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A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

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Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#31

Post by batou »

Spooky23 wrote: post #20
terminado wrote: post #2

If you're going to master an original work in a digital format, and it's going to be a terabyte of anything, why MP3 and not FLAC? Figure at a bitrate of 128 kbps, and a sample rate of 44.1 Khz, an MP3 1 million bytes in size usually clocks in at close to 1 minute of playback. With those statistics in mind, a ballpark figure of 2 years of noise is a reasonable estimate, and that's pretty close to the 711.5 days they…

For the true audiophile looking to appreciate the noise in the exact manner that the artist intended, the distortions introduced into the harmonic balance by MP3 make for a completely different and less organic experience.

I'll sell you some magic beans to put in a bowl in your listening room for $250 that will fix that.

(No shit - someone actually sells those)

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#32

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

batou wrote: post #31
Spooky23 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the true audiophile looking to appreciate the noise in the exact manner that the artist intended, the distortions introduced into the harmonic balance by MP3 make for a completely different and less organic experience.

I'll sell you some magic beans to put in a bowl in your listening room for $250 that will fix that. (No shit - someone actually sells those)

Someone actually bought those.

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#33

Post by dredmorbius »

lultimouomo wrote: post #29
JTon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's lossless, then it'll handle noise the same as the raw wav file. Am I missing something?

I'm guessing he meant that FLAC could actually inflate the file size (which is very probable).

Probably, but not by much -- you'd add the size of the data header. Depending on the compression block size, that could be repeated multiply to the file as a whole.

But yes, compressing random values makes little sense. Doing it losslessly increases data size. Doing it lossily decreases randomness.

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#34

Post by dredmorbius »

ild wrote: post #13
asn0 wrote: post #7

Another data source for /dev/random?

/dev/random will take forever; too slow.

I believe asn0 was suggesting this as a seed / input to /dev/random, not an output.

The lossy compression (and apparent algorithmic errors) make this a fairly poor choice of random noise input.

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#35

Post by nitrogen »

dredmorbius wrote: post #33
lultimouomo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing he meant that FLAC could actually inflate the file size (which is very probable).

Probably, but not by much -- you'd add the size of the data header. Depending on the compression block size, that could be repeated multiply to the file as a whole. But yes, compressing random values makes little sense. Doing it losslessly increases data size. Doing it lossily decreases randomness.

If the samples don't occupy the full range, then a Huffman table or related encoding could reduce the storage requirements. Ignoring encoding overhead, at most ~12 bits per sample are needed if everything works as the author intended, or ~14.8 bits using the range from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9272071

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#36

Post by nitrogen »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #22
terminado wrote: post #2

If you're going to master an original work in a digital format, and it's going to be a terabyte of anything, why MP3 and not FLAC? Figure at a bitrate of 128 kbps, and a sample rate of 44.1 Khz, an MP3 1 million bytes in size usually clocks in at close to 1 minute of playback. With those statistics in mind, a ballpark figure of 2 years of noise is a reasonable estimate, and that's pretty close to the 711.5 days they…

If you're going to author it, why not include just a few quadrillion \x00 characters every so often in a comment field (or whatever the equivalent is for mp3)? I mean, FLAC proves that people for some reason cherish wasted storage space, especially when that storage space is used for meaningless content that they can't actually hear. My scheme does that, only bigger.

There are audible sounds that MP3 simply cannot encode correctly. One example is in a song by Planet Funk (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3166937). However, better lossy formats shouldn't have this problem.

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#37

Post by petecooper »

batou wrote: post #31
Spooky23 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the true audiophile looking to appreciate the noise in the exact manner that the artist intended, the distortions introduced into the harmonic balance by MP3 make for a completely different and less organic experience.

I'll sell you some magic beans to put in a bowl in your listening room for $250 that will fix that. (No shit - someone actually sells those)

See also: http://wathifi.com

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#38

Post by kstenerud »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #22
terminado wrote: post #2

If you're going to master an original work in a digital format, and it's going to be a terabyte of anything, why MP3 and not FLAC? Figure at a bitrate of 128 kbps, and a sample rate of 44.1 Khz, an MP3 1 million bytes in size usually clocks in at close to 1 minute of playback. With those statistics in mind, a ballpark figure of 2 years of noise is a reasonable estimate, and that's pretty close to the 711.5 days they…

If you're going to author it, why not include just a few quadrillion \x00 characters every so often in a comment field (or whatever the equivalent is for mp3)? I mean, FLAC proves that people for some reason cherish wasted storage space, especially when that storage space is used for meaningless content that they can't actually hear. My scheme does that, only bigger.

It's also used for archival, so that a few years down the road when a new lossy format du jour (cough m4a) comes along, you're not left with the dilemma of converting one lossy format to another. Not to mention the fact that better quality encoders tend to come along over time.

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#39

Post by cozzyd »

maaku wrote: post #16
terminado wrote: post #2

If you're going to master an original work in a digital format, and it's going to be a terabyte of anything, why MP3 and not FLAC? Figure at a bitrate of 128 kbps, and a sample rate of 44.1 Khz, an MP3 1 million bytes in size usually clocks in at close to 1 minute of playback. With those statistics in mind, a ballpark figure of 2 years of noise is a reasonable estimate, and that's pretty close to the 711.5 days they…

Um, lossless compression (FLAC) is not going to handle random noise very well. You're probably better off with the raw WAV file.

Well, if they're cutting out "wimpy" numbers, there is a little to be gained from lossless compression.

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#40

Post by cozzyd »

CountSessine wrote: post #24
theandrewbailey wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you're making noise for noise sake, MP3 compression would make it less 'noisier'.

Yes - that's sort of what I was wondering. What effect would the MP3 compression have on the signal's entropy? He says, "MP3 format was chosen not only for its length..." which implies that he managed to compress it at least a bit - if so, there goes his entropy! I can't see how an MP3 compressor could make any headway against a really noisy signal using psycho-acoustic masking, so I'm guessing that any compression h…

I think the psychoacoustic masking would certainly degrade the spectrum... time for a little experiment!

Step 1) Generate 1 second of white noise in audacity, look at spectrum Step 2) export to mp3 Step 3) Import back, look at spectrum

Result: http://i.imgur.com/vZtZ6xE.png (left is original, right is mp3 roundtripped)

The mp3 (at least with this encoder) kills some of the high frequencies, so the noise is no longer white.

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