Managerium: I've forgotten the trick of posting without just copying in all of the response. I tried, but Gog hung on me, so I'll just go back to the easy way, sorry.
I copy the upmost BBcode quote_ID (13 in this case) then close off quote and open new ones by pasting after, which lets me interject responses per section.
Managerium: What a great post, I wish I could do that! Seriously. I can see where my wasted life has gone, and I don't mind a bit. ;-)
But remember classical music takes up a lot more space for fewer 'songs', and I'm a classical and jazz fanatic and I like most kinds of music. My music files are backed up onto a 4Tb HDD, which is almost full (without duplicates), and I still have a lot of CD's and vinyl not yet digitized. I would have liked an iPod with a lot more space, but instead they dumped it altogether.
VBR tries to take into account more for what needs the space for better compression. Yeah randomly seeking is a bit slower, but i think it's worth it. For videos they would store key frame ID and location so seeking to those then gets you close.
As for you doing encoding, it's not too hard. I've just been doing FFMpeg program. Right now my goto is AAC using 0.7 for general purpose (can do 0.5 for just talking like lectures) and 1.0 for music. Though maybe take a complex 1 minute section of music and adjust until you can't hear any differences, may be closer to 1.3.
So example: ffmpeg -i classicsong.flac -acodec aac -q:a 1.0 -t 60 classicsong.m4a
the -t 60 limits to a 1 minute section, this would be great for quick encodes to test and check quality, otherwise remove it. If you prefer a bitrate, change -q:a 1.0, to -b:a 256k and you're set probably.
Managerium: All very true. Copyright is a really screwed-up mess, the people who should benefit from it don't, and it just seems to cause a whole lot of problems, even now. Not to mention that there is no agreement world-wide that applies, so everything seems to depend on where you live.
Well after the 2000 MickyMouse Copyright Extension act (life+70) really is odd because it only benefits corporations and companies. You have to be some kind of nut to decide how you want your created works to be sold and who it could be sold to, after you're dead. No it was fully intended not for individual creators, it was intended for hoarders of copyrights with the intent to indefinitely sell them.
Probably a lot more i could say on the topic, but it's ranting and on DRM and peeves of corporations going after individuals and how it looks bad when a corporation is suing a 12 yearold girl for downloading a song or dead people... And how preventing sharing of files will never go their way.
