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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Tony... what do you propose...

1. There are extra bits that the operating system associates with a file. These are file system metadata. This includes the obvious differences in file name and location on disk.

2. The storage hardware has its own metadata, e.g. revectored blocks. This is normal with SSDs but still possible with spinning rust (although if there are more than a few such sectors the disk's days are likely to be numbered).

3. The physical data imprinted on the media may have various quality, i.e. weak bits vs. strong bits. This will be true on all storage media except static RAM. Some deal with this on an ongoing basis. (DRAM dynamically refreshes memory to catch leaking charge before it causes data corruption.) Some deal with it on demand. (Spinning rust and optical media use error correcting codes to recover weak data most of the time.) With spinning media there can even be physical jitter. Google "pit jitter".

4. Every time you play the same file the results will be slightly different and this may cause the same file to sound different each time for electrical, acoustical or perceptual reasons.

You can control for these variations by making copies with random file names done in a random order. Carcass93 did some of this, after which he noted that differences disappeared. If for some reason they persist then a second generation of random copying would be appropriate.

If you download two files over the Internet they will be stored on different places in your computer. They will have different metadata and they may have different "bit quality". Again, you will have to control for this. The goal here is to be sure that the differences that are heard relate to the source of the files and not something else.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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  • RE: Tony... what do you propose... - Tony Lauck 01/3/1509:16:53 01/3/15 (0)

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