[Mike Rivers]

On 4/20/2012 10:08 AM, Nil wrote:

Well, then use Broadcast WAV.

But it's twice the size of FLAC

I didn't think that size mattered these days.



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be operated without
a passing knowledge of computing, although it seems that it can be
operated without a passing knowledge of audio" - John Watkinson

Drop by http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com now and then

[geoff]

Mike Rivers wrote:
On 4/20/2012 10:08 AM, Nil wrote:

Well, then use Broadcast WAV.

But it's twice the size of FLAC

I didn't think that size mattered these days.

It shouldn't. And every 6 months about 50% less significant.

geoff

[Ron Capik[_3_]]

On 4/21/2012 10:16 PM, geoff wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:

I didn't think that size mattered these days.

It shouldn't. And every 6 months about 50% less significant.

geoff


I think you guys need to have a talk
with the women in your lives. 8-)
==

Later....
Ron Capik
--
[Sorry, the devil made me do it.]

[Marc Wielage[_2_]]

On Sat, 21 Apr 2012 08:29:33 -0700, Preben Friis wrote
(in article ):

Can you elaborate on this? The majority of recorders seem to agree on using
cue points with a chunk ID of 'cue ' according to EBU specifications.
------------------------------snip------------------------------

I'm speaking strictly of song title, artist, JPEG artwork, and other
consumer-type information. For normal timecode, scene, take, notes, and
related information, I think all the major players (Fostex, Marantz, Nagra,
Sound Devices, Tascam, Zaxcom, etc.) are compatible on BWF. But BWF is not
ideal as a music format for home use.

After months of my own tests, I came to the conclusion that lossless is
lossless, and AIFF = WAV = FLAC = ALAC and every other lossless format. The
key to me is how the CDs are ripped and where the metadata comes from, which
is a different problem than what the o.p. asked.

--MFW

[geoff]

Ron Capik wrote:
On 4/21/2012 10:16 PM, geoff wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:

I didn't think that size mattered these days.

It shouldn't. And every 6 months about 50% less significant.

geoff


I think you guys need to have a talk
with the women in your lives. 8-)
==

No, that side of things is sorted - she's had 4 kids, and size doesn't seem
to be an issue for either, in fact 'complimentary' ;-)

geoff

[geoff]

geoff wrote:
Ron Capik wrote:
On 4/21/2012 10:16 PM, geoff wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:

I didn't think that size mattered these days.

It shouldn't. And every 6 months about 50% less significant.

geoff


I think you guys need to have a talk
with the women in your lives. 8-)
==

No, that side of things is sorted - she's had 4 kids, and size
doesn't seem to be an issue for either, in fact 'complimentary' ;-)


Each of our houses has enough room for all the kids , if you were wondering
!

geoff

[[email protected]]

The SHN compression format, on the other hand,
does indeed save the markers.


But on the other hand nobody has ever heard of it, so unlikely to be
supported for long.


I believe SHN precedes FLAC by a number of years.

They are both based on an ingenous compression algorithim which was then
optimized for audio probabilities.

[Randy Yates[_2_]]

Mxsmanic writes:

I'd like to compress the WAV files in my archive to something lossless but
compressed. I've read about FLAC a lot, how widely is it supported? Or is
there another format that's better still? I'm using Sound Forge.

A nit, but FLAC *is* compressed - it's just losslessly compressed, as
opposed to lossy compression. I think you know that - just were a bit
sloppy in the title.
--
Randy Yates
Digital Signal Labs
http://www.digitalsignallabs.com

[Mxsmanic]

Randy Yates writes:

A nit, but FLAC *is* compressed - it's just losslessly compressed, as
opposed to lossy compression. I think you know that - just were a bit
sloppy in the title.

Yes, I was very sloppy in the title. Sorry about that.

[Randy Yates[_2_]]

Mxsmanic writes:

Randy Yates writes:

A nit, but FLAC *is* compressed - it's just losslessly compressed, as
opposed to lossy compression. I think you know that - just were a bit
sloppy in the title.

Yes, I was very sloppy in the title. Sorry about that.

Cool. And I also recommend FLAC - been using it for several years.
Seeing the evolution of hard drive space to the TB range, and knowing
that quality matters to me, I can say in retrospect it was a good
choice.
--
Randy Yates
Digital Signal Labs
http://www.digitalsignallabs.com

[Mxsmanic]

Randy Yates writes:

Cool. And I also recommend FLAC - been using it for several years.
Seeing the evolution of hard drive space to the TB range, and knowing
that quality matters to me, I can say in retrospect it was a good
choice.

Thanks, that's reassuring. I was just looking for a lossless format that is
likely to be around as long as WAV. It sounds like FLAC is widely used enough
to have some sort of perennity.

[geoff]

Mxsmanic wrote:
Randy Yates writes:

Cool. And I also recommend FLAC - been using it for several years.
Seeing the evolution of hard drive space to the TB range, and knowing
that quality matters to me, I can say in retrospect it was a good
choice.

Thanks, that's reassuring. I was just looking for a lossless format
that is likely to be around as long as WAV. It sounds like FLAC is
widely used enough to have some sort of perennity.

asLTHOUGH THERE ARE OTHERS, i SUSPECT flac WILL HAVE THE LONGEVITY.

GEOFF

Oooops capslock.

[Mike Rivers]

On 5/15/2012 10:27 PM, Mxsmanic wrote:

Thanks, that's reassuring. I was just looking for a lossless format that is
likely to be around as long as WAV. It sounds like FLAC is widely used enough
to have some sort of perennity.

And just how long do you expect WAV to be around? If you
want permanence, get it in writing.

"Sort of perennity" is a good way to look at it. You'll have
it for as long as you care about it, but you may realize
that eventually, when you don't have it any more (like you
no longer have anything that will play WAV or FLAC or a SATA
hard drive) you no longer care about it.



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Trevor]

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
...
And just how long do you expect WAV to be around?

I bet I'll be able to convert .wav files into anything else that takes it's
place for as long as I'm alive, and probably anybody else living today for
that matter. That's the great thing about uncompressed digital, easy peasy
to write a conversion program for a new data format/file container, without
loss.


"Sort of perennity" is a good way to look at it. You'll have it for as
long as you care about it, but you may realize that eventually, when you
don't have it any more (like you no longer have anything that will play
WAV or FLAC or a SATA hard drive) you no longer care about it.

Well obviously you need to copy all data to new media before your hard
drives are no longer readable for whatever reason.
If you don't, then as you say, you no longer care about it.

Trevor.

[William Sommerwerck]

And just how long do you expect WAV to be around?

I bet I'll be able to convert .wav files into anything else that
takes its place for as long as I'm alive, and probably anybody
else living today, for that matter.

How about the next 10,000 years, give or take a couple of hundred thousand?


That's the great thing about uncompressed digital, easy to
write a conversion program for a new data format/file container,
without loss.

Or lossy-compressed, too. (Additional loss might occur when converting to
another lossy-compression scheme.)

Digital data is highly fungible. The idea that, even a couple of thousand
years from now, the contents of WAV files (or //any//other kind of file)
won't be recoverable, is absurd.

[Randy Yates[_2_]]

"William Sommerwerck" writes:

And just how long do you expect WAV to be around?

I bet I'll be able to convert .wav files into anything else that
takes its place for as long as I'm alive, and probably anybody
else living today, for that matter.

How about the next 10,000 years, give or take a couple of hundred thousand?


That's the great thing about uncompressed digital, easy to
write a conversion program for a new data format/file container,
without loss.

Or lossy-compressed, too. (Additional loss might occur when converting to
another lossy-compression scheme.)

Digital data is highly fungible. The idea that, even a couple of thousand
years from now, the contents of WAV files (or //any//other kind of file)
won't be recoverable, is absurd.

In celebration of FLAC, here's a good oldie and an old goodie:

http://www.digitalsignallabs.com/flac.flac
--
Randy Yates
Digital Signal Labs
http://www.digitalsignallabs.com

[Mxsmanic]

Mike Rivers writes:

And just how long do you expect WAV to be around?

About as long as .TXT or .JPG files, which is to say, a very long time.

"Sort of perennity" is a good way to look at it. You'll have
it for as long as you care about it, but you may realize
that eventually, when you don't have it any more (like you
no longer have anything that will play WAV or FLAC or a SATA
hard drive) you no longer care about it.

I haven't looked at the FLAC file format, but the WAV format is so simple that
you can write something fairly quickly that will play it.

[Mxsmanic]

William Sommerwerck writes:

How about the next 10,000 years, give or take a couple of hundred thousand?

A WAV file is essentially just a string of digital samples, so it will be
readable even after the specs are gone, for anyone who cares to write a small
program to read it.

Or lossy-compressed, too.

Compressed files are much, much harder to figure out. Lossy compression is
even worse. Compression is akin to encryption in terms of information theory.

[geoff]

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
...
On 5/15/2012 10:27 PM, Mxsmanic wrote:

Thanks, that's reassuring. I was just looking for a lossless format that
is
likely to be around as long as WAV. It sounds like FLAC is widely used
enough
to have some sort of perennity.

And just how long do you expect WAV to be around? If you want permanence,
get it in writing.

"Sort of perennity" is a good way to look at it. You'll have it for as
long as you care about it, but you may realize that eventually, when you
don't have it any more (like you no longer have anything that will play
WAV or FLAC or a SATA hard drive) you no longer care about it.

WAV ( aka Linear PCM) though a file format, is also pretty much a
fundamental level of physics wrt digital technology.

A technological equivalent of suggesting that 'speech' will go out of date.

geoff

[geoff]

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
Mike Rivers writes:

And just how long do you expect WAV to be around?

About as long as .TXT or .JPG files, which is to say, a very long time.

"Sort of perennity" is a good way to look at it. You'll have
it for as long as you care about it, but you may realize
that eventually, when you don't have it any more (like you
no longer have anything that will play WAV or FLAC or a SATA
hard drive) you no longer care about it.

I haven't looked at the FLAC file format, but the WAV format is so simple
that
you can write something fairly quickly that will play it.

Unless I'm wrong, I think FLAC possibly evolved from the WavZip, a Zip
algorithmn tuned to the audio.

geoff

[Mike Rivers]

On 5/16/2012 9:11 AM, William Sommerwerck wrote:

Digital data is highly fungible. The idea that, even a couple of thousand
years from now, the contents of WAV files (or //any//other kind of file)
won't be recoverable, is absurd.


I don't think it's absurd at all. I can't imagine that the
documentation for the WAV format, or a data reduction
algorithm, will be around for a thousand years. Unless we
get really stupid (depends on how long Facebook lasts) in
the next thousand years, I suppos it would be possible with
enough time and trials, to reverse engineer the process from
the data, but people like me aren't going to do that. The
material would have to be really important to spend much on
recovering it.



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Mike Rivers]

On 5/16/2012 2:58 PM, Mxsmanic wrote:

And just how long do you expect WAV to be around?
About as long as .TXT or .JPG files, which is to say, a very long time.

How can you justify that? Neither of them have been around
half the time of a phonograph record or analog recording
tape yet. We can still play those because it's easy. But if
I were to hand you an 8" floppy disk, what would you have to
do in order to read it? Sure, there are probably still some
drives in computer museums (and in my friend Don's storage
shed) but you'd pretty much have to build a computer around
it, which means figuring out the hardware interface, for
starters. Then figure out how the data is written, what bits
are the data you want to recover and what bits are checksums
and parity bits. It's not a trivial task, and most people
aren't going to take that much trouble to save what might be
a musical recording that hasn't been preserved in some other
medium.

I haven't looked at the FLAC file format, but the WAV format is so simple that
you can write something fairly quickly that will play it.

Your presumption is that you'll know what a WAV file is. I
predict that documentation, and perhaps even history, will
be lost in a couple of hundred years. That's the way things
have been going in the computer age.




--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Frank]

On Thu, 17 May 2012 08:56:22 +1200, in 'rec.audio.pro',
in article FLAC or other uncompressed formats, which is best?,
"geoff" wrote:

WAV ( aka Linear PCM) though a file format, is also pretty much a
fundamental level of physics wrt digital technology.

Okay, but remember that a .wav file can quite validly contain other
than LPCM audio data. I have perfectly valid .wav files with MPEG-1
Layer III audio data, Dolby Digital AC-3 audio data, Sony ATRAC audio
data, etc.

To reverse engineer it, you would need to know the values of the
format tags, such as 0x0055 for MP3 and 0x2000 for AC-3, so as to know
which codec to use in order to decode the audio data.

And of course, you would have to know where the RIFF header ended and
the audio data began.

It would also be nice to how many channels of audio data were
contained within the file. I have .wav files, as I'm sure many people
here do, with a single channel, two channels, six channels (5.1
surround), etc.

And don't forget about BWF (EBU Broadcast Wave Format) .wav files that
contain time code.

--
Frank, Independent Consultant, New York, NY
[Please remove 'nojunkmail.' from address to reply via e-mail.]
Read Frank's thoughts on HDV at http://www.humanvalues.net/hdv/
[also covers AVCHD (including AVCCAM & NXCAM) and XDCAM EX].

[Les Cargill[_4_]]

Mike Rivers wrote:
On 5/16/2012 9:11 AM, William Sommerwerck wrote:

Digital data is highly fungible. The idea that, even a couple of thousand
years from now, the contents of WAV files (or //any//other kind of file)
won't be recoverable, is absurd.


I don't think it's absurd at all. I can't imagine that the documentation
for the WAV format, or a data reduction algorithm, will be around for a
thousand years.

Why not? Unless it just goes completely obsolete, it'll be used.

Unless we get really stupid (depends on how long
Facebook lasts) in the next thousand years, I suppos it would be
possible with enough time and trials, to reverse engineer the process
from the data, but people like me aren't going to do that. The material
would have to be really important to spend much on recovering it.


--
Les Cargill

[Trevor]

"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
And just how long do you expect WAV to be around?

I bet I'll be able to convert .wav files into anything else that
takes its place for as long as I'm alive, and probably anybody
else living today, for that matter.

How about the next 10,000 years, give or take a couple of hundred
thousand?

You think anybody will care in 10,000 years?
(I doubt there will even be anybody left to care)


That's the great thing about uncompressed digital, easy to
write a conversion program for a new data format/file container,
without loss.

Or lossy-compressed, too. (Additional loss might occur when converting to
another lossy-compression scheme.)

Exactly, do YOU want that?


Digital data is highly fungible. The idea that, even a couple of thousand
years from now, the contents of WAV files (or //any//other kind of file)
won't be recoverable, is absurd.

Not at all. Assuming anybody cared, (and is left to care) they will simply
copy to some really archival storage when one is invented. Actually we have
some now, but not common enough or cheap enough to be useful.

Trevor.

[Trevor]

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
...
A WAV file is essentially just a string of digital samples, so it will be
readable even after the specs are gone, for anyone who cares to write a
small
program to read it.

But suppose you had no idea what it was. And even if you managed to decode
it into a string of values, would you know how to build a D/A converter?

I pose a similar question about analog magnetic tape. The difference there
is that if you know what it is, it's very easy to convert what might be
left of the magnetic domains into audio.

And why would you suppose they know what one is and not the other, and why
would they know the more obsolete one rather than the newer? The way such
knowledge is being archived these days, the only reason they would not know
is when there's nobody left to care anyway.

Trevor.

[Trevor]

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
...
And just how long do you expect WAV to be around?
About as long as .TXT or .JPG files, which is to say, a very long time.

How can you justify that? Neither of them have been around half the time
of a phonograph record or analog recording tape yet. We can still play
those because it's easy. But if I were to hand you an 8" floppy disk, what
would you have to do in order to read it? Sure, there are probably still
some drives in computer museums (and in my friend Don's storage shed) but
you'd pretty much have to build a computer around it, which means figuring
out the hardware interface, for starters. Then figure out how the data is
written, what bits are the data you want to recover and what bits are
checksums and parity bits. It's not a trivial task, and most people aren't
going to take that much trouble to save what might be a musical recording
that hasn't been preserved in some other medium.

Now you are simply changing the whole argument from one of file formats,
back to the perennial argument of physical file storage.


I haven't looked at the FLAC file format, but the WAV format is so simple
that
you can write something fairly quickly that will play it.

Your presumption is that you'll know what a WAV file is. I predict that
documentation, and perhaps even history, will be lost in a couple of
hundred years. That's the way things have been going in the computer age.

Actually the way things are going these days is that nearly all human
knowledge is stored on current servers somewhere, which are regularly
replaced and backed up as necessary. There is no reason short of nuclear
holocost that such knowledge will simply be erased. Especially given the
continual reduction in data storage costs.

Trevor.

[geoff]

Mxsmanic wrote:
geoff writes:

How do you get music from a pile of dust ?

You don't. But both analog and digital recordings end up as dust,
because they are both recorded on the same physical media.

Really ?!

geoff

[Mike Rivers]

On 5/16/2012 11:41 PM, Trevor wrote:

And why would you suppose they know what one is and not the other, and why
would they know the more obsolete one rather than the newer?

I don't expect the history or technical principles of
magnetic tape or a phonograph record will necessarily
survive longer than that of anything digital, but if you
have some idea of what it is, it's pretty easy to figure out
how to play it. There isn't very much that you need to try
before you can get SOME sound out of it - and from that
point your ears will tell you how to refine it. Assuming
that anyone 1000 years from now knows what today's music
sounds like.


The way such
knowledge is being archived these days, the only reason they would not know
is when there's nobody left to care anyway.

That's a real problem. At some point nobody will remember
the principle of sampling, but I suspect that how magnetic
fields work will continue to be studied in whatever the
equivalent of 8th grade science class is in the future.
Today there is some interest in hearing what Enrico Caruso
or Robert Johnson or Hank Williams sounded like. But will
they in Y3K? And if they don't care what those guys sound
like, will they care what Michael Jackson sounds like?

We can speculate about either aspect of retrieving archives,
but without both, they'll remain unheard.



"Impossible" is a strong word, and I'm not saying that
nobody will ever figure out a CD 1000 years from now, but
there indeed may not be anyone who cares enough and is well
enough funded.



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Randy Yates[_2_]]

(Don Pearce) writes:

On Wed, 16 May 2012 21:00:40 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote:

William Sommerwerck writes:

How about the next 10,000 years, give or take a couple of hundred thousand?

A WAV file is essentially just a string of digital samples, so it will be
readable even after the specs are gone, for anyone who cares to write a small
program to read it.

Or lossy-compressed, too.

Compressed files are much, much harder to figure out. Lossy compression is
even worse. Compression is akin to encryption in terms of information theory.

A Wav file can actually be almost anything. Your programme has no idea
what it might have to decode until it reads the RIFF.

typedef enum
{
PCM = 0x0001,
ADPCM = 0x0002,
IBM_CVSD = 0x0005,
ALAW_G711 = 0x0006,
MULAW_G711 = 0x0007,
ADPCM_OKI = 0x0010,
ADPCM_IMA = 0x0011,
ADPCM_SIERRA = 0x0013,
ADPCM_G723 = 0x0014,
DIGISTD = 0x0015,
DIGIFIX = 0x0016,
SONARC = 0x0021,
ADPCM_YAMAHA = 0x0020,
DSPGROUP_TRUESPEECH = 0x0022,
ECHOSC1 = 0x0023,
AUDIOFILE_AF36 = 0x0024,
APTX = 0x0025,
AUDIOFILE_AF10 = 0x0026,
DOLBY_AC2 = 0x0030,
GSM610 = 0x0031,
ADPCME_ANTEX = 0x0033,
VQPLC_CONTROL_RES = 0x0034,
DIGIREAL = 0x0035,
ADPCM_DIGI = 0x0036,
CONTROL_RES_CR10 = 0x0037,
VBXADPCM_NMS = 0x0038,
ADPCM_G721 = 0x0040,
MPEG = 0x0050,
ADPCM_CREATIVE = 0x0200,
FM_TOWNS_SND = 0x0300,
GSM_OLI = 0x1000,
ADPCM_OLI = 0x1001,
CELP_OLI = 0x1002,
SBC_OLI = 0x1003,
OPR_OLI = 0x1004,
} SAMPLE_T;

--
Randy Yates
Digital Signal Labs
http://www.digitalsignallabs.com

[Mike Rivers]

On 5/16/2012 11:48 PM, Trevor wrote:

Now you are simply changing the whole argument from one of file formats,
back to the perennial argument of physical file storage.

The two really can't be separated. There are already tales
of digital magnetic tapes that can't be played now, though
this seems like it's more along the line that nobody cares
enough.

Actually the way things are going these days is that nearly all human
knowledge is stored on current servers somewhere, which are regularly
replaced and backed up as necessary.

But some of them aren't. rec.music.makers.synth has been
around longer than Google. Can you find my posts about the
first NAMM show I attended, 1988, I believe. I can't. I
Nobody archived that, unless it's in someone's private
collection. I didn't archive it myself because I figured
that the newsgroups and their content would be around for a
very long time. And if I did save the text files, they'd
probably be on an ST506 disk drive, backed up on a 5-1/4"
floppy. I still have a working computer with 5-1/4" and
3-1/2" floppy drives, at least I think it still works. But
I'm not planning to preserve it forever.

There is no reason short of nuclear
holocost that such knowledge will simply be erased. Especially given the
continual reduction in data storage costs.

While data storage cost for media may have dropped, we're
putting more data in smaller containers, which means that
the risk of greater loss with smaller mishaps is greater. So
refreshing the archive must be done more frequently. Even
though this can be automated, it still involves labor, and
that's getting more expensive.

And what makes you think there won't be a nuclear holocaust?
Or a great electromagnetic pulse? The LIbrary of Congress
has a pretty good holocaust-resistant storage facility for
film, video, and recorded sound, but they don't have
everything, and they have to be selective as to what they
add to that archive. .



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Mike Rivers]

On 5/16/2012 9:42 PM, Frank wrote:

Okay, but remember that a .wav file can quite validly contain other
than LPCM audio data. I have perfectly valid .wav files with MPEG-1
Layer III audio data, Dolby Digital AC-3 audio data, Sony ATRAC audio
data, etc.

There's a common example of this in the DAW world. Questions
about why a WAV file recorded in one program (or on one
recorder) won't import into this or that DAW? The usual
answer is "open it in Audacity and export it as a WAV" with
no understanding of why this works (though, it often does).

You may think you're archiving a file, but you may have
inadvertently done it in a format that will become
unsupported sooner than others. Professional archivists have
their club and secret handshake and try to limit the chaos.

And don't forget about BWF (EBU Broadcast Wave Format) .wav files that
contain time code.

Wouldn't it be nice to know exactly when something was
recorded even if you can't find the track sheet?



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Mike Rivers]

On 5/16/2012 10:07 PM, Les Cargill wrote:
Mike Rivers wrote:

I can't imagine that the
documentation
for the WAV format, or a data reduction algorithm, will be
around for a
thousand years.

Why not? Unless it just goes completely obsolete, it'll be
used.

And that's exactly my point. I believe that it will be
completely obsolete in a thousand years. Don't ask me to
justify that but I've seen a lot of things become obsolete
in my lifetime.




--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[William Sommerwerck]

Mike has a point about people "forgetting" how particular technologies
work -- or even what they were for -- but no one is going to forget the
sampling theorem, or any of hundreds and scientific or technical principles.

A couple of millenia from now, an engineer or scientist would have no
trouble figuring out what a phonograph record was, or how it worked, in two
or three seconds -- even if he or she had never heard of such a thing. Any
more than you or I would be the least confused about what cuneiform tablet
was for.

[William Sommerwerck]

Is "holocost" what you're charged to use the holodeck?

[Arny Krueger[_4_]]

"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...

A couple of millenia from now, an engineer or scientist would have no
trouble figuring out what a phonograph record was, or how it worked, in
two
or three seconds -- even if he or she had never heard of such a thing. Any
more than you or I would be the least confused about what cuneiform tablet
was for.

Really? We are currently in the midst of a tremendous shift from physical
mechanisms to software that could not have been imagined in say, 1930. That
was 80 years ago. 200 years from now, can we even imagine what the ongoing
shift will be from/to?

[Mxsmanic]

Mike Rivers writes:

But suppose you had no idea what it was.

The format is so simple that I should think it wouldn't be hard to figure out
what it is, especially when the file extension is WAV.

And even if you managed to decode it into a string of values, would you know
how to build a D/A converter?

Sure. It's very basic stuff.

I pose a similar question about analog magnetic tape. The
difference there is that if you know what it is, it's very
easy to convert what might be left of the magnetic domains
into audio.

One of the advantages of analog. But in the future, converting from digital to
analog won't be significantly harder.

The problematic formats are the ones that are more complex: those that use
compression, for example. Compression greatly reduces the redundancy of data
(by design), which makes it a lot harder to guess the nature of the data that
has been compressed. Just looking at the raw data from a WAV will suggest
digitization of a waveform, but looking at raw data from a compressed file may
not immediately suggest anything.

[Mxsmanic]

Mike Rivers writes:

At some point nobody will remember the principle of sampling ...

That would surprise me. It's so elementary that it's self-evident. And what
would replace it?

[Mxsmanic]

Arny Krueger writes:

Really? We are currently in the midst of a tremendous shift from physical
mechanisms to software that could not have been imagined in say, 1930.

Software had already been imagined 100 years before 1930. Babbage incorporated
the concept into his Analytical Engine. Vannevar Bush even foresaw the Web in
a 1945 paper. There's really nothing new under the sun.

That was 80 years ago. 200 years from now, can we even imagine what the ongoing
shift will be from/to?

Yes. The main problem with predicting the future, though, is that we tend to
assume that past trends always reflect future trends, so that we predict
change in the wrong places.

However, a technical nerd transported to the present day from 1930 would grasp
practically all modern technology very quickly indeed. It's not magic.

[Mxsmanic]

Don Pearce writes:

A Wav file can actually be almost anything. Your programme has no idea
what it might have to decode until it reads the RIFF.

The pattern of the raw data in the file, as well as its extension, very
strongly suggests samples of a waveform.