[OT] Extra time spent

[Kagamin via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 11 June 2014 at 03:56:06 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Point being, all that admiration I have for both that second 
> closing and the initial opening battle, and I *still* never 
> noticed they were the same song! Don't I feel like the perfect 
> fool now! ;)

The battle theme starts as an off-vocal version, which sounds 
considerably different to the vocal version. Maybe the vocal has 
a different rhythm.

> While I often like watching dubs (they've generally gotten a 
> lot better than they used to be), with music the English 
> translations just don't sound as good no matter how well 
> they're done. Maybe it's just my familiarity with english, but 
> I like to think it's the aesthetics of the languages 
> themselves...even if I'm only fooling myself about it.

Western languages being non-syllabary do sound discontinuous, and 
Japanese has an advantage in its strict syllabary structure - it 
sounds very smooth. It makes it even more interesting, how the 
translators try to get the most out of their languages and 
compensate or work around the warts. On the other hand, german 
dub of Star Wars has the best version of Darth Vader ever.

> And last time I did an indie game (ages ago) I was very 
> surprised how much difference I noticed (even on ordinary 
> speakers) when encoding the music as 128kbps MP3, as opposed to 
> 128kbps Vorbis and 320kbps MP3.

I can only hear a difference when comparing them side by side. 
When taken separately, I can't guess the bitrate.