Last week we finally got a DVD–writer for our home PC after years (and probably hundreds of CDs) of burning with my 12X LiteOn 12101B CD–writer. We bought a 16X DVD+/-RW, the LiteOn SOHW-1673S announced not too long ago and discussed quite actively. This drive is closely related to the 1653S and the 1633S, both of which are great all–around burners and readers.

Everything about this drive has been great and I’ve been busy cleaning up my hard disks with all the junk and unused data from the past few years. I’ve got only one complaint though, I find it ironic that I can now buy a DVD writer for six thousand pesos when the CD writer it replaces had me forking more than seven grand! Haha, the wonders of technology. An expounding of Moore’s Law?

This had me thinking that a good percentage of data are hardly supposed to be kept on hard disks, and should’ve been archived safely a long time ago — before you end up losing everything after an unexpected hard drive crash.

With the continuously dropping cost of DVD media, I just rediscovered my interest in archival quality music storage. I used to encode my music in mp3 format using the well–known LAME encoder, using the just as famous r3mix preset — until I discovered Ogg Vorbis. I was caught in the format’s quality and technical merits, but more importantly the philosophies and beliefs it supports.

But after a few years, I got tired of musing over sound quality and clipping and dithering, so I just set ooggdropXPd at q=5 and enjoyed the music. Right now, more than half of the encoded albums on my drive are in vorbis format, with old backups in r3mix–encoded mp3s. But recently, I came across the FLAC project and and it had me reverting to my technically obsessed persona. FLAC is closely related to Ogg Vorbis and just as technically sound. With 4.5 gigabyte of space on a single DVD, I can archive a good number of albums after compression with FLAC. And since FLAC is lossless, I can re–encode to any format I want in the future, or whatever format is most supported when I finally get a portable audio player. An iPod? Probably.

But the big question: Why did I write this entry? 😉 Well, I’m just buying time so I can update my WP plugins and related projects, as well as cook up something refreshingly new. Stay tuned.