Strange Attractor

Strange Attractor


32: You make a big thing smaller

December 15, 2016

How is music & video compressed & streamed?

How MP3 files work (How Stuff Works, Tech)
The 'Mother of the MP3': Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega was used to develop the MP3 (Wikipedia)
Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega (YouTube)
What is an MP3 & who was behind it? (Wikipedia)
MP3s were officially released in 1993, but drew on research from as far back as 1894 (Wikipedia)
A list of other non-MP3 digital audio formats (Wikipedia)
'Ogg Vorbis' is an alternative audio format (Wikipedia)
'FLAC' is another alternative audio format (Wikipedia)
How competing audio formats were standardised into the MP3 (Wikipedia)
Internet Standards Organisations (UniForum)
If you want to include MP3s in your products, you may need to pay licensing fees as they're intellectual property like any other invention (MP3 Licensing)
Licensing, ownership & legislation around MP3s (Wikipedia)
The 'standards' comic Johnny mentioned (xkcd)
Material Girl by Madonna (YouTube)
A diagram of the structure of an MP3 file (Wikipedia)
Ziploc.com
Evolution of the MP3 player (PC World)
The first generation classic iPod: "1,000 songs in your pocket" (Wikipedia)
Old iPods are selling for as much as $90,000 (Mashable)
The famous comment Johnny was talking about where some nerd says that the newly invented iPod is "lame" (Slashdot)
The Book of Eli (IMDb)
How Hollywood gets its old-school tech (The Ringer)
How does audio compression work? (Wikipedia)
What an uncompressed versus a compressed song looks like in different file formats (Wikipedia)
A discussion about why you can't compress with irrational numbers like pi (ars technica)
Another discussion about why you can't compress with irrational numbers like pi (Encode)
What is bandwith in computing? (Wikipedia)
Neil Young's 'high definition' music player: PonoPlayer (Digital Trends)
Don't buy what Neil Young is selling (Gizmodo)
What is streaming media? (Explain That Stuff!)
JPEG compression: What it is, when to use it & when not to (a.k.a. Joint Photographic Experts Group) (Learning & Memory)
All about GIF (a.k.a. Graphics Interchange Format) (Wikipedia)
All about TIFF (a.k.a. Tagged Image File Format) (Wikipedia)
All about PNG (a.k.a. Portable Network Graphics) (Wikipedia)
What is the difference between JPEG, GIF & PNG? (University of Surrey)
Destructive vs non-destructive editing (SLR Lounge)
Africa by Toto (YouTube)
Spotify vs Apple Music: Is there a difference in sound quality? (C|NET)
What happens when you watch a YouTube video? A nice, simple explanatory clip (YouTube)
How does internet radio work? (How Stuff Works, Tech)
What is buffering? (Bandwidth Place)
What is buffer? (WhatIs.com)
What is caching? (WhatIs.com)
Bhuja! Strange Attractor's current snack of choice (Majans)
Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia

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