Re: Determining the usefulness of compression
Pigeon wrote:
> I think the point re WAVs is that gzip and its kin don't compress them
> very well so you waste a lot of cpu and get something that if you're
> lucky is 90% of the original file size. I think there's a program
> called 'flac' that will compress them to around 60-70% of original
> size, so you could make the script intelligent about this.
Yes, flac is a lossless audio encoder. It's probably the best choice
currently for lossless audio compression. (Vorbis is the best choice for
lossy audio compression.)
> Compressing WAVs works better for a better quality original recording.
> More or less all music has been produced with some analogue signal
> processing somewhere in the chain. This introduces noise. (Is it
> possible to make a digital guitar? Does the idea even make sense?)
Well, there are "guitar synthesizers" that emit MIDI streams generated
by scanning the state of the strings, but you don't really use these as
guitars, but rather as guitar-like synth controllers. An actual guitar,
whether acoustic or electric, begins with the analog-by-definition
waveforms of physical vibrating strings, so there's no getting away from
the initial analog stage even if you build in an ADC and have only
digital data as output. (And electric guitar pickups, particularly
single-coil ones, are fairly noisy to begin with.)
There do exist recordings of pure digital data. Frank Zappa's album
'Jazz From Hell' (1986) and Wendy Carlos' album 'Beauty in the Beast'
(also, coincidentally, 1986) contain nothing but digitally-generated
music recorded to digital tape, with no intervening analog stage. I'm
sure there must have been more such records in the years since then.
Craig
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