Ask Jack: 25 June 2009
Laptop DJ I am a DJ making tentative steps into digital music. I have a MacBook, which I will incorporate into my sets. How can I ensure music CDs are imported at the highest possible quality? Also, what is the difference between a music file of 320kbps and a WAV file? Stuart Eve JS: For maximum sound quality you will need to do some "secure ripping," where the standard is a Windows-only program, EAC (Exact Audio Copy). The guide at Hydrogen Audio reckons XLD (X Lossless Decoder) is a Mac equivalent, and "it's the only application for Mac OS/X that uses the AccurateRip database used by both EAC and dbPowerAMP". Max looks like a good alternative. WAV, the waveform audio format, is a Microsoft file format that usually contains uncompressed audio using linear pulse code modulation or LPCM. Audio CDs also use LPCM encoding, so a WAV file can provide the same sound quality as the CD. (The Mac equivalent is AIFF.) WAV files are easy to edit but very large, as shown by the number of tracks on an audio CD. Their size can be reduced by using a lossless compression system such as FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). However, most people convert to a "lossy" format such as MP3, AAC or WMA. This produces very small files, but there is inevitably some loss of quality. Whether the difference is audible is another matter. Briefly, very few untutored people can hear the difference between a 256kbps LAME-encoded MP3 file and a WAV file. (You can learn to hear differences, but why would you want to?) However, this depends on the quality of the reproduction
Original post:
Ask Jack: 25 June 2009
Newly asked questions: Are women doing better or worse in IT since Ada Lovelace?
When Ada Lovelace was working with Charles Babbage on the first digital computer, the Difference Engine, back in 1842, employment in IT was at an equality nirvana: exactly 50% of the workforce were female. Lovelace's contribution was to use the Difference Engine to work out Bernoulli numbers, and to debug some of Babbage's programming ("This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process," Babbage wrote). Lovelace is thus frequently described as the first computer programmer, and has been remembered down the years: the Pentagon named Ada, intended to be an "error-proof" programming language, in her honour – but her example is one that modern women and their daughters seem not to be following. Indeed since her time the gender balance in computers has got considerably worse. On "Ada Lovelace day" on Tuesday, the Women in IT scorecard from Intellect, which represents the UK IT industry, showed that only 23% of the 1.2m IT workforce (597,000 in the IT industry itself, 650,000 IT professionals in other industries) are female, compared with 45% in the UK working population as a whole. Looking ahead, the pipeline offers no encouragement: in computer science and IT-related subjects, females account for just 15% of both applicants and acceptances in 2008, while women account for just 9% of those taking computing A-Levels, a proportion that has steadily fallen over the past five years. And to add insult to injury, where women do have jobs in IT, they tend to be in user support, and operations such as "database assistants" and clerks. Yet the survey also shows that females outperform males in IT-related A-levels – even though at the top of the industry, the number of men with higher qualifications is far above the average across all professions. And women tend to be less well-paid than men (though it's not clear whether those on the same pay scale get the same pay)
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Newly asked questions: Are women doing better or worse in IT since Ada Lovelace?