I worked for a guy who swore that programming had nothing to do with art. He knew this because he was a programmer and an artist. At the time I disagreed with him but since he was my boss and it was just a passing discussion anyway, I ignored it. I shouldn't have. It turns out that his art was producing horrible electronic music that no one with ears or a brain would listen to and that his idea of good software was worse than his idea of good art.
Good programming is more of a craft than a science. A good craftsman can be an artist. This is the same in programming. Compromise the artistic aspect to produce useful, working code but don't sacrifice artful code because it isn't valuable. Beautiful code is valuable.
The idea that a single generation will have a noticable affect on the quality of a recording is laughable. We are talking about a single d-to-a conversion and another a-to-d conversion. On even mediocre equipment you would have to have some golden ears to be able to hear the difference. Once it is in a non encrypted format, it is digital generations from then on. If you are willing to put up with 128k MP3's, and most people are, you certainly aren't going to care about a single generation copy.
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I worked for a guy who swore that programming had nothing to do with art. He knew this because he was a programmer and an artist. At the time I disagreed with him but since he was my boss and it was just a passing discussion anyway, I ignored it. I shouldn't have. It turns out that his art was producing horrible electronic music that no one with ears or a brain would listen to and that his idea of good software was worse than his idea of good art.
Good programming is more of a craft than a science. A good craftsman can be an artist. This is the same in programming. Compromise the artistic aspect to produce useful, working code but don't sacrifice artful code because it isn't valuable. Beautiful code is valuable.
The idea that a single generation will have a noticable affect on the quality of a recording is laughable. We are talking about a single d-to-a conversion and another a-to-d conversion. On even mediocre equipment you would have to have some golden ears to be able to hear the difference. Once it is in a non encrypted format, it is digital generations from then on. If you are willing to put up with 128k MP3's, and most people are, you certainly aren't going to care about a single generation copy.