Well, before I came here I handn't known about such things, like: mpc, cvs, replaygain, foobar, flac, blind test, double blind test, cvs, tons of great music, kbytes of meaningful advice and now I feel this place to be (like one popular artist said) f*** great!

I already knew about most of those things, since I was already a regular lurker at vqf.com/bbs

But before HA I surely had much less online friends

Before HA I too was in the Dark Ages of Audio knowledge - feel like i've progressed to the Industrial Age - looking forward to the day when I can just transfer by wi-fi (in the blink of an eye) to my little portable player that will hold my 2TB collection of ape files

Omg you knew already about Foobar, Flac and Replaygain in vqf.com/bbs era?!? You psychic!!

Well, I already knew about CVS, having worked in software configuration management for a decade now, but I too was blind to most aspects of DAE and encoding.

When I started lurking here, I was using WMP with an MP3 plug-in, and was seemingly happy with my 128kbps CBR MP3 files. In fact, MP3 was the only compressed encoding format I knew about. As far as I was concerned, MP3 meant "music on a PC"...there was no other way to do it. WAV meant "uncompressed" and I knew MP3 was "compressed". I never listened closely enough to hear artifacts, but mainly I dreamed of such elementary things as a way to make the volume the same across my music files and a way to get rid of those gaps between tracks.

Googling led me to Dibrom's audiocoding wiki, then to HA (and RareWares). The first thing I learned about here was LAME, then EAC, then MP3Gain, then foobar2000, then other encoding formats such as Ogg Vorbis, MPC and AAC.

With so much valuable (and verifiable) info, my supply of quality encoding-related tools went up dramatically, as did my demands. Now, I can hear a few artifacts in low bitrate files if I try hard, I insist on gapless playback and ReplayGain functionality...and being a control freak, I have a new, tightly defined method for extracting, encoding and managing my music.

HydrogenAudio has given me a new hobby/obsession, has brought me new friends, and has greatly improved my music listening experience.

Well, before I came to HA, I used to be very proud of my mp3s, ripped using Audiocatalyst in Burst mode and encoded in VBR 75 using the Xing encoder. I used to believe Xing was the ultimate solution.

MOST of them, man!!! :B

I knew about mpc, cvs, blind test, double blind test, tons of great music...

I knew about replaygain before coming here, but that was probably from r3mix.

And I surely knew about Flac, but I don't remember where I learnt about it.

I was basically stuck on one of those personalized, funky Lame command lines, or at least trying to decide on one... and doing most of my encoding with FhG (Producer Pro) at 160kbps and 192kbps CBR -- I was VBR-phobic at the time.

Actually, many of those FhG-encoded files still sound pretty good (the 192k ones). Some I never bothered to re-encode because they just aren't troublesome sound-wise. These days I'm gradually moving to lossless, as I like the idea of a guarantee against artifacts and HD space is as cheap as oxygen (err, hydrogen). I figure when I finally cave in and get a DVD burner, lossless will be it from then on.