Lesson 6 Music And The Internet
OBJECTIVE: In earlier lessons you studied various types of file formats such as digital audio, MIDI and standard midi files. This lesson will take a closer look at how these files and other media can be used for exchanging files and music over the Internet.
Music can be published on the Internet in many ways.
Most widely used formats:
SMF-Standard MIDI Files (Extremely small and can be loaded into a web page in seconds).
SMFs can be shared among any platform.
Remember that MIDI does not contain any audio signals.
SMFs will need to be played through a sound card (computer) or MIDI keyboard with a General MIDI Sound Set (Designed to make MIDI gear compatible by standardizing at least one set of sounds found in the MIDI instrument).
Online Collaboration
Digital Audio
Allows us to publish and listen to high quality music on the Internet.
An exact CD quality recording takes up around 10MB of memory a minute.
Some form of compression is needed in order to make downloading take less time.
Data compression consists of cutting the amount of information that is normally present in order to create a smaller file size. "Trimming the fat".
MP3s
Most popular Internet audo compression (MPEG Layer III) encoding.
Revolutionized music distribution in the late 1990s.
MPEG is the acronym for Moving Pictures Experts Group
Has developed systems for video data including DVD movies, HDTV broadcasts and digital satellite systems.
When using mp3 encoding one can take a CD-quality recording and "trim" or "compress" the file size by a 10:1 ratio or more while still maintaining sonic integrity to the music.
Example: A 4-minute song that would normally take 40 MB of space would only require 4 MB.
Using the MP3 compression system reduces the number of bytes in a song.
Anytime you compress a song, you will lose some of its quality - A trade off for being able to carry more music files in a smaller storage system.
Streaming Media - Audio & Video
Sends a file to your desktop from a remote source in “real time”.
No waiting for downloads.
Except for MP3 players, you will encounter streaming audio most frequently as part of links in websites.
The RealPlayer format was developed by RealNetworks and has become a popular and widely used format for streaming audio and also video.
RealMedia files are streamed into your computer as you listen through the RealPlayer application. (.rm)
This allows for radio stations and others to broadcast music live over the Internet in real-time.
Examples of Streaming Media