Wait.... Did you hear that?

Out with some friends last night and the discussion turned briefly to ipods and iphones and the amount of music stored on the devices. Then this morning I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the loss of music through compression in making MP3s. It is compared as the fast food of music and "like hearing through a screen door."

(You can read the article yourself HERE.)

I imagine that most people don't realize quite how MP3s are made, but it only makes sense that certain sounds and aspects are "tossed out" to make room for the compression. Most of the time I can't tell the difference, but as I enjoy some of the intricacies of jazz and classical music, there are times that I've felt that I wasn't enjoying something quite as much when listening to it in MP3 format. Perhaps some of the subtleties are things which can be "felt" but not necessarily identified in any hard and fast way.

The medium is changing rapidly and I doubt that MP3s are going to be the standard for very long. Something new, and hopefully better, will come out.

One thing that the SFChronicle does not point out is the dispose-ability of music these days. I know I've written about it before, so I won't spend much time on it, but gone are the days when friends would sit around in someone's living room, listening to an album (or even a CD) and pass around the dust jacket or jewel case and admire the cover art and read who played on the album and maybe even check out the lyrics. Today it's about how many gigs or storage your device holds and how much you've got on there already.

*sigh*