[Commons-l] Audio file sizes

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 3/6/07, Edward Z. Yang <edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote:
> 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.

Ogg/Flac is very fast, especially on the decode side.  My laptop can
convert a flac to an Ogg/Vorbis file at 45x real time.  Given your
point below and my cpu speed, which I hadn't thought of.. I wouldn't
expect any transcode to take more than 10 seconds. ;) But, that will
have to be fixed.

At some point we'll want to transcode video and for all I could argue
that transcoding audio is fairly cheap, transcoding video is far
less...

> 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.

Ugh. This is a point that we'll have to address.  This is an issue
without lossless upload but more of one with it.