Ghosts, FLAC
Nine Inch Nails once again proved that they (he?) are the coolest people (person?)* on the planet. The latest album, Ghosts I-IV (a 36-track series) is sold online for $5. So, last night I picked it up in FLAC lossless. For $5. No DRM, no quality degradation, just 600 megs of pure above-CD sound.

And then, to play it and get it onto my iPod.

Crap.

For those who don't know, FLAC is a sound/music file format that is perfect, and well-compressed. Handy to have for your master-copies - you can make degraded versions from there. MP3 has better compatibility and is much smaller per-file, but if you convert from a high-quality MP3 into another format, it will degrade. FLAC will not. I figured "I'm a nerd, I should get the FLAC and transcode a copy into MP3 for my ipod and other players".

Seemed easy enough.

Until I found out that none of the mainstream apps have 1st-party support for FLAC, despite it being the standard for lossless. Then I went looking for opensource tools (my typical second-choice after free MS products). Double-crap. The OSS tools are little command-line Perl scripts that were designed for Linux and seem to complain about various missing dependancies on Windows XP - I even went to the trouble of installing ActiveState Perl onto my machine to run them.

So, I ended up fetching Foobar2000 - a decent freeware app. Still, I wince at using freeware, because you always worry about getting what you paid for, and since it's closed-source, you don't know what's inside.

Foobar2000 is actually surprisingly nice - it feels like a stripped-down iTunes using the Windows native interface, with far more power-user-friendly features. It's happily grinding away at converting my unreadable (but archive-quality) FLAC files into MP3s.

* NIN is a band... but it's a band of hired guns run by the owner, composer, lead performer, etc. that is Trent Reznor. So I often think it's kinda silly to refer to it as a band when he does more than most singer-songwriters.