A short study on audio compression

Back in the days I made a small study on audio compression. It’s far from scientific quality, but I nonetheless want to post it, so here we go. (I have edited out some of the blatant errors I have found.)

Spectral representation of compressed sound.

Introduction

Motivation

Sound is usually compressed in order to save space. Audio space conservation is an important issue in transmission and storage. We may for example want to store audio in such vast amounts that without compression it would take way too much storage space. We might also want to transmit audio data over transmission path having only limited capacity, for example receive a MP3 file through slow modem connection. There are also other constraints regarding compression, much of which is discussed later.

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Introducing Alan Wake

(This piece was originally written in 2011 as a Facebook note)

About one and a half months back I was browsing the games shelf in a local department store. I happened to come upon a copy of Alan Wake. The price had been considerably lowered. I think the original cost was 50+ EUR, but now it was only 19,95 EUR. Needless to say I bought it.

Alan Wake PC.

I remember that the game received high scores on the gaming press, however, I was not sure about the sales. Definitively not the figures of, say Modern Warfare 2, but not a disaster either. Alan Wake was “No. 1 video game of 2010” on Time Magazine. And I can fully understand, why.

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