I'll have to admit that a lot of the readings about digital compression had me confused and totally lost. The Wikipedia entry was easy to follow, but the http://dvd-hq.info/data_compression_1.php article was very difficult to follow.
I'm no audiophile, so I never really paid attention to descriptions of music on file sharing sites, (you know, when I'm just browsing file sharing sites, not actively participating in them), so I never really had any idea what lossless audio meant. I'll have to find a track that is listed as "lossless" and compare it to an .mp3 to see if I can notice any difference.
The article that Ed Galloway wrote is very interesting because it combine a few of the things that we have been talking about so far this semester. Digitizing the images themselves is difficult because of the money and time involved, but beyond that, it is hard to categorize a digital collection. He mentions that it was difficult starting the project because there were so many hands in on it. It seems as though different people may have wanted the collection for different reasons, so they had to adhere to the Dublin Core standardization of inputting metadata. This is yet another aspect of digitization that need to be sorted: as items become more accessible, what do they mean to different people?
Hello Marc,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who was a bit thrown off by that second compression article. It was a long read, and believe me, it gave some details that you probably won't even need.
When it comes to your comment on audio, the compression actually does matter. When I converted some of my CDs to mp3 to load onto my player (a godsend for those 2-4 hour drives I need to take for work and class), I noticed that the file size does matter. . .to a point. I personally don't notice a difference from an extraordinarily large file size (10-30MB; "Lossless" compression) to a "standard" file size (5-7MB). Any smaller, and I start to lose audio quality and notice distortion. It is an interesting thing to test if you have the time, though, so have at it!
RE: Audio compression - I have self-proclaimed 'audiophile' friends who insist that there's a world of difference between a lossless compression and a compressed music file. I gather it's something my ears just aren't as attuned to with CD sound (I'm entirely willing to admit that there's a huge difference in listening experience between CD and LP, but that's another story), but I'm more interested in preserving a digital copy of my music so that I can reproduce it later if the original CD is damaged. I suppose if I thought through the implications a bit at the time, I would have opted for lossless compression in the past, but my storage options were limited. Lossless really does take up a huge amount of space and, despite the decreasing costs of hard drive storage (internal and external), it just wasn't feasible at the time I started digitizing my music.
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