I've been reading lots of rants lately from live music traders about how evil MP3 is.

Their arguements are quite sound but don't really center around MP3 as such, but mislabelling of content. Their biggest worry is that people trade an audio CDr burnt from a compressed sources and claim it to be from an uncompressed source. They argue that it is very easy, once music is burnt to an audio CD, to lose the information stating it is from MP3 source.

Personally I try to label an Audio CD I've made from MP3s as being MP3 sourced. This is particularly important for my band's demos as I'd rather send out the WAV sourced demos than the MP3 sourced ones.

What particularly amussed me was that these same people were quite happy to trade DVDs as if they were perfect. Personally I can't help but see DVDs as badly lossy compressed video. Often the audio is compressed on a DVD too. Often it's compressed badly.

There are some that demand uncompressed audio on their DVDs but this lowers how much video you can have. Highest bitrate for video (8000k) and uncompressed stereo audio fits about an hour on a one sided DVD. Compressed audio and Variable Bit Rate video can give you up to 90 minutes.

I only got thinking about this because I noticed the new format of DVD coming out. That crazy blue ray thing from Sony made of paper. All those pictures of people cutting up their DVDs. "Foolproof data security".

We'll never be happy until we can get a DVD format that fits uncompressed video and audio. Then we'll all be arguing over the number of scanlines/resolution (700+ for PAL/NTSC, 4000 for film) used.

I have no point.

Don't get me started on the quality of CDr and DVDr media. These days I tend to burn really important audio (say, my band's latest demo or live gig) to an Audio CD but also a data CD as WAV files. I'm also making sure those data files are backed up every year. Why? Recently I went through the old archives of my band and about twenty files are lost forever because the CDrs degraded. I'm not letting this happen again. DVDr makes it easier.

The data version of the music ensures absolutely no loss of quality between backups. But if a file is corrupted the whole song is gone. The audio version of the CD means I can still hear a song even if part of it is corrupted, but you lose quality between rips.

Lots of people been asking how my arm/RSI/OOS has been. I've now not been playing guitar for about six weeks (more?) and going to the physio about once a week on average (down to once a fortnight now). I've got a good idea of how the muscles in the arm work now and how to stretch each one. I'm all up on how to warm up and cool down (extreme style with heat and cold packs).

But does it still hurt? Yes. But I've isolated the muscles that I use for the guitar and they're fine now. The overall problem of numbness, weakness of arms and hands, sore fingers and wrist is still there but not as bad. Is it not as bad due to frequent physio or better use? I don't know. I'll know when I stop going to the physio.

It'll be interesting to see how I go starting to play guitar again. I expect the whole band to be crap after two months off, although the jam after a long break usually kicks ass. First jam is next week. Three jams before the gig in May.