Glad you asked. Euphoria is run by people who know a lot about music and audio, and so of course we want you to hear the sounds available here - they're really good. So, let us point you toward some resources to help you enjoy the full multimedia experience that is the Web:
Player Applications
There's one hitch: High-quality audio is a real pig when it comes to file sizes and network bandwidth required for transmission. How obnoxious is it? Well, you're familiar with the compact disc. Digital audio for CDs is obtained by using 16-bit (two-byte) numbers to represent samples of the analog signal. The samples (like frames of a motion picture or videotape) are taken at a rate of 44,100 times a second (44.1 kHz), and since we have two ears it all gets done for two channels (stereo).
Now for the math: 1 minute of CD-quality audio contains 60 x16 x 44,100 x 2 bits, all of which are important. That's about 10 megabytes, for anybody who doesn't have a calculator handy. Chop any off indiscriminately, and the loss will be audible (and maybe ugly). So how do we shrink them? First, we can halve the resolution to 8 bits. This means losing some dynamic range and clarity, much like going from CD to cassette. We're down to 5 MB per minute, though. Next, we can halve the sampling rate to 22.05 kHz, which will lop off some of the high frequency information. Things like cymbals will be muffled, and some of the detail will disappear. Think of the effect of putting a thick blanket in front of a speaker. While we're at it, we'll go from stereo to mono reproduction. Just like AM radio! But we've got that minute of audio down to one-eighth of its original size - 1.25 MB.
Well, we've made our hypothetical audio file a tad more svelte. All the reductions entailed so far have been linear in nature, and the losses are pretty easy to describe. In order to trim the file sizes, we have to accept audio quality that is quite a bit lower than compact disc. It's still musically useful, and does a serviceable job of demonstrating a song to a distant listener. Unfortunately, that minute of music is still over one megabyte - a rather hefty chunk of bits to shovel through a dialup network connection. Surely there's something we could use to mash all the bits into a smaller box, right? Many of you are familiar with data compression, that software marvel that stuffs, packs and zips files into neat little packages fractions of their original sizes. Why don't we just do that to these big bad audio files?
Because it's virtually useless, that's why. Try an experiment: take a plain WAV, AU or AIFF file and compress it with PKZip, Stuffit, or GZip. See how much good that did? If you were lucky, it shrank the file by five percent. That's because there's really not much "filler" in common digital audio formats - all those bits mean something. So, we have to dig deeper into the bag of tricks.
Enter MPEG, a set of standards defined by the Moving Picture Experts Group. These hard-working folks have come up with a workable solution to the problems inherent in audio and video data compression. It's not magic, but simply takes advantage of something called masking. This is the reason you raise your voice in a crowded room, and why taped sounds such as rainfall and surf can block out intrusive noises. MPEG encoding analyzes the audio content, and uses the masking effect to disguise its handiwork as much as possible. The end result can be well over 15:1 compression while retaining acceptable (decent FM radio) sound quality.
So now you know why we keep the music samples on Euphoria short (generally a minute in length), and why we use 8-bit, 22.05 kHZ mono samples. We chose the Sun AU format because it has the highest cross-platform portability for Web purposes. Keep your eyes on this space, because we're converting everything to MPEG audio Layer-2 files to squish 'em down more. We'll keep the AUs there for anyone who has difficulty running MPEG decoders, e.g. those with older Macs and PCs. Please feel free to email our resident audio wizard with any questions or comments. And thanks for taking the time to wade through this - it's important to understand the limitations of digital audio delivery in cyberspace if you're looking for new music out there.
Player Applications and Further Reading
