After the release of Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, a.k.a. Halo 25, the remixed version of Year Zero, Trent Reznor of NIN is officially free of the Interscope label. His next album, Ghosts I-IV, a.k.a. Halo 26 comes with a variety of free download and purchase options in multiple digital and physical formats, many exclusive to the Nine Inch Nails website:

http://ghosts.nin.com

Kill your iPod (part II).

When it comes to audiophiles all is but lost.

With the advent of MP3, the idea of lossless audio seemed to have fallen upon deaf ears. Enter: FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, it compresses waveforms by finding similarities (like bzip), not by changing the the waveform itself (mp3 et. al.).

When it comes to playing FLAC on a portable, a HD based one is the only way to go because of the increased size of FLAC files -- roughly 1/2 the size of the original uncompressed stream. FLAC players are listed on the FLAC website, but as far as I see it there are only two choices for gapless MP3 and FLAC playback:

• Rio Karma -- purchase from Karma Limbo, his are pre-hacked with upgrades
• a Rockbox enabled device such as iRiver, or iPod

Kill your media player (part I).

When it comes to digital formats quality is all but lost.

I enjoy listening to CD quality (uncompressed) audio streams and have been known to bring a CD to work on occasion to do so. However most media players geared towards playing file streams (like MP3s) have broken implementations for CD playback. So I'll stick to encoded files for media players -- and why not FLAC? Lossless, yes, gapless, maybe. Let me restate that if several tracks from the same CD bleed into each other across the track marker, surely our 21st century computers should be able to reproduce the 'gapless' 1980's technology known as the 'compact disc' (even if they're in separate, adjacent files). Tracks should play back with no interruption AS GOD INTENDED IT.