Microsoft has never done regular computing right. What makes anyone think they can nail the quantum version of it?

I never compromised on quality - 128 kbps for me baby! Hard-drive usage be damned.

Of course, now I know it’s not great quality. But here’s the thing: I’m old enough that I can’t tell the difference anymore. So 30 years later, my 128 kpbs MP3s still sound perfectly fine to me 🙂

I had quite a few commercial music CDs that started “rotting” from the edge after a few years. I looked it up back then and apparently it was poorly-pressed CDs that let humidity creep in-between the two plastic disks and oxidize the aluminum coating inside. Cheap CDs I guess.

Not to mention, even if you still had those CDs, they’d probably be dead by now.

Here’s the little story of my most precious MP3s:

Back in the 70s when I was a kid, I used to go to my grandparents’ house fairly regularly. I loved my grandpa and I used to spend hours with him. And he loved me too. So much so that he usually left a small cassette tape recorder going on his desk while we spent quality time together in his office.

He made hundreds of tapes containing nothing else but the sound of our voices while we were together, and sometimes my grandmother’s who would pop in the office to check on us from time to time. Hundreds of hours of ordinary life with my grandpa that he used to play back for his own enjoyment when he was alone.

I found the tapes in his attic after he died in 1995. Turns out, I had one of the very first CD burners on the market at that time - a huge, phenomenally expensive, VCR-sized SCSI 1x burner affair - and I also had a pretty solid PC for its time, all bought by black market money I made as a student on the new cellphone craze. I digitized all the tapes as WAV files, kept the best bits, made them into CD tracks and burned 2 audio CDs, one for my mom and one for me. I stored the tapes somewhere but I lost them. Probably in a move again.

Years later, I tried to play my CD. Sure enough, it didn’t play. I asked my mom to lend me hers, and… it didn’t play either. The tapes were gone, the CDs were gone… my grandpa was gone.

I had nothing to lose, so I tried reading both CDs using all the CDROM drives I had lying around. One finally managed to perilously latch on to something vaguely readable on my CD - skipping and grinding and pulling byte after byte very slowly. I left it running for 2 days and it finally managed to extract all the audio unscathed. The CD came back out totally scratched up and the CDROM drive never worked again, but I had saved the memory of my grandfather’s voice.

I encoded the audio tracks as 128 kpbs MP3s, and that’s my most precious set of MP3s: the voice of my grandfather talking to me from half a century ago.

I do. I have a gigantic collection of rare track rips in MP3 / 128 kbps, both downloaded from the days of Napster / Emule / eDonkey, ripped from CDs and cassettes or from recordings I made in raves.

Since then, I moved across 7 countries and I lost all that physical media in the moves - when I didn’t ditch them on purpose to travel light.

All I have left is my collection of low-fidelity MP3s. I still listen to them all the time. They’re not always that great, being what they are, so any MP3 player that improves their playback somehow is a win for me.