Strange Attractor

Episode 32: You make a big thing smaller


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How is music & video compressed & streamed?
  • How MP3 files work (How Stuff Works, Tech)
  • The 'Mother of the MP3': Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega was used to develop the MP3 (Wikipedia)
  • Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega (YouTube)
  • What is an MP3 & who was behind it? (Wikipedia)
  • MP3s were officially released in 1993, but drew on research from as far back as 1894 (Wikipedia)
  • A list of other non-MP3 digital audio formats (Wikipedia)
  • 'Ogg Vorbis' is an alternative audio format (Wikipedia)
  • 'FLAC' is another alternative audio format (Wikipedia)
  • How competing audio formats were standardised into the MP3 (Wikipedia)
  • Internet Standards Organisations (UniForum)
  • If you want to include MP3s in your products, you may need to pay licensing fees as they're intellectual property like any other invention (MP3 Licensing)
  • Licensing, ownership & legislation around MP3s (Wikipedia)
  • The 'standards' comic Johnny mentioned (xkcd)
  • Material Girl by Madonna (YouTube)
  • A diagram of the structure of an MP3 file (Wikipedia)
  • Ziploc.com
  • Evolution of the MP3 player (PC World)
  • The first generation classic iPod: "1,000 songs in your pocket" (Wikipedia)
  • Old iPods are selling for as much as $90,000 (Mashable)
  • The famous comment Johnny was talking about where some nerd says that the newly invented iPod is "lame" (Slashdot)
  • The Book of Eli (IMDb)
  • How Hollywood gets its old-school tech (The Ringer)
  • How does audio compression work? (Wikipedia)
  • What an uncompressed versus a compressed song looks like in different file formats (Wikipedia)
  • A discussion about why you can't compress with irrational numbers like pi (ars technica)
  • Another discussion about why you can't compress with irrational numbers like pi (Encode)
  • What is bandwith in computing? (Wikipedia)
  • Neil Young's 'high definition' music player: PonoPlayer (Digital Trends)
  • Don't buy what Neil Young is selling (Gizmodo)
  • What is streaming media? (Explain That Stuff!)
  • JPEG compression: What it is, when to use it & when not to (a.k.a. Joint Photographic Experts Group) (Learning & Memory)
  • All about GIF (a.k.a. Graphics Interchange Format) (Wikipedia)
  • All about TIFF (a.k.a. Tagged Image File Format) (Wikipedia)
  • All about PNG (a.k.a. Portable Network Graphics) (Wikipedia)
  • What is the difference between JPEG, GIF & PNG? (University of Surrey)
  • Destructive vs non-destructive editing (SLR Lounge)
  • Africa by Toto (YouTube)
  • Spotify vs Apple Music: Is there a difference in sound quality? (C|NET)
  • What happens when you watch a YouTube video? A nice, simple explanatory clip (YouTube)
  • How does internet radio work? (How Stuff Works, Tech)
  • What is buffering? (Bandwidth Place)
  • What is buffer? (WhatIs.com)
  • What is caching? (WhatIs.com)
  • Bhuja! Strange Attractor's current snack of choice (Majans)
  • Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia
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