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Don't bother with acoustic matting.. it takes the edge off the howl if you have a high speed delta cpu fan or similar, but it'll make naff all difference anywhere else. Anyway, what happened to the good old days where the more racket your PC made the more l33t you were?

it makes me feel really old when the "good old days" still feel slightly new to me

my first two PCs didn't even have CPU fans, just a fairly poxy little number on their low-wattage (compared to modern ones) PSUs.

and even they were noisier than my first (and still arguably favourite) computer (though it wasnt, in truth, good for *much*)........ old atari ST..... talk about silent running. No cpu fan, no psu fan (only about 50w all in), no hard disc.....

to me a silenter a computer is the better, particularly when typing. aids the concentration - flat noise such as you get off a fan tends to get you tranced and send you to sleep. that's why i like doing plain text-hacking work with my old laptop... it's only VGA resolution, and not too great for any heavy graphical work, but it's just fine for working on Word...... without the display taking up your entire vision....... or making any noise whatsoever, until the hard disc spins up to (auto..)save the document.

the loudest one would have been just a few years ago, hard to choose between the potential culprits. the first iteration of my brother's uni PC is definately a top contender, you could hear it across the house, probably why he got a 500w soundsystem to plug into it and shake the windows. but, i digress...
either one of the family beaters (450mhz K6/2, 600mhz athlon) or my older machine (cyrix 333 progressing to duron 850) ...... all of them replete with cheap-ass PSU (loud), crap CPU fan (buzzy), salvage and/or cheap hard drives (whiney) and, of course, a graphics card requiring it's own fan. we're talking jet plane here. not good for really thinking too much whilst working with it.
no definately the athlon, it had such a heat problem, that last summer i had it clocked down to 540mhz, with the side of the case off, and no less than two extra 40mm and one 80mm purposely-installed fans trying to get a little extra ventilation going.

stupid, hellish-to-use thing. it was almost as loud as an average university computer room (also a crap place to work, unless you find one of the rare sanctuaries that still has a couple rows of VT220 terminals.... excellent for getting your email, shunting files around in unix command line, and web-browsing with Lynx. purposeful, efficient, quick and easy on the eye. never did get round to trying commandline quake tho)

hmm.... WMA VBR.... any opinions?

tried mp3'ing up a mates cds at work (direct onto the player via usb ) and all that was available was windows media player ... which didnt offer any kind of mp3 option, just vanilla WMA (ugh), lossless (as if!) and vbr.... went for the vbr option

must say, considering the bitrates went from about 110 up to about 170 depending on track, it sounds quite good (using the "middle" quality) if you dont listen hard. the middle-lower quality starts losing cd transparency and the lowest setting is pretty rubbish, however (but still not as bad as 64k)

edit: fed the decoded output from some of them into cooledit sound analyser. thems some ugly looking graphs... thought the treble sounded a bit dodgy but it looks worse. i tell ya: if mp3 encoder writers allowed their routines to mangle the higher frequencies as much as wma does, they'd all be claiming 64kbit efficiency as well (indeed, mp3pro uses a similar, but better-sounding - still rubbish - technique). Basically all sound above a particular cutoff is reduced to noise with the only detail being the intensity. Super efficient compression but doesnt sound too great. Worse still, the cutoff is only 15.5khz at medium level (i'm sure Lame mp3 could out-perform that like-for-like).... 13khz at med-low.... and 13khz even with some quite bad visible compression artifacting in the 10-13 range for bottom level.

also listened to them with some better cans and speakers and so revised what i wrote above..

probably wont do that again then - just load a decent 128k encoder like musicmatch onto the player's HD instead

192kbps or nothing for me now...

it makes me feel really old when the "good old days" still feel slightly new to me

Ah, well I'm a child of the overclocking era you see... if you don't have at least 17 fans running at 7,200rpm and making enough noise that the neighbours bang on the walls at night, all to achieve an extra 5mhz or so, then you're just not hardcore enough
Given up on all the malarky now, since I realised how pointless it was.. but it has increased my noise tolerance somewhat

Josh_PoloGTi wrote:192kbps or nothing for me now...

Me too

how about LAME VBR then?

get you that 192 quality at about a 176k average, but still not distorting on the really tricky parts

PS Groovy - i've had a 486 clocked to 160mhz. Beat that.

I have around 20,000 mp3's, i've had my collection since about 2000, have 3 hard drives, one 60 GB Maxtor Drive and a 120 Maxtor drive and a small 10GB one that was already in my computer.

My computer stays on ALL the time, and i haven't had any hard drive problems as yet. (Touches Wood)

Josh_PoloGTi wrote:192kbps or nothing for me now...

Same here. 192kbps songs are kinda hard to find tho. But whenever I, humm, "backup" any CDs I do it at 192.

now i've got big hard discs (and have managed to blow the charger circuit on the NPod so might replace it with a 30 or 40gb jobbie whilst prices continue to crash) i think it's time to start on a project of 192k / VBR'ing all me CDs to replace the scrappy 128k thats-good-enough-for-now copies
got, what... 70+gb free, and have done for best part of a year now, after all..

(yep, after just a few weeks it's no more, thanks to a hookey car charger)