HW: Love in Space clip

[Paul Mather]

On Fri, 4 Apr 1997, Ron Jennings wrote:

> as someone who tried to make a webpage of hawkwind samples, and decided
> to hang it up, i understand star_rats completely.  a thirty second sound
> clip was 8Megs at 44 khz stereo 32 bits, and reducing it to 11 khz mono
> 8 bits only got it down to about 500k. it also resulted in a clip that
> sounded like it was playing inside an empty soupcan. (these were wavs)

Unless it's a typo, 32 bits is overkill for digitised audio, since samples
on the CDs themselves are only 16-bit (sampled @ 44.1 KHz).

My recommendation is to use MPEG Audio Level-3 compression (which was
designed specifically to handle low bit rates).  You get good
(psychoacoustically-tuned) compression (e.g. 1:12 without loss of
fidelity, much more if you want to go down in quality) and, better still,
it is an international standard (not proprietary, like lots of the other
audio formats).  The Internet Underground Music Archive uses MPEG for its
sound files; I believe they have several players there you can download
for free.  There are also various freely available MPEG encoders and
decoders for a wide variety of platforms.

Also, how well you digitise and clean up the resultant stream will have an
effect on overall compression achieved.

> also, i don't think i have EVER d/l'ed an AU file that sounded <good>,  and
> i think a lot of the problem is due to bandwidth
> restrictions.

Yup.  Let's all raise a glass in honour of Claude Shannon... ;-)

Cheers,

Paul.

obCD: Free, _Fire and Water_

e-mail: paul at csgrad.cs.vt.edu                    A stranger in a strange land.