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Streaming and MP3 |
On band activities, we've played at limited stages such as CD self produce and live concerts.
On live concerts, we can have maximum dozens of audience in spite of tough preparation.
CD self produce is not effective because some of friends and concert audience buy them.
But, nowadays, we can have lots of unknown audience listen to our original music through the Internet.
There're some ways to provide music on the Internet.
MIDI is one of them, but not appropriate for demo sounds of band.
To provide recorded music through the Internet, Streaming such as SoundVQ, RealAudio, WindowsMedia
and MP3 will do.
We should pay careful attention to data size of music when providing it through the Internet.
If it's too large, it'll take too much time to download, then people just give up to get it.
That is why MIDI are popular in the Internet world.
MIDI data gets smaller because it records music data only and soft/hardware sound generator on PC has
music wave of instruments. However, on sending recorded music data of band, it gets large data
because it has to have its music wave.
Dozens of bytes of MIDI data turns to dozens of megabyte in WAV data.
To exchange those data on the Internet, data compression and streaming technique is effective.
Data compression is to get data size smaller, and MP3 is one of these.
By deleting non-auralization data such as high range, it gets data size small.
Streaming is a technique that divide large music data and output required part only.
While listening to the beginning of song, the next data is transfered, so listeners don't need to wait.
RealAudio is the most popular one.
Encorder is required to make both MP3 and Streaming data.(At the same time, required player software to play these data.)
Generally possible to select music quality(sampling rate, etc.) when making data, however,
cannot avoid trade-off that the better quality we require, the larger file size we get.
As it's common to make a file size under 1MB on the Internet, make a choice to play 3-minute-long song in extremely
low quality or play just part of a song (ex.30 sec. at the beginning).
Also required to be careful on MP3 encorders is there're 2 types which think much of sound quality and much of velocity.
The former one exchanges data to same size file in better sound quality, and takes times. The later one
takes less time compared with the other one, but the sound quality is not good enough. The later one is useful for making copies of music CD products
to MP3. The later one is useful for creating self produce music.
To provide band demo sounds for as many people as possible, streaming is easier to play.
On streaming, RealAudio is so far recommended because of diffusion of the player, however,
WindowsMedia will be spread in the near future. If disc space available,
it's effective to provide songs in plural formats including MP3.
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