[Commons-l] Audio file sizes

[Edward Z. Yang]

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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> What I'd like to see us do instead, is to ask uploaders to send us
> losslessly compressed Ogg/Flac files instead. Lossless compression
> because disk space isn't totally irrelevant and to avoid people
> downloading insanely huge wavs just because they don't want to use the
> java player or install a codec.  We already permit uploading these
> lossless audio files they can be easily transcoded to Ogg/Vorbis while
> preserving all metadata. [snip]

I think this is a great idea and should definitely be investigated. However:

1. Encoding audio in a lossless codec seems, at least from my
experience, to be a very CPU intensive process.  WIth our equipment,
this may or may not be a problem.

2. If we encourage losslessly compressed audio, we will probably want to
increase our maximum upload size. Longer audio clips will easily exceed
20 MB, and Spoken Wikipedia usually *must* split up their audio files in
order to upload them in (whether for better or worse). This also runs up
with some of HTTPs limitations when it comes to file uploads. An
anonymous FTP server would be pretty neat, but I doubt it's going to happen.
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