Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Thanks for your comments, madtom 1999. As to your your point regarding recognition of anything better than CD quality, I offer this meta analysis http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18296 which suggests that people can distinguish high resolution music (ie better than CD quality).
The question of blind / double blind testing is, in my mind anyway, a bit of a red herring, for four reasons. The first is that the testing environment itself is not a relaxing and contemplative environment, and may reduce the listener's ability to notice fine differences in details. The second is that many listeners (and I would include myself in this group) haven't spent time really working on trying to hear these kinds of differences. The third is that there is no particular guarantee that the music on offer in a double blind test actually exhibits any kind of potentially detectable difference between its 16/44.1 and (say) 24/96 forms. And finally, the fourth is that there is no particular guarantee that the equipment used for the testing is capable of rendering - in a reasonably accurate fashion - the difference (if it exists) between the 16/44.1 and 24/96 versions of a given piece of music.
With respect to the potentially detectable difference between 16/44.1 and 24/96, I find it instructive to use the Spek open source spectrum analyzer to look at music files and see what content is out there above 18-20kHz in those high-resolution files. Picking two more or less at random, The Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore East shows some overtones, at a very low level, above 20kHz; Orchestra Baobab Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng shows much stronger overtones up into the 25kHz region and lower ones up to 40kHz. Interestingly, this latter shows that the high frequency overtones taper off in what appears to be a natural fashion between about 35 and 42 kHz, well below the Nyquist frequency of the sampling. So no "brick wall" filtering, which is quite evident on some music that was evidently recorded at 44.1 kHz and later re-released on 96 kHz (Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo Despite the Snow is a "good" example of this).
Thanks again for raising this point; I think I may do a future article on this topic.
As to the question "is FLAC's compression worth it", for me at least, right now, it is: my music library is currently almost all FLAC (a few scattered MP3s where that was my only option), and I am guessing about 75% is CD quality, the rest being 24 bit and often 88.2 or 96 kHz. Currently this requires about 250GB. This fits nicely on a reasonably priced 500GB SSD along with the rest of my stuff on my laptop, leaving me with a great travelling music collection. It also fits barely on my 256GB MicroHD card in my digital audio player...
As to the effort required to decompress FLAC introducing jitter in the digital output stream, I don't believe we can make these kinds of a priori arguments. It's just as easy to claim that the extra I/O required by WAV files will introduce jitter into the digital output stream. What's needed is some very careful testing of these hypotheses.
Thanks for the comment, Dane. I liked Clementine as well, except that it had no provision to control the output, which Strawberry remedies.