Neil Young has been banging (www.wired.com) around (www.usatoday.com) on the interwebs recently bemoaning the state of the musical recordings. While I'm not sure that aging hippies who have smoked way too much weed really know that much about technology, he does raise an interesting point. The quality of the music (and the medium) we are using for music today is pretty shitty. Over half my music collection is stuff that was ripped at 128 kbps by old-school encoders in the early 2000s that left the songs riddled with artifacts. Coupled with the fact that most people are terrible at backing up their hard drives in general, we're all on the verge of losing our Third Eye Blind collections every. freaking. day.

All is not lost, however. An overly dedicated audio nerd wrote a pretty comprehensive article (people.xiph.org) about how music is recorded, how sample rates and whatnot affect what you hear, and how everyone probably really just needs to chill out and buy a decent pair of headphones.

Which gives me a little hope that maybe, just maybe, we'll all be able to forget about the Spice Girls with one more hard drive crash and really focus on those high quality Lady Gaga singles going forward. Or is that just me?