Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Thanks for the comment, Jason.
I guess we'll have to respectfully disagree. I see great value in ripping at the highest quality available and then if / as wanted downsampling to CD or lower standard. For starters, ripping at 24 bits rather than 16 gives an excellent waveform shape all the way down to the vinyl noise floor. 16 bits, not so much. Think about it this way:
Suppose you want to avoid signal overload (clipping) and you're digitizing something with a decent dynamic range. Let's say you decide to keep the peaks below -3dB. And let's remember we're not recording sine waves. And finally, let's remember that when we're recording, we're dealing with the actual signal being laid down, not the "perceived loudness" or other useful indicators of volume levels when we're thinking about other aspects of the chain, like listening.
We might find that the quiet spots in a song with decent dynamic range are 50dB below the peaks. So if we're recording with 3dB of headroom above the peaks, we would be -53dB for the quietest parts. Now 53dB corresponds to almost 9 bits of a signal; so a signal at -53dB is being represented by only 7 bits if we're working at a 16 bit resolution, versus 11 if we are working at 20 bits resolution and 15 bits if at 24 bits resolution.
7 bits means only 128 distinct values, thus slightly less than 1% distortion (quantization distortion, I emphasize, not something benign like 2nd harmonic) added by the conversion process. Yes you can use dithering and noise shaping but really it's much easier just to record at 24 bits and forget about all that complexity.
As to filling the extra bits with noise and silence, FLAC's compression will take care of the silence for you, and signal can be perceived within the noise, see for example https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/how-brains-filter-signal-no…
As to the reasons 16/44.1 was chosen for the CD standard, the complexity - including engineering and cost trade-offs - are best described in this article http://www.turing-machines.com/pdf/hero.pdf
As to hi-res formats not taking off, hmmm. They - 24/48, 24/88.2, 24/96 etc, DSD - are quite conspicuous even on such consumer sites as https://ca.7digital.com/ and anyway, "taking off" is not any kind of measure of anything except what certain providers have chosen to provide to their customers.
For me, the short version is "always acquire music at the highest resolution possible", so that you're never disappointed by the choice of a crummy format when you upgrade your equipment later. And this includes making digital copies of your precious vinyl!
Thanks for the kind comment, Paul. You are so correct - Jimi still rocks (and yes, it's still raining in Vancouver).