Hi everyone, and thank you for patiently waiting. J-CORE 14 has arrived!
Planning to work on updating some old batches like Diverse Systems, Alstroemeria, Otographics and maybe Wavforme as well.
One small hiccup is that I have run into the storage limit on my seedbox server, which now cannot even fit both flac and opus j-core torrents. Eventually, I am planning to migrate everything to 8Tb VDS, so please consider donating few $$ to keep old releases seeded 24/7.
Changes:
1) One of the biggest updates with 760 albums being added, and 45 old rips replaced with better ones — mostly EAC 100%.
2) Vorbis has been replaced with Opus 160kb VBR. Opus is considered the successor to Vorbis, providing better compression efficiency (20% size decrease). Note that I have been using aotuv v8 for vorbis until now, which is very high spec, thus there should be no audible difference in terms of audio quality. This change was requested many times, and I have finally agreed, given that Opus has recently gained full native support on all major OS.
As you can see from the chart below, opus cuts all frequencies above 20khz comparing to Vorbis, but retains more details in the mid-range (which is more important)
3) “Media” tag added to all new releases which will mention origin of the rip — Web, CD, Vinyl etc. Note that it’s not applied to old albums to prevent changing the hash of all files, and make it non-compatible.