Completely unrelated to my inability to buy cheap games, noted earlier:

I downloaded a song this weekend, and it turned out to be in “tta” format.  Which has weird associations for me, actually, because it’s an acronym I’ve only seen used when people were talking about the old animated series “Tiny Toon Adventures”, and it seemed unlikely that the song in question would have anything to do with that.

It turned out that tta is short for True Audio, or some such, and that it is a lossless audio format designed to compete with FLAC and Apple Lossless and so on.

Nothing I currently had installed would play it, of course, so I had to go download foobar, install a plug-in for that, then get a command-line AAC encoder, toss the song into foobar and tell it to write me out an AAC file.

The whole thing reminds me a lot of the 80s compression format wars, where you had SEA .ARC files, PKWare .ARC files, .ZIP files, .LZH files, and .ARJ files – just for starters, let’s not even get into weird formats like .ZOO – and you had to keep a dozen different decompression utilities around because different BBS operators had different opinions as to the One True Best Archiver.

It was silly then, it’s silly now.

On the plus side, I’m happy to report that foobar is one of the few Windows programs I’ve run into lately that installs with basic user rights – not adminstrator rights – doesn’t bitch about it, and does its job without ever demanding elevated permissions.  It deserves some credit for that.