[Commons-l] [Wikitech-l] Audio file sizes

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Using loss less audio is particularly relevant for the recordings of 
pronunciations. For ordinary use having them compressed in a lossy way 
is not a problem. The point is that with the Shtooka software that 
became available, we are in a position to easily create large amounts of 
sound files. These are of relevance to scientists and they have a need 
for loss less files. Given that the only identified reason to have loss 
less soundfiles ARE the pronunciations, the current upload size would 
suffice. They are in effect single words at most a sentence.

Thanks,
    GerardM


Edward Z. Yang schreef:
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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.
>