Nick Batzdorf wrote:MP3?! Feh!
And foi!
That's like living with ugly plastic sheets over the good furniture that you only take off when guests come over.
Believe it or not. This was extactly the reaction I expected first when the idea came up yesterday. mp3 is asociated with I-Tunes, Robin williams downloads ...etc and all but NOT with fine sounding orchestra simulation. I'm aware of that. The day the mp3 came out I thought. Hey cool, now I can email my friends some of my pieces and it was not the birth of a new generation of Audio Processing. I understand that !
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But, hey : Don't you believe I'm a purist and a passionated musician aswell ? Come on . . . I'm one of you guys or would I even post stuff in this forum ?!

When I was a little guy at the age of 5 years I allready saved my money (not eating choclates n stuff) in order to be able to buy high quality Tapes (Chrome and metal) instead of the IEC Type 1 normal tapes just to enjoy the little nuance of the sounds I recorded ''
Its juts I have this nightmare remembering the times when I had my emu sampler and was happy of being able to use 128 MBytes of RAM instead of 32 MByte from the AKAI Sampler I had before. At that time I aforded the Peter Sidlycec Library but could only use like 5 or 6 Intruments of it. Therefore I'm like a burned child with RAM limitations. Otherwise I wouldn't even think of the mp3 codec. And what happened until know ? Well we have such incredible libraries like the vsl which i consoder as a dream which come true. But buying a mac and 4 slave PC's ist not a dream for me. It remembers me of the old days where I needed several sound expanders and 2 sampler . . .
But all that is not even the point. The point is (and I'm refering to you GOURMET AUDIO LOVERS )
Are you able to hear any difference. I'm not able. With a good converted mp3 I simply cannot hear acoustically a difference. Its as I said. Just go ahead. Let your wife, your gril friend or your neighbour start up the exactly same audio file (1 converted and one not) and you'll have real difficulties to guess which of the file is the mp3 and which one is the .aif
Than the only thing which is problematic is the image of mp3. The "name" mp3 doesn't sound good to a musicians ear but the mp3 itself sounds good (its no fastfood !)