To all the people who listened to my music over the last few months and years… I’m sorry everyone. I’m really very very very sorry. You see – I just had no idea.
Today I bought some studio monitors, and I listened to my music. And it isn’t pretty. Oh, the mixes are fine – the problem lies in how I distribute them. I used to think (WAY back in the day) 128 kbps mp3 was fine. It was what all the cool kids were using. I eventually upped my recordings to 160, then 192 and 256. I switched to 256 AAC encoding a few months ago beliving it was “indistinguishable” from the raw form.
Holy cow was I wrong.
While listening to some of my pieces now, I occationally say “What the heck happened to the high end in this piece??”. Without fail – I’m listening to a compressed version that was destined for the web site.
Oh – the high end is still there… it is just… bad?
In any event – I’m going to have to change my format again. Possibly to 48kHz Apple Lossless (inside mp4). It is noticably better then CD quallity. Well – you can notice it if you have good speakers.

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