Readings - Multimedia and Audio Compression

A lot of this stuff was already familiar to me. Pictures, oddly enough, were something that I studied in the context of binary in math and computer programming. Sound files likewise I had previously learned about when I had had to make recordings for various auditions. The section on text had some interesting an useful tidbits, especially for making things line up, an annoying problem that makes many websites look stupid and unprofessional.

However, the article on sound suffered from one of the usual problems: it sounded quite outdated. Broadband connections are pretty much standard today, which is why YouTube is so popular. Audio files are almost a nonissue now, in a day when anyone can host videos for free on the internet with someone else picking up the bandwidth. Admittedly, YouTube has problems with profitability, but I personally don't see it going away. The same goes for audio. All sorts of people host all sorts of stuff on myspace, social networking sites, their personal sites.

MP3 compression has actually been going the opposite direction recently. Apple recently rolled out new higher quality MP3 download options for iTunes because even with the higher bitrate, connections are so fast that the downloads don't take long at all. BitTorrent as well has made sharing files on networks easier, though this is not applicable for personal websites. MIDI is still useful because it is a set of instructions and such for notation purposes, but size of files is less and less of an issue. Hulu even streams entire episodes of TV shows, and sunday night football can be watched via a live stream.

Anyways, the point is that while understanding audio is useful, compression will continue to become less and less important as computers and networks get faster and faster.