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Re: [ARSCLIST] The Hope of Audacity...
One solution that immediate comes to mind is that the major software vendors should be encouraged to
certify hardware that is proven to work with their software.
George, do you think the problems you documented come about from editing program - hardware driver
interaction or is it more often than not purely editing software simply mangling data?
And this also raises the question, for the small/budget-starved institution, maybe it IS a better
idea for them to record directly to CD media, on the assumption that a dedicated CD recorder used
with good-grade media is less likely to mangle its own data?
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "George Blood" <george@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 9:38 PM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] The Hope of Audacity...
Hi, Friends,
There are a variety of issues that have been raised in this thread.
First is the disappointment others have mentioned that the tools we're buying are not doing what
we think they're doing. Namely, we're feeding them data (output of the A to D converter) and
that data is being changed between the input and being written out into a file. Given the
commercial pressures we all understand, writing stable code that has a few "quirks no one will
find" could be seen as a simpler solution to making payroll than digging deep into the myriad of
problems and the cooperation necessary from other vendors. Interoperability is a non-trivial
issue.
Second, this is more than just an issue of you get what you pay for. Sure Sonic and Pyramix tend
to perform better than the desktop applications. But they control much more of the signal chain.
The lower priced programs hit their price point by handing off (or depending upon or using) the
work of others (WaveLab, Samplitude, SoundForge, etc. let M-Audio, RME, PreSonus, etc build
interfaces, for instance). But who wants to be working 20 different other companies to assure
interchangeability. Ideally, everybody does. The reality is, given the number of hours in the
day, are you going to add the cool new feature, or chase down a bug with somebody else's code.
Apple tried to make the world a simpler place with CoreAudio. Great idea. When it works.
Yes, they should begin with integrity of signal. But if that's an obstacle, they build a
workaround (a "trap"). And it suits the needs of 99% of their users (and appears to have
snookered a far larger percentage!). Who are we to deprive a bezillion garage bands of the
features they need and pay for, just so we can have the needs of our small numbers met?
Lacking the tool vendors doing this work, each of us needs to shake down their own system. It's
a royal pain in the butt. Every change in the system means re-checking it. OK, so Peak 6 will
now preserve the bext chunk (it used to blow it away). But now it embeds waveform display info
in the INFO chunk. That's perfectly acceptable according to the .wav spec. But it means there's
garbage there that, 25 years from now, some preservation is going to sweat recovering, because
"if it's in the file it must have been important". Every program, every OS, every hardware,
every driver change has the potential to disrupt a perfectly crystalline signal chain.
Third, what does it tell us in the trade that, for all our efforts to create higher resolution
files, there's been overwhelming satisfaction with the lesser results. Well, for one thing, it
reminds us that there's more impact from good analog playback than from spending an extra
whatever on 8 extra bits that are 30dB below the noise floor. For another, good AtoD design does
amazing things when outputting lower res files. It reminds us that so many of our source
materials are of such low (or lower) quality that there isn't more information to be captured at
the higher resolutions. Once we argued over 48k vs 44.1. Then 96k. Some want 192k, and others
think 384 is worth doing. Look folks, if you keep increasing the sample frequency, you won't
start capturing video off the audio cassettes. But you are building more and more fragile
systems. Where you have to break the files into multiple sub-file (due to the 2GB file size
limit of WAV), you create a chance to lose one of the pieces. Is this really better
preservation than having one file (even 44/16) of the whole thing?
Fourth, while the pursuit of ever higher standards is a worthy goal (and the reason we have
converters that perform so well at lower sample rates), there will always be circumstances in
which an institution simply will not have the resources to "do it right". We can all salivate
at the enormous volumes of audio out there to be saved. As much as we dream of driving Lexuses
into retirement, your garden variety historical society with a shoebox full of oral histories
may never be able to justify spending "what it costs" to "properly" digitize them. If their
board can get its act together and apply for grants, maybe there's a better use of that few
thousand dollars. A use closer to their primary mission. So a nice retired couple volunteers to
bring in the CD-R recorder they bought for their granddaughter (who really wanted an iPod), plugs
in the cassette player they picked up at a garage sale, and digitizes the shoebox of cassettes.
And lo and behold, that bit of history is preserved for the future. Did they only get 80% of the
information off the tapes. Yeah. But 80% is a lot more than nothing.
This is a very slipper slope, of course. For every Harvard or IU (and others) here are plenty of
large institutions buying crap equipment, giving it to sleep-deprived, hung-over work-study
students. Institutions that really do know better, and who could manage the resources to do a
much better job (even if not "do it right").
And so it goes. So it always has. And so it always will. Our job is to help advance the trade,
do as well as we can, at a price that means more of it gets done. Until we're all using $25,000
workstations and $15,000 A to D converter, (and more hours making our systems pass 24 bits than
lingering on ListServs!) we shouldn't be pointing fingers at the poor blokes trying eek out a
living selling $250 (or free) software. You get what you pay for. If you paid for that, you got
it. Of your own free will.
Back to your regularly scheduled madness.
G
PS I bought my Prius when gas was $2.00/gallon.
On Aug 18, 2008, at 12:00 AM, ARSCLIST automatic digest system wrote:
I believe George Blood is on this list.