I’m getting worried about the pacing. This was a quieter episode, but it only adapted two chapters like the previous two episodes. I can’t imagine they could finish the whole arc in two cours at this rate. I’m not sure they could finish the whole arc in three cours at this rate. They might take an entire additional season for Kyoto.

The moon waning as Sano trains was some surprising attention to detail. The moon really was waning in the second half of May 1878, with last quarter on May 24.

The first conversation with Anji during training was good filler. The second one, I’m not so sure, but it worked.

There are four acts that make a monk immediately fall from the religious life and make him ineligible to ever become a monk again in this lifetime: sex, murder, grand theft, and false spiritual claims. Anji didn’t fall from desire, so what did he do? (Don’t answer that.)

This is the first episode so far this season that adapts only 2 chapters and adds several original scenes to fill out the runtime.

I liked the new scenes.

The much-expanded Senkaku fight was silly, but he’s never not going to be silly.

It’s been a long time since I thought about Tenchi Muyo.

The Magic of Scheherazade showed us that mixing turn-based and action RPG battles is harder than it sounds, so I’m a little worried about the balance here.

This episode was a noticeable improvement over the previous one, which itself was above the show’s running average. I’m getting my hopes up for the quality of the rest of the season, if not their odds of getting to chapter 128 at their current 3-chapter-per-episode pace.

Why don’t they advertise these things? Can they be bothered to list all the formats they support somewhere?

The even more efficient example was Mega Man 3. The standard rip format for NES music is far more efficient but also far more complex, requiring specialized skills to rip instead of a copy of ZSNES and a fast finger on the F1 button.

Edit: the standard rip format for NES music is NSF, but an expanded version NSFe is better if you can get it because it supports metadata like song names and lengths.

Everything filed under “Chiptune”, excluding the AT3 and MAB files which are effectively general purpose music formats, comes to 1.14 GB for 4211 items totaling 158:50:29. There are a lot of duplicates in there, because for a lot of these items it’s more trouble to hunt down a replacement copy than it is to store a backup.

The catch, of course, is that it’s all retro videogame music from bleep to bloop.

Those are SPC files, and that particular example was one rip of Final Fantasy VI (III)'s soundtrack.

Unfortunately, it only handles music embedded in Super Famicom/Super Nintendo games. To convert your own music to SPC, you’d have to rewrite it for the SNES sound chip.

Chiptune formats for retro videogame music can be very efficient. Just picking two with particularly good music, I have a 21 KB (0.02 MB) file storing 28:30 of music and 4.72 MB of files storing 1:54:48 of music, both at source quality.

The catch is that they are designed exclusively to rip chiptunes from retro videogames as close as the format designers and player coders could manage to the original. So even the oversized ones like the 4.72 MB of files extracted from a 3 MB game are going to be far smaller than a general use format like opus. But you can’t encode your own music in the format without going to massive effort to code it like you would an authentic chiptune, and you’re unlikely to like the results.

Ten chiptune formats, two other videogame music formats (.at3 and .mab), WMA, IT, AAC, MP2, and MIDI.

Because hard drives aren’t getting any bigger lately and I don’t want to multiply the size of my videogame music collection by ten?

The preview for this week’s episode is mostly Aoshi monologuing, but it’s funny rather than insightful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh0ciz8yWDk

Strawberry doesn’t support about a dozen audio formats I use, so until it’s got wider support I have to pass.

I think the first anime handled Aoshi’s thought process in this episode more clearly. In this one it’s as opaque as the manga, even though Aoshi got a little more camera time.

Solid. Compared to the old anime, music isn’t quite as good, bloodier, more focus on Aoshi.

Seems more promising than last season, but I’m not sure how they plan to get through the entire arc in just 23 episodes at this pace.

There’s a real chance that my employer will abruptly ban Chinese-branded phones from their network.