I have a new Latina artist that I like. Her name is Lucero. Her "Mi Destino" is an interesting album to listen to. It also introduced me to why music from Napster is a joke. The 6th song on the Mi Destino album is called Prisionera. It is a good example of why lossy conversions such as MP3 have to be dealt with on a song by song basis. I first used 128kb/s for a conversion rate and Prisionera really sounded terrible. Then, I tried 256kb/s and the conversion was much better. If you are curious, convert it using 128kb/s and then try to understand her lead-in where she talks. The low bit rate conversion generates trash that you can't understand. I went through a number of programs that convert CD audio into mp3. I also tried a number of audio sound cards in my PC. The evential winner was a Creative Audigy Gamer. It will do Dolby 6.1 and will process the audio from the CD doing a digital extraction. The conversion program that came with the "gamer" was the first combination to process prisionera properly. You have to use mp3vbr and I set the conversion at the 60% value. The bit rate fluctuates from 90-422 kbps and produces a file close to the size of a 128kbps fixed conversion rate.
Once you have heard the trash produced by the MP3 conversion, you can hear similar places in every song that I listened to. You could not download quality music from Napster. It doesn't matter because Napster has been shut down. I really thought the recording industry made a mistake on how they dealt with Napster. I thought they should have pointed out where each song was trashed by the MP3 conversion. If someone liked the songs and they heard the flaws in the conversion, it wouldn't be too long until they owned the albums containing the songs they like. Napster, in that case, would have actually stimulated sales of CDs. I started thinking of the recording industry as a bunch of pre-computer bureaucrats. This may not be true but it is really hard to change pre-conceptions like that.
Lucero is also pretty enough to cause someone to stare to the point of being personally embarassing. One of my local, cool Latina's told me she is a popular "Soap's Star". The show is called "Mi destino eres tú". It is on a local latin channel but the timing is really bad because the soap she is in is broadcast when I usually can be found sleeping. When Lucero's "Mi destino eres tú" is playing, her two year old starts to dancing to the music. I had to chuckle because I also wiggled around while it is playing. Lucero is part of "Sony Discos" and the music comes out with a lot of bass. Side effects of listening to Lucero was adding a sub-woofer to my systems that I listen to her on. I joke that it ended up being a $200+ CD :).
The latest addition to Lucero's Prisionera saga is adding a Creative Soundblaster Live to my computer that I do my audio processing on. The CDROM player has supported digital audio and now I have a sound card that also supports it. It comes with software that will convert CD files into mp3vbr directly. The MP3 sounds much cleaner than an analog conversion to wav and is 9+ times smaller.