that makes brussel sprouts taste like crap scraped off the pavement and distilled for example. On to music. Some stuff sounded better on my old intro stereo from my youth and completely unlistenable on my good system. This would be the stuff engineered to sound good only on cheap club systems. However, you can spend some time with it and erase your memory of it, replacing it with cleaner sound on a good system. Additionally taste and sound are subjective AND influencable. If you give someone something to taste and tell them there is grape or orange in it they will likely suddenly detect that. Same with music. You could even have some hot chick/dude tell someone they like some music or sound and they will be hard pressed not to have an improved response to it. Time also influences memories of music. Stuff you heard a lot when young but hated can suddenly be nostalgic and cool 10 or 20 years later. Your brain recalls hearing it and not the hating it part. So bottom line, I want trained golden ears in charge of rating my music system. I simply do not trust people who in blind taste tests can not tell the difference between cat food and pate (although I think that says more about pate than taste buds).
  2. I used to rip my CD's using iTunes lossless. This is ok for stuff sold on iTunes but less than worthless for other material. I ended up buying dBpoweramp. dBpoweramp verifies the rip by doing it multiple times from the CD and paying attention to errors etc. After that it computes a checksum of each ripped track and compares it with what other people got. This ensures you have the best chance of getting a perfect rip. A scratched CD will still suck of course, but you will know you did not get a perfect rip and can do something about it if you want to. You also get the option of choosing metadata from 3 online sources as you rip. You can use their consensus majority rule data from the three sources or pick and choose. Discrepancies are hilited so it is easy to see what data is suspect. Usually 90-98% of it is not controversial. The rest of the time someone was lazy on one of the 3 services and you are missing plurals, a ', or something else minor. Their default album art search is pretty handy as well. I either use that or a google image search on the artist + album name. In addition, they have a metadata editor. This is fantastic for grabbing album art of already ripped / downloaded stuff. Unfortunately their stuff is less useful after the ripping is done unless you rerip. I ended up reripping because I just did not trust what I ended up with using iTunes. Finally I highly recommend adding the folder art as "Folder.jpg" or some other consistent name inside the album folder. If you ever switch to serving your music from a NAS one day you will be glad you did.
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