Upon one of Hugh's many pages describing this course, I stumbled upon this article about digital music compression algorithms. Being a Computer Science student deep in my bones, I couldn't overlook that...
Since I am looking at this from a more technical point of view, I wonder what the others in the class think about this...
The article in its essence deals to some extent with one of the most fundamental principles in Computer Science - the trade-off between space and time/speed. When talking about digital music, this recurrent principle is obvious (size of file vs. time for downloading), but in other fields it is not so directly connected and still very powerful and dominant...
I can personally see a market or an audience for most of these algorithms. WMA has strong copyright management principles, AC-2 (or AAC) might replace MP3 in the future, OGG is open-source - vital for some business models where paying for the compression technology would raise production costs too high.
As the article says, the most exciting news are yet to come as researchers strive to develop algorithms combining the advantages of the existing ones... I personally think that open-source algorithms won't quite catch up with ones where money are being invested into research, but hey - many people a decade ago would not (and still don't) consider open-source music a viable model either...
If you want to learn more about the different algorithms, this is a link provided by this article: "Want to know more about audio formats?"
Posted by djalalievp at February 6, 2005 09:45 PM