RHUM

I’m going to talk about file extensions for a moment. No wait! Please, come back. This could change your life.

I was late to digital music, buying an iPod in 2005. Until then I was mainly listening to CDs on my Walkman. I know, I was a heathen – unbelievably, I didn’t get an email address until 2004. I was in love with books and music and I paid for them. But I’ve made up for those primitive years by becoming a bit of a geek now; I love the freedom and life-changing potential of technology. But when I switched from CDs to mp3s, I also made another unwitting change: one in quality.

The mp3 format is like buying a mattress too big for your bed, then cutting it in half, making it horrible to sleep on, rather than getting a bigger base and sleeping on a full, effective mattress. Forgive the clunky metaphor, but you’d really have to do a test to see for yourself what I mean. I recommend a song with a hell of a lot of high hats, something really pushing the upper frequencies. Put the CD in your laptop and then import it into iTunes, first as an mp3 and then as a wav, aiff, or the Apple Lossless file type, m4a. Now just sit back and listen to the two. Listen in headphones and through speakers. Can you hear it, the bit crusher-like sound in those high hats? The stereo image is different. Where it feels in space, that strange, abstract concept of the stereo image, differs between the two. The mp3 feels flat and dead whilst the m4a is opened up like a drunken flower, filling up all the frequency ranges and space in front of you.

When converted to mp3, the file becomes one eleventh of the size of the original. In technical terms, it’s called compression; I call it assault.

Let’s kill the mp3. Let’s destroy it and replace it with larger lossless files, so that our music flies from our speakers with all the joy and flavour it was created with. So what if we can’t carry our entire music collection around with us – you couldn’t listen to it all anyway. I say carry less, but carry quality.

As I write this, I’m listening to Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca in m4a, and the space and intricacies of those roomy songs is actually there, not compressed to death. If you import a song as an aiff file it is huge – but worth it. Have you ever been in a club when a DJ is playing occasional mp3s off CDs? They don’t pop out in the mix, they pop in; they shrivel and collapse like leaking balloons. Why would you want to take your favourite paintings and cram them into smaller frames, just so you can look at them all at once? It makes no sense. Art should be appreciated in the same manner it was imagined by the artist, not destroyed for the consumer’s convenience.

And my 5th generation iPod is somehow still going strong, full of beautiful lossless files. Maybe it’s the quality ingredients I feed it.