digg

Join DiggAbout

The Digg Crew wants to hear your thoughts!
Please take our short survey about Digg and potential feature ideas.

Music File Compressed 1,000 Times Smaller than MP3

rochester.edu — The music, a 20-second clarinet solo, is encoded in less than a single kilobyte, and is made possible by two innovations: recreating in a computer both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player.

show profanity settings
expand all
  • geekchic, on 04/01/2008, -1/+81Back in the mists of time, a programmer wrote a basic version of Chess for the Sinclair ZX81 computer - in less than 1kb.
    • cosmikdebris, on 04/01/2008, -0/+28Moist eyes with the nostalgic memories.
    • Tehrooni, on 04/01/2008, -3/+2say what???
    • Chrisfromdevon, on 04/01/2008, -0/+35imagine how quick modern day machines would run if all code was normalized that efficiently!
      • ImperfectFreak, on 04/01/2008, -6/+2Really slow probably. One of the biggest trade offs in computing is size for speed and vice versa.
        • GliTCH82, on 04/02/2008, -0/+3You guys are living in a dream world. Programs are much more complex today they were years ago, there's absolutely nothing wrong with API abstraction in terms of performance or speed. We have the processing power today, we can cut corners to save time.
          • Durinthal, on 04/02/2008, -0/+4Programmer time is more valuable than processor time.
          • BoneheadFarker, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1@Durinthal

            ...today. Back then, not so much.
    • Dubbsacc, on 04/01/2008, -0/+8Dugg for mists of time.
    • mlavergn, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9I had a ZX81, and to think people complain about the iPhone keyboard ... HA! We DREAMED of having a touch screen keyboard! We had to short the pins by hand, using our eyeballs to close the circuits ... and we were lucky! Fond memories of it though, here's the assembler source in case anybody wants to try to port it to X86 (joking): http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/
      • Sheff, on 04/02/2008, -0/+4I had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to get to school. J/K When I was a kid I had a black market Apple II built by a Japanese man who operated out of a basement shop in the Ginza. It was a genuine Apple case though because there was a score for the logo. Unfortunately, my parents didn't understand computers so they never bought me a disk drive(I wasn't 'advanced enough') to store any of my programs. I couldn't even save to a tape recorder successfully. Everything would be gone once the computer was turned off. But I do remember wishing for a Sinclair.
  • oduska, on 04/01/2008, -4/+296MIDI?
    • Drehmini, on 04/01/2008, -1/+71Agreed. If you compare the two samples you can most certainly tell one was computer generated.
      • Spottswood, on 04/01/2008, -7/+5Yeh it sounds like a fisherprice toy instrument. Epic fail
        • 47f0, on 04/01/2008, -0/+6No, your MIDI sounds like a toy - that's because the MIDI in most sound cards is a toy. Given a decent midi patch set (I.E. samples) you can get some very good music from MIDI.
        • Terr01, on 04/02/2008, -1/+4If your individual MIDI voices sound bad, first consider blaming the hardware or a cheap software substitute.

          Also, if your 3D first-person-shooter scene is chock-full of jaggies and displays in only 256 colors, first consider blaming the hardware or a cheap software substitute.
        • Spottswood, on 04/02/2008, -0/+2ahhhh i understands now thanks. My laptop is a piece of crap ^_^
          • Terr01, on 04/02/2008, -1/+3Well, it's not your fault: It doesn't make economic sense for most manufacturers to put in nice default hardware or software emulation of midi voices.

            But yeah, MIDI data is really just information like "Now do A grand piano, D sharp for one second." It's up to your particular computer to decide what that means--you could even change "Grand Piano" to be the sound of a quacking duck, which I suppose could be useful for an Aflac jingle but not much else.
      • alexpigment, on 04/01/2008, -1/+7Well, that may not be the case on this. I mean it's one instrument and they have all the time to study and reproduce THIS piece of music. On the other hand, there will NEVER be a converter for a standard multi-instrument song. Which is why the tag line on this is total *****.
        • theaceoffire, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1Computers are advancing farther and farther... I see no reason why music companies couldn't produce music using this method one day.
          • rootneg2, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1Computers may be getting faster and cheaper with more memory; but at a certain point you just run into basic limits imposed by information theory.

            People could certainly make music this way; but a teeny tiny file size will necessarily limit the amount of artistic and musical nuance you can articulate. Heck, I'm sure that there are some "experimental" or "indie" bands that *do* make music like this; I bet you can even find somebody, somewhere selling a CD of solely 8-bit beeping.

            Something like Shannon's law comes into play when you talk about very high compression rates. like this.
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon-Hartley_theor ...
    • Poltras, on 04/01/2008, -6/+27That's exactly what I was thinking. Isn't this just advanced MIDI replay? Is MIDI only used by professionals anymore that kiddies have forgotten about it?
      • asspants, on 04/01/2008, -10/+3I think the kiddies grew up and have become the professionals
        • MrESaulved, on 04/01/2008, -0/+7If only wishing made it so.
        • Spottswood, on 04/01/2008, -1/+1"Im mature!" says asspants :P
          the internet is serious business people
      • debuffplx, on 04/01/2008, -2/+18Digital Signal processing/ resynthesis != MIDI. MIDI is just a set of control codes that allow an instrument like the Korg triton to interact with note press or midi sequencig. The kiddies certainly haven't forgotten about it because it's essential to making Dnb, Dubstep, Trance or whatever. MIDI is still used every day from pro studios to some kid using fruity loops studio.
        • megaton, on 04/01/2008, -0/+13The resynthesis engine certainly isn't what's fitting in 1KB of storage!

          I think his point was that the control data that's being stored for the synthesis is ~MIDI.
        • soomprimal, on 04/01/2008, -1/+2For all intents and purposes this is MIDI. It is a set of computer instructions playing through a synthesizer. It's MIDI.
          • heinousjay, on 04/02/2008, -0/+3Except that MIDI is a well defined protocol (and actually, nothing more) and this doesn't conform to that protocol. So, while in certain respects, it is similar to MIDI, it is not MIDI.
          • megaton, on 04/02/2008, -0/+2Really? Which of the components can't conform to the literally hundreds of control codes in MIDI?
    • TheCheeks, on 04/01/2008, -2/+32Was gunna post the same thing but ill just digg you up instead. Sure, probably a more "advanced" MIDI but same concept unless I'm missing something.
    • Fr0stbyte124, on 04/01/2008, -3/+8This is far better than MIDI. Much more control over the end sound.
      • asspants, on 04/01/2008, -11/+2got something to back that claim up?
        • PiGuy, on 04/01/2008, -0/+7RTFA?
        • prgmctan, on 04/01/2008, -0/+5did you read the article?

          Edit: PiGuy beat me to it
        • asspants, on 04/01/2008, -16/+2I did, and I also listened to the two audio files, and the "end sound" sounds like *****.
          Also, ***** you, john mccain supporter.
          • asspants, on 04/01/2008, -5/+4no really, i get it. i honestly do, but what i meant was the technology demo they've given is not so impressive.
          • PiGuy, on 04/01/2008, -2/+6Classy
          • norman619, on 04/01/2008, -0/+7They lied to you. Politics doesn't really go with everything.
    • rblancarte, on 04/01/2008, -0/+26certainly sounds like it. Maybe this is supposed to be some sort of April Fools?
    • Yazilliclick, on 04/01/2008, -3/+4April Fools? Yes indeed.
      • Elliuotatar, on 04/01/2008, -1/+2If this was an april fools then the link to the computer generated version would just have been a midi file.
        • Yazilliclick, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3No it would have been to a wave file of what might have been midi music so that silly people like yourself would be foolish and fall for it. Ignoring the fact that midi and this has nothing to do with music compression sentences like ""Maybe the future of music recording lies in reproducing performers and not recording them," says Bocko." should be a dead giveaway.
    • jeriqo, on 04/01/2008, -1/+8MIDI doesn't make any sound, it has to be coupled to either a sampler or a syntheziser.
      I still don't get it.
      Sure a 20MB syntheziser can produce thousands of hours of music, so what's new?
      • pixelguru, on 04/01/2008, -0/+4Yes, midi just says "note number 34 on at this velocity at this time". The kind of modeling they're talking about here is modeling the acoustics of the instrument and then feeding it the precise parameters of the performance. It's also my understanding that while the actual file the performance is saved as is very small, there's a crap load of code and data needed to decode it back into music... and then it only sounds as good as your instrument modeling - in this case, not very impressive for only a single instrument (and a clarinet is little more than a square profile waveform).
    • norman619, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2Exactly. Dugg
    • tikal2k, on 04/01/2008, -1/+0Dugg for the LULZ

      You DO realize that they have MIDI controllers for clarinets now, right?
    • linagee, on 04/01/2008, -2/+2Wrong. MOD ftw. MOD blows MIDI out of the water. (Imagine midi on steroids where music voices are included in the file.) I don't think this is an April fools joke, as there is actually a format that does what they say, it just never became that popular. (Who knows why??)
      • culbeda, on 04/03/2008, -0/+2I did love MOD files, but I don't think most of the kiddies on here even remember MOD files. I used to have an awesome collection of them up on my BBS to give people an idea of how old they are. And hell, I never even owned an Amiga.
    • measuredincm, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1Yeah, I was cracking up when I realized this was MIDI!
    • culbeda, on 04/03/2008, -0/+1Nah, my Roland MT-32 sounded MUCH better than that. Thank you, Sierra games!
  • AndrewDB, on 04/01/2008, -5/+58Oh boy the RIAA is going to have a field day with this technology..
    • narcofiche, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1Guess I won't be replacing that 1GB Shuffle for another 160GB iPod.
    • alexanEmpire, on 04/02/2008, -0/+3***** THE RIAA!
  • jbroderick, on 04/01/2008, -7/+2But what does it all mean Basil?
  • ryborg, on 04/01/2008, -3/+108 MIDI 2.0? Meh
    • Tayls, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1Yeah, more like MIDI 1.0. What matters most is the quality of sound, and the second recording seems so cheap and fake...funny considering you can make some amazing sounding orchestral recordings with Logic's MIDI patches.
      • elscorcho717, on 04/02/2008, -1/+1MIDI's been around since like 1983... i think 2.0 isn't a stretch
  • hermslice, on 04/01/2008, -5/+123april fools????
    • Frustian, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3I'm pretty sure it is, however it is from a University.
      To do something like that with more than one instrument in a song would take too much computing power for it to be usable.
    • fyrehart, on 04/01/2008, -3/+9Dunno if I'm just being retarded, but the wav file saved as 3.91MB...
      • powatom, on 04/01/2008, -2/+13That's because you don't have the software necessary to decode the 1kb file on your computer. So what they did is play the file through their special software, then just used something like Audacity to record the audio output as a .wav file. Kind of like holding a microphone up to a radio. You're not copying the audio information, you're just recording whatever comes out of the radio, as well as static and any ambient noise.

        Of course, it may just be an April Fool's joke, but what they're talking about is theoretically possible, at least. I'm kind of skeptical about the 1kb file size, but without fully understanding what exactly is in the file itself, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
    • Yazilliclick, on 04/01/2008, -0/+5Yes it most certainly is. The article was ok, but reading people on here taking it for real is better :)
    • stevenb486, on 04/01/2008, -1/+1Sadly I dont think its an april fool's. The professor quoted in the article actually does research on "physical modeling based music encoding"
    • KingGorilla, on 04/02/2008, -1/+1I don't know anymore
    • jguy584, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1I don't think so. It seems to me it isn't actually a sound file, its just instructions for the virtual player to play the virtual clarinet they made
  • debuffplx, on 04/01/2008, -2/+7resynthesis has been around for a long time. Virsyn's Posideon, disco DSP Vertigo, Camelon500 ect. All of them give more convincing results than this.
    • zarex, on 04/02/2008, -0/+2This is all based on Csound, which has been around since the 1970's. There was a net-specific version called "netsound" done at MIT in the 90's, which became part of the MPEG4 standard.

      Yes, exactly this technology is ALREADY PART OF THE MPEG4 STANDARD. Come on folks, let's give credit where it's due.
  • SkippyDoorknob, on 04/01/2008, -1/+65I half expected the sample audio to turn into a Rick Roll at some point
    • DeadlyCouncil, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Man, if only....
    • Spottswood, on 04/01/2008, -0/+4Whoa, that would have been the most elaborate rick roll ever
      epic pwnage heads rolling everywhere
      .....maybe next year
      • Elliuotatar, on 04/01/2008, -0/+4Uh you do know youtube is rickrolling every user there, don't you? That's the most epic rickroll ever. Maybe now rickrolling can die.
  • Starch, on 04/01/2008, -12/+2mmkay, so where the ***** is this music file for me to listen to?
    • ChzPlz, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2RTFA.
    • ssmith2k3, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1on the right of the page
    • gameforge, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1You'd need a player. But when they use their player and output a WAV, you're hearing basically exactly what you would if you had a player.

      You did see the links to the WAV files on the right, didn't you?
    • ExRe, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2I heard they play it for you in this program called "Anger Management". You should check it out.
  • Ganja420, on 04/01/2008, -1/+49WHOA THIS HAS BEEN AROUND SINCE 1991
  • BigManOnCampus, on 04/01/2008, -2/+14Good thing this can't be used to compress political speeches. Simulating the physics of those windbags is next to impossible.
  • narcofiche, on 04/01/2008, -1/+37I rarely sit and think about compression. Maybe I should start.
    Hmmm... Compression.
    • gameforge, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3Compression... Entropy.
      Entropy...
    • bobartig, on 04/01/2008, -1/+2This isn't compression. It's some procedural performance values added to a MIDI'esque music file to 'recreate' the sound of a performance.
      • narcofiche, on 04/01/2008, -1/+4Thank you, bobartig. Feed my compression thoughts. They are hungry. Yum.
  • kelmaster1, on 04/01/2008, -3/+3Is this really necessary? It's not the 90s...
    • powatom, on 04/01/2008, -0/+6Going to the moon wasn't necessary either, we just thought 'that would be cool'.
    • pixelguru, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2It was in the 90's that I first heard of this type of acoustic processing. At the time, it was supposed to be the next great thing which was right around the corner. I'm actually surprised that people are still working on the concept given how easy it has become to transmit very high quality audio.
  • TheKorn2, on 04/01/2008, -3/+44Yaaaaaay, so now you need a 1 gig player "application" filled with the "physics" for everything from drums to synthesizers to elephants, to play a 1k file. Good job, boys!

    Footnote: apparently, the clarinet player's physics are modeled in fairy-land, while the clarinet itself is modeled realistically. ("recreating in a computer both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player")
    • powatom, on 04/01/2008, -2/+6I'd rather have a 1 gig application and millions of tiny audio files to play my music rather than a single 25mb application and many gigabytes of music. The overall space needed to both store and play music would be smaller overall, if this thing is real.
      • apophenic, on 04/03/2008, -0/+1I'd rather hear recordings of actual artists playing music than a computer synthesizing them for me.
    • bababoosh, on 04/01/2008, -3/+0So what? It's still cool as hell!
  • iMike360, on 04/01/2008, -5/+3Just waiting for someone to make a tonguing joke.
    • ceredron, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1ah, but clarinets don't really tongue as well as brass players, they just don't have to, according to the size of their mouthpiece.
  • IronPwnage, on 04/01/2008, -1/+13So...April Fools or not?
    • Fr0stbyte124, on 04/01/2008, -2/+3Real
    • gameforge, on 04/01/2008, -3/+21May as well be... this is like saying they compressed a Blu-ray version of The Matrix into 10MB by using dynamically-generated textures, mesh models, and Quake's replay engine at 1920x1200.
    • Yazilliclick, on 04/01/2008, -2/+2april fools and pretty obvious if you read the article.
    • Spottswood, on 04/01/2008, -2/+4no pics. didnt happen.
      photoshopped wav. fake.

      Seriously, if it was real they'd at least mention MIDI in the article
  • garths, on 04/01/2008, -6/+6Is this a general solution? In other words, how easily is it extended to compress sounds in general? This is an important question. I can, for example, encode the same clarinet solo in 1 bit. The decoder works like this:

    if bit=1
    play clarinet solo

    but that is obviously not a general purpose solution.
    • bobartig, on 04/01/2008, -2/+2well, this is not compression to begin with. No, it is not a general solution. You can't feed audio data into one end, and get this scheme out the other. It is generated algorithmically.
      • Sagarian, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1that's actually just another way of defining compression -- the complexity (or length) of the code of an algorithm to produce the output.

        It's compression, but the size of the compressed stream is really the input bits (1kb) and the player itself required to reproduce the original signal.

        So for compressing one clarinet note it isn't very efficient. But to compress every clarinet solo ever recorded? it woud probably be very efficient.
  • ryborg, on 04/01/2008, -2/+19This is a misleading title/article -- thats not compression!
    MIDI 2.0? meh
  • bongbishop, on 04/01/2008, -7/+2You mean I didn't get rickrolled on this story? This is great news.
    With that kind of compression, people can carry millions of songs around in their iPods.
  • KesshoRyu, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9So now all we have to do is stop using any instrument besides clarinets until they model all other instruments.
    • gameforge, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2And that only gets us compressed instrumentals.
      • niksko, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3Being a clarinet player I see no problem, lol :D
  • jnorris441, on 04/01/2008, -1/+3audio nerd humor
  • SilverBlade2k, on 04/01/2008, -3/+5I'll personally file this under 'April Fools' until I hear otherwise.
  • h0ms4r, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3I was half-expecting the clarinetist to play a certain Rick Astley song...
  • viewofeverlast, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9LOL... midiroll'd.
  • H0tKarl, on 04/01/2008, -6/+51Music quality degraded 1000x.
    iPod fans still unaware.
    • xXMetalJesusXx, on 04/01/2008, -11/+6Wow...in a completely unrelated thread, you still manage to vomit fanboyism...good job
    • mparker7410, on 04/01/2008, -6/+2You're so much better than those fools as proved by your comment.
    • powatom, on 04/01/2008, -3/+1RTFA
    • ExRe, on 04/01/2008, -1/+3The internet is serious business.
    • niksko, on 04/01/2008, -1/+9He's right though. Everytime I try to explain why, for example, you shouldn't take an MP3 then encode it to wav again so you can burn it to a CD and play it through your parents expensive stereo system and then expect it to sound nice, it's always the iPod fanboys who say that they dont care about sound quality. They always say "But I can't hear the difference". If you cant hear the difference between the original cd and a low bitrate MP3 rip of that that has then been transcoded back to wav, there is something seriously wrong with your hearing.
    • solistus, on 04/02/2008, -3/+5high-bitrate compressed audio virtually identical to uncompressed to the human ear.
      Audiophiles still unaware.
  • prgmctan, on 04/01/2008, -0/+13omfg... it's so flat...
  • theoceanmusic, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3uhh this sucks
  • geniuslocimusic, on 04/01/2008, -5/+3Hey here's an idea; why not refrain from using technology to suck more life out of the otherwise infinite dynamic possibilities of sound and music? All this will do is make it possible for more untalented people to mimic a finite number of techniques, but I doubt it will do ANYTHING to enhance the artistry of a real musician.
    • powatom, on 04/01/2008, -1/+5Read the damn article. The decoder works by modelling physics. Once they have figured out 100% how the physics of real life audio works, they can model EXACTLY the physics of the music. This means that you will be able to hear the music exactly as it was recorded live, as if you were standing in the room with the musician (of course, if you have crappy audio hardware the results will never be that good).

      It's not really compression, it's a different form of encoding which just happens to produce small file sizes. No audio information is stored in the files, just instructions for the decoder so that it can model muscle movements, wind pressure, the vibration of the wood, etc etc.
      • carpespasm, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3the way I see it, this does nothing to removed "real" musicians' ability to practice their art and make use of an instrument in any way they want. If this makes some kid or lazy pop producer more able to produce music then all the better. Just don't listen to what you don't like. Everyone has to start somewhere and those that are given a chance to catch the music bug will usually do so and graduate from things like this to the real deal as their income allows.

        Don't be a music snob.
      • Yazilliclick, on 04/02/2008, -1/+2Really your understanding of the article and the alluded to technology is worse than the person you replied to. Nothing like this will ever be able to replay a performance, ever. It's not a compression technology at all, it has nothing to do with replaying how the music was played by performance. It's a glorified MIDI system at most and most likely just an april fool's joke.
    • Kronos6948, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3Just because Polaroid invented the instant camera doesn't mean that people won't paint portraits.
  • Angostura, on 04/01/2008, -0/+37I have designed a splendid system of compressing piano solos into an extremely small space, all it requires is a specialised piece of decoding hardware. The sound is encoded into a series of dots and lines on a piece of paper. To decode, I have a wooden box with manually operated key connected to hammers which strike a series of strings.
    • bobartig, on 04/01/2008, -11/+7No joke, written music actually contains a lot of data in a very small amount of space. The efficiency of encoding is great, although the decoders are rather complicated.
      • alexpigment, on 04/01/2008, -1/+7I think you missed the joke
      • DeeprBlue, on 04/01/2008, -1/+4WOOOSH
      • niksko, on 04/01/2008, -1/+2So you don't continue in your ignorance, type Player Piano into wikipedia.
  • irvin666, on 04/01/2008, -9/+1I can't tell whether this is an april fools joke or not.

    Regardless, probably the best algorithim compression out there.
    • crazybrit, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3That's not what it is, stupid. Also, it sounded awful.
    • Yazilliclick, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1It is an april fools joke and it's rather obvious lol Comments here are the best.
    • alexpigment, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1you are ***** retarded.
  • MrESaulved, on 04/01/2008, -0/+3Whenever synthesis modeling gets attention every several years, it's always the damnable clarinet or recorder that gets modeled first, never the good instruments!

    Music Workstations like Korgs (and Yamaha) have had drop-in synth modeling boards for ages with brass and reed and string models, and they sound a hell of lot better than that, and they take up the same trivial bit-space as MIDI.

    http://www.korg.com/gear/info.asp?A_PROD_NO=EXBMOS ...
    • Yazilliclick, on 04/01/2008, -2/+2It's an april fool's joke buddy, but good job on wasting your time on that long reply.
      • MrESaulved, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2Long reply? It took me all of 30 seconds to type it, and the information I provided doesn't get stale on April 2nd, unlike your lame-ass comment.
  • edgardcastro, on 04/01/2008, -5/+2THIS IS SPARTA!

    I mean... STUPID!
  • jasdf, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9It sounds horrid.
  • BESTenemy, on 04/01/2008, -1/+3There was another format called "mod" in the good old days. It was similar to Midi. The difference was, it contained single tone recording of each instrument being synthesized and did not rely on standard MIDI synthesizer library. The quality was much higher than that of MIDI's, and the size was a small fraction of an MP3. Early games with syntesized sound effects took advantage of that format due to lack of storage and processing power necessary to decode high-bitrate data. Today there's no longer a need to go to such lengths to get results.

    Here's a sample: 5 minute musical composition that takes up 400kb. Winamp can play it. Not sure about other players

    http://www.filewatcher.com/m/guitar%20slinger.mod. ...
    • Chrisfromdevon, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2Yeah baby! I miss mod trackers you jsut cant get good ones anymore. Bring back Screem tracker 3
    • powatom, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Woah :O

      That is very impressive! Do you know of any software that can still produce .mod?
      • BESTenemy, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1The format had originated on Amiga computers and by now is practically obsolete. Last time I touched it in 1994, back when the composition workflow was DOS-based. Nowdays very few mod generators remain. One of them is ModPlug http://modplug.com/ Give it a try.

        If you have done any music composing in the recent years, you'll find that pretty much any other program is more superior. MOD's value is purely sentimental.
    • ziyue, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Better sound quality than midi? That's because you included the sound bank in the mod file. As oppose to midi, where you are at the mercy of the quality of the sound bank on which ever computer the midi will be played. Mod is really just Midi+sound bank. Nothing more.
    • linagee, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1jinx. I said / thought of this first. Obviously the article poster didn't. For extra credit, anyone want to reply to this post and tell me why MOD never became as popular as MP3? (Still trying to figure it out.)
      • dinkleberry, on 04/02/2008, -0/+2Short answer: Unless you want to bump a MOD file up to a huge filesize, it cannot capture the diversity of sounds present in a well-produced and/or acoustic sound recording. All but the the biggest details are lost. In an MP3, (arguably - dependent on bit-rate etc) nothing but the smallest of details are lost.
      • BESTenemy, on 04/02/2008, -0/+2Although the files themselves are small, the samples they contain are uncompressed. As long as the building blocks of a composition are repetitive, then the total size will be small. However, if it is to include something like a voice track, then it will take up as much as a .wav file. It was designed as a substitute for MIDI. Old Yamaha synthesizers with floppy drives could produce mods. That way the artist could not only transfer the sequence, but the exact sounding of it. In comparison, MIDI sounds only as good as an individual MIDI processor that's playing it and will always be inconsistent.
    • shotgunefx, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1Oh yeah baby, I have a collection of several hundred I wrote back in the day with ModEdit.

      But 400k was generous, I was using them for 386 "real mode" based games, so more like 40-60k. Though not without their problems. Every player, they sounded different. Pitch bends and whatnot.

      But back to topic, this isn't' compression, this is article is talking about synthesis.
  • Ramble, on 04/01/2008, -1/+2Sounds like a similar graphics technology where textures, etc. are generated on the fly by the processor. The name escapes me now.
  • adorkable81, on 04/01/2008, -1/+1LOL at "from the backpressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering"
    • chrishirsch, on 04/02/2008, -0/+1quality roffle material. dumbass
  • MiddleOfNowhere, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9Kids, you can take two approaches: Compress an existing audio signal or synthesize what you want to hear. This article refers to the latter approach.
    As others here have mentioned, MIDI is an established technology that will trigger notes from a (hardware or software; really doesn't matter) synthesizer.
    Now all this - very fuzzy - article describes is a virtual instrument (probably a sophisticated physical modeling algo) that is controlled by a set of modulation parameters.
    You could achieve the same with a run-of-the-mill PC, one of the better Physical Modeling VSTs and a set of controller parameters if you had a lot of time.
    Move along, people. This *is* amazing, but it doesn't mean you'll get to download ten times as many Radiohead songs into your iPod or Zune. It means that we, the musicians, may get access to more sophisticated virtual instruments. But this is not a one-size-fits-all compression technology in the traditional sense.
  • gr00vy, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Ohh Snap! I can finally get all my clarinet music onto my time capsule!
  • Quenlin, on 04/01/2008, -1/+6This is obviously an april fools gag, unless they're using midi. Either way it sounds like *****
  • iSkylla, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Not to mention that the compressed one is a little more than a quartertone FLATTER than the regular one. ***** virtual music.
  • Leetamus, on 04/01/2008, -0/+0misleading title award anyone? Somehow I don't think this is going to replace mp3's anytime soon... this has to be a joke right haha?
  • alexpigment, on 04/01/2008, -0/+4Buried for *****. don't get my hopes up about music compression and then let me down with GLORIFIED MIDI
  • zeroflake, on 04/01/2008, -0/+5kinda like "vector" audio.
    • alexpigment, on 04/01/2008, -0/+2actually, that's a cool way to think about it
  • MrDandy, on 04/01/2008, -1/+1A very cool scientific experiment, but this thing will never replace sampled compression like MP3 for contemporary music. Maybe it's passable when you're reproducing a single instance of a single instrument. But not all clarinets sound the same, or guitars, drums, etc-- not even if they're the same model! Not to mention the effects of the particular recording studio's acoustics, any modifications to the particular instruments, after effects, etc etc. This thing would need an emulator for every instrument that would or could appear in a piece of music. It would be an enormous effort to track down all that info and reproduce all those physics, just to save a few Kb.

    And what about vocals?
  • tikal2k, on 04/01/2008, -1/+1I thought it was gonna be a Rick Astley cover

    APRIL FOOLS

    It's MIDI, LOL
    • RainDrizzleFog, on 04/01/2008, -1/+1Wow, good thing no one else said either of those things yet.
  • jjohnstn, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1"We are still working on including 'tonguing'"

    Yeah, me too.
  • asherchang, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Though cool, this seems to be just an improvement on MIDI, not an uber-compressive update on the MP3.
  • Projektorboy, on 04/01/2008, -1/+2I agree with a lot of people. It just sounds like they've just made MIDI on steroids, rather than having truly compressed PCM audio down to 1kb.

    ATLEAST NOW WITH WEB 3.0 WE CAN HAVE EMBEDDED SUPERMIDIS IN WEB PAGES RIGHT?
  • DenTPuzz, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1Didn't Yamaha release some unit to do this in the 90's?
  • stix213, on 04/01/2008, -0/+1MIDI file on crack rather than actual audio compression. Wake me up when they can get the lyrics with the song compressed 1,000 X mp3 compression. Buried for inaccurate.
  • Fetching more discussions...
    Show 51 - 82 of 82 discussions
  •  

    Login or register to add a comment

    Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.


© Digg Inc. 2008 — Content posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain.
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.