In other news, snow is cold and wet.

It’s been a long time since I thought about Tenchi Muyo.

Why don’t they advertise these things? Can they be bothered to list all the formats they support somewhere?

The even more efficient example was Mega Man 3. The standard rip format for NES music is far more efficient but also far more complex, requiring specialized skills to rip instead of a copy of ZSNES and a fast finger on the F1 button.

Edit: the standard rip format for NES music is NSF, but an expanded version NSFe is better if you can get it because it supports metadata like song names and lengths.

Everything filed under “Chiptune”, excluding the AT3 and MAB files which are effectively general purpose music formats, comes to 1.14 GB for 4211 items totaling 158:50:29. There are a lot of duplicates in there, because for a lot of these items it’s more trouble to hunt down a replacement copy than it is to store a backup.

The catch, of course, is that it’s all retro videogame music from bleep to bloop.

Those are SPC files, and that particular example was one rip of Final Fantasy VI (III)'s soundtrack.

Unfortunately, it only handles music embedded in Super Famicom/Super Nintendo games. To convert your own music to SPC, you’d have to rewrite it for the SNES sound chip.

Chiptune formats for retro videogame music can be very efficient. Just picking two with particularly good music, I have a 21 KB (0.02 MB) file storing 28:30 of music and 4.72 MB of files storing 1:54:48 of music, both at source quality.

The catch is that they are designed exclusively to rip chiptunes from retro videogames as close as the format designers and player coders could manage to the original. So even the oversized ones like the 4.72 MB of files extracted from a 3 MB game are going to be far smaller than a general use format like opus. But you can’t encode your own music in the format without going to massive effort to code it like you would an authentic chiptune, and you’re unlikely to like the results.

Ten chiptune formats, two other videogame music formats (.at3 and .mab), WMA, IT, AAC, MP2, and MIDI.

Because hard drives aren’t getting any bigger lately and I don’t want to multiply the size of my videogame music collection by ten?

Strawberry doesn’t support about a dozen audio formats I use, so until it’s got wider support I have to pass.

There’s a real chance that my employer will abruptly ban Chinese-branded phones from their network.

Looks like they put the oversized load on a boat for as long as they could, but have to do the last leg by road.

Leave a bad review. I did get halfway back.

The US has lots of land that doesn’t require irrigation, but also lots of land that can grow crops if irrigated. Some of that land in California is some of the best farmland in the whole country, growing things that prefer California’s Mediterranean climate (similar to parts of Australia’s southwest coast).

We have the technology and have had it for a while. But we don’t have the laws and habits of dry countries so US water laws are a wasteful mess.

An irrigation canal like this is a big ditch to move water from a river to near farm fields. Without the extra water taken from the river, there wouldn’t be enough water in the soil for crops to grow in the area.

Being a big ditch open to the sky, the hot sun and dry air make a bunch of the irrigation water evaporate before it even gets to the field. So we went to all the effort of taking water out of the river just to waste it humidifying the nearby air.

Why did we do it in the first place? Because it’s way easier and cheaper to dig a ditch than to lay a big pipe, and I don’t know if the US had any other water-delivery tech at the right scale when these were built.

This title is a play on words, meaning “leave Mac owners short change”. That is, not having as many coins as they assumed they had. Usually you are short change because you had a little less money with you than you thought, but with malware involved they mean theft.

It’s difficult. I didn’t understand the headline until reading the summary. “Short-changed” means not getting everything you purchased. It originally meant not getting all your change from paying with a larger bill. For example, if you used a $5 bill to buy $2.20 worth of snacks and got $2.75 back, you were short-changed.

Seems to vary depending on whether I’m attempting to listen to music on my device (“attempting to” is the right word as it takes 15 seconds to load each individual song as it goes through a playlist) or listen to a YouTube video. It can go further into the background if it’s music on my device, no further back than a big window drawn over the screen if it’s a podcastable video, and must be in the foreground for a video IIRC.