Nice, I haven't tried their requests. But it is definitely a good place to be if you use Apple stuff in general.

you can use a membership at either GGn or BS to get an invite to the other

I don't think this is true. I don't see official recruitment, or even unofficial invite offers, going in either direction.

Appreciate that, but I have a pretty good access to media as it is.

On a lighter note, I did check it out. I know a lot, but there's always someone who knows more. What I do know is how to get the best possible lossy audio on my computer. My issue presently with that is, I do not have an optical drive. Both of my computers are too small for them. The solution is a $30 external drive I can hook up to either of them. Though I'm not sure "expert rippers/encoders" would agree with using a cheap drive, they'd probably recommend/require a better one. So my present way around that is to acquire FLAC and run that through my encoder. I use AAC Low Complexity and crank it up all the way. My M4A files are a hair bigger than 320k MP3s and sound better. The only issue I have found with M4A is that Winamp cannot play them. I'm not joking. A media player from the 1990s but people still love it. I found a Mac version called MacAmp, and guess what, it can't play them either. Winamp can play M4A with a plugin, it just doesn't ship with the product. Literally everything else, I'm sure, can play it, due to the licensing for MPEG-4/M4A being much looser than MP3, which basically everyone just pirates and the company doesn't really care because that horse isn't only dead at this point, it's decomposed and its ashes are gone with the wind. There isn't even a dead horse to beat anymore. The issue is effectively moot.

All that being said, I appreciate the link and I'm quite tempted to try it anyway. The worst that can happen is I learn a lot and don't get in. Or I just learn a lot and don't apply.

For what it's worth (if you want to know, I mean) I use fre:ac to encode. There might be better tools, but this one gets me where I want to go. And Mp3Tag to fix the tags (there's always something wrong).

I wonder how my encodes would stack up against theirs. I have high standards, especially with the metadata. I'm also pushing 50 and I have some hearing loss. So there's that working against me.

Yeah, I just saw that. I updated my MacBook Air to Golden Gate, and it has a warning about Rosetta 2 being dropped in macOS 28.

I don't think I run anything through Rosetta now. I've played Blue Prince and Cyberpunk 2077 on the Mac, but I think those are Apple Silicon. They were released in the last couple years (that is — the ARM64 version of Cyberpunk, not the 2020 release), so it should be ARM64. I also play Animal Crossing: New Leaf via a 3DS emulator. Pretty sure that's Apple Silicon. If not... well, I hope to be done with ACNL by this time next year. I can play Animal Crossing: Wild World on my iPhone via the Delta emulator (or others, I'm sure).

It's funny, you don't get a Mac to game, but a lot of Mac users now are ex-Windows users who got tired of Microslop's bullshit and put their money where their mouths were (or keyboards were). There are a few die-hards from the 80s and 90s among us, but since Apple Silicon, a lot of people have left from Windows. I was running a 4th-gen Xeon, so I was doing most of my gaming on an Xbox anyway. Always wanted a Mac, but I was a gamer first. I got priced out of PC gaming... so when that PC died, I got a Mac. Now I have two of them. It really is better here, but not in every way. I like it, so I'm getting my money's worth. They're also not the premium/expensive computer platform anymore. The computers start at $600, desktop and laptop. The laptop only has 8GB of RAM and is basically an iPhone 16 Pro in a laptop, but it's still more capable than any Windows machine at the same price point. The same power on Windows costs a lot more. The base M5 Mac mini is a bit easier to beat on the PC side, but a $600 Windows desktop PC is not going to be great. I still think the Mac will treat you better. If you're a gamer though, you need more. You're looking at a Max or Ultra variant, and for what those cost, you better really want a Mac, because comparable gaming PCs cost the same or less. Top end Mac users aren't gaming either, they're doing creative stuff (think Hollywood, Pixar stuff).