Dateiliste

A few more people got killed for texting and driving at the same time. So I finaly decided to write an article for people's safety on the road with any internet communication device. And to warn people that it is also extremely dangerous. So please watch the road and if you have to text, pull over along the side of the road and do it. But please, be careful.

And if you see somebody driving while texting, avoid them at all cost. These people are road hazards. Anyway, stay safe on the roads. It is very important.

    Have a nice day.

A heartfelt tribute to the most amazing person I've ever known.

Si vous êtes curieux de savoir de quoi il s'agit, lisez la suite.

FLAC files are lossless compressed copies of wave files. That about tells it - you can save gigabytes of hard drive space by using FLAC files in a mix. But there's another important advantage to FLAC files - as they're smaller, there's a lot less that has to be read in from the hard drive. There's little CPU overhead for FLAC decoding, so if your mixing app can handle FLAC, the FLAC files are to be used. The smaller size of FLAC files means during live mix playback, at least twice as many tracks can be played as with wave files.

The only downside to FLAC is that it's usually 24-bit integer, not 32-bit float. This does cut  out a bit of "air", and definition, but as 24-bit is vastly superior to 16-bit, and most mixing is done in 32-bit float, there's more point to using 24-bit FLAC files than trying to save HD space with 16-bit waves.

A shareware DAW (digital audio workstation) with uncrippled functionality is REAPER. It supports FLAC (and .ogg) for import/export and mixing.

This little article deals with how to convert a music piece to 22 KHz with as little damage as possible.

First of all, a simple formula. Detail limit of a sampled format is sampling frequency/8. In scientific sampling, a sampled signal is considered accurate as long as the sampling frequency is 8 times the frequency of the signal to be sampled. This is because 8 coordinates are required to describe a sine wave: 4 positive, 4 negative.

Hence, by the way, you need 160 KHz sampling to accurately represent 20 KHz (so much for CD audio's claims of "22 KHz bandwidth" - 22 KHz, yeah, but for noise, not music, detail limit is much lower).

Thus: 44100 Hz (CD audio) divided by 8=5512.5 Hz. Enough for midrange, but there's already distortion in the treble and high frequencies. 22050 Hz (Descent 3 sampling format for music) divided by 8=2756.25 Hz. Not very detailed, is it?

So what happens when you go over the magical f/8 limit? Aliasing happens. Rectification distortion, foldover, etc. Everything becomes "squarish" (or more precisely, triangular). The minimum time frame also becomes 0.36 msec., which is slow (to human perception that sounds "stiffy", "woody").

And that tends to sound weird. Get an acoustic instrument record and downsample to 22050 Hz, then listen to what happens to treble and space harmonics. But never fear, for there are ways to smoothing out the damage.