4 ms·
I'm assuming this is due to the lower average signal level of symphonic recordings? Rock music is mastered closer to 0db due to the well-publicized loudness wa
by nerflad 10y ago
I'm assuming this is due to the lower average signal level of symphonic recordings? Rock music is mastered closer to 0db due to the well-publicized loudness war.
Obviously, this doesn't affect bandwidth in uncompressed audio, where every sample contains every bit, so filesize = bit-depth * sample-rate(hz) * T(seconds). But in compressed audio, average signal level can make a significant difference in filesize/bandwidth.
(Who would have thought a network would be a casualty of the loudness war... harhar)
- mikeash 10y agoI think rock is just less regular at a small scale. Consider a flute versus an electric guitar. The flute is at least somewhat like a pure tone which would be easy to compress, while an electric guitar is a mishmash of stuff that will look much more random on a sample by sample basis.
- nerflad 10y agoCool -- I didn't even consider the shape of the waveforms (sine-like for flute, saw/square-like for anything distorted) having an effect on the data, but now that you tell me... duh!
- mikeash 10y agoTo be clear, I surmised this from what I described, I didn't actually get down and poke at how the codec works on these different types of music. But I'm pretty sure that's what's going on. These lossless codecs work by attempting to predict the next sample from all the previous ones, and then encoding the difference between the prediction and reality. So a more regular waveform will compress better than a crazy-looking one. It's somewhat counterintuitive since rock music tends to be less complicated from a high-level human perspective.