Topic: ADAT Playback

[meandean]

Waves are still pretty big to be transferring over the Internet.

  Ok, but a lossless compression isn't going to buy you anywhere near the kind of reduction you would get from mp3.
Give the internet a year or two and we'll look back and laugh at how it was in the old days, just as I laugh about my
first PC with a whopping 210Mb HD (which by itself costed close to $300 over 18yrs ago- OMG, that's only worth about
20min worth of audio CD).

[BlinkenLights]

Milliways is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe. (Many would say this is impossible.)

Inside, guests take their places at tables and eat sumptuous meals while watching the whole of creation explode around them. (Many would say this is equally impossible.)

You can arrive for any sitting you like without prior reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time. (Many would insist this is absolutely impossible.)

At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time. (This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible.)

You can visit it as many times as you like and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this usually causes. (According to the doubters, this is patently impossible, even if the rest were true, which it is not.)

All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for. (Many claim that this is not merely impossible, but clearly insane.)

This is why the advertising executives of the star system of Bastablon came up with this slogan:

"If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe."

[meandean]

  In case you missed it folks, our fearless leader rescued this Forum from diabolical spammers... 

[meandean]

"If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe."
 

  Sounds like a Dr Who episode...

[James]

  In case you missed it folks, our fearless leader rescued this Forum from diabolical spammers... 

If, by that, you mean me, then thanks!

James. 

[Fanny Pack]

Wav is so easy to
work with (even I can do it), that I don't think that it's worth the trouble to even bother with anything
else now that there is so much over-capacity available!

It is worth the trouble when you have to transfer the file over the internet, which is one of the reasons for MP3 compression in the first place.  Even now with high speed internet, transferring WAV files isn't a pleasurable experience.

[meandean]

It is worth the trouble when you have to transfer the file over the internet, which is one of the reasons for MP3 compression in the first place.

 I'm not against mp3, it's one the biggest breakthroughs in formats. The fact
that you can reduce audio to less than 10% of what it would otherwise take and still
get something that sounds good (almost indistinguishable in some cases) is remarkable,
especially when you consider players that are smaller than a pack of gum.

  Then there's jpg images and mpeg video- the internet and HDTV wouldn't be possible
if it wasn't for highly sophisticated compression technologies.

  All I'm saying is that for what I do, wav is easier for ME to work with, now TB HD's
and multi-core CPU's are as common as door knobs. If I want to convert a file, there's a ton
of utilities available...

  I'm waiting for them to MPEG human DNA...

[BlinkenLights]

mp3 is lossy.. james it talking about lossless compression. FLAC and RLE for that matter is lossless but still compression. even if we get 50% compression, thats great. Laser signals have TONS of repeating samples in them so using RLE on each channel then stringing them together would make for pretty good compression. and decompressing them on the other end would be cake...

[meandean]

 X-Y is a bit fragile and needs lossless, but I suspect color could be crammed way down.

[James]

The color channels is where you will find the most redundant information. X & Y will be redundant at every dwell point and one or the other at every horizontal or vertical line. This will only be true for purely digitally generated signals. Waves made by recording the analog outputs of a DAC will be WAY more random.

James. 

[Fanny Pack]

I wasn't advocating using MP3.  I was only using it as an example of how/why compression is very useful.  Stringing the channels would not be a smart way to do it since you would have to load the entire file in order to play it.   

[James]

Serializing the data by channels is fine. All you need to do is write code to translate it back to wave. You don't play the compressed file directly.

James. 

[Fanny Pack]

I guess so if you don't care about delays while loading or using a huge amount of memory.

[BlinkenLights]

the comressed files are for storage and transfer not playback. There is no need to store compressed files as drive space is very cheap. on the other hand as long as the decompression routine knew where the beginning of each channel was (and it should because that info can be stgored in the header) there would be no problem streaming the decompression

[Fanny Pack]

the comressed files are for storage and transfer not playback. There is no need to store compressed files as drive space is very cheap. on the other hand as long as the decompression routine knew where the beginning of each channel was (and it should because that info can be stgored in the header) there would be no problem streaming the decompression

If they aren't for playback then how do you play them back?  They have to get from compressed to decompressed somehow.  And that takes time, especially when it is 8 channels of WAV data at 44khz... Playing while decompressing is no problem if your routine is optimized but you can't have your streams stuck together front to back or your harddrive is going to thrash like a banshee as you stream it.  Nothing kills a computers perceived performance like a thrashing harddrive.  While what you are talking about will work, it will be slow.  If you want to create any kind of playlist where another show starts immediately after another show ends you have to be able to do things snappy.