My main recording tool is Audacity, which works for me because I do one-track live acoustic recordings. It wouldn’t surprise me if Audacity were considered a reference encoder, just because of its origins in free culture.

Thanks for the MP3 link bug report. I’ll fix it pronto.

Funny that it’s so much easier to talk about the technology and techniques than the music… Anyhow, glad that it speaks to you.

Personally I really like how the three textures/tracks work together. The chunky rhythmic guitar vs the airy whistling, with the metallic bottleneck poking out of the mix in unpredictable places. The way they work together so nicely without having to be exactly in sync is because they were all playing along with a MIDI piano part which isn’t in the mix. It was like a skeleton for a sculpture. Also, the whistling sits in the background glues the rhythm guitar and bottleneck together, like corn starch.

Note: your link labeled “mp3″ above is to the aiff file.

Relative to Ogg and Flac, one of the issue I’m having with those formats is a lack of confidence that the files I might produce will be totally correct in different players. Flac seems way better than Ogg in this respect, but (maybe I am wrong about this) there isn’t any kind of reference encoder / player that everyone considers pretty standard.

Anyway, that’s a long winded way of saying that I haven’t found a reliable way to use those formats in my file distribution process. I output those formats, but then they sit while I feel like I need to test every file on every player I have.