Sunday, April 6, 2008
New Codec Improves on MP3 by 1000x
Posted by Chris Gohlke in "Digital Home Software" @ 12:00 PM
"A quest by researchers at the University of Rochester resulted in a 20-second clarinet solo being compressed into less than a single kilobyte of data -- nearly 1,000 times smaller than a standard MP3 representing the same audio. In order to get this done, they created a model of the clarinet itself -- essentially replicating each aspect of the sound rather than creating thousands of digital samples from a performance of it. The resulting file occupies less than a kilobyte despite including all of the audio materials. By comparison, the same clarinet sample would occupy 32KB as a MIDI file."
Pretty interesting research, but there are so many variable that I doubt any model would capture all of them. As a result, I don't think this will catch on to replace MP3's for specific musical works, but would be ideal for reproducing other audio data.
Pretty interesting research, but there are so many variable that I doubt any model would capture all of them. As a result, I don't think this will catch on to replace MP3's for specific musical works, but would be ideal for reproducing other audio data.
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