[SOLVED]gen wav question

[StarWolf]

often the old windows wav sound odd and also is there a place for small ones on the forums?

[Ole Juul]

Re: gen wav question

I take it that you are making a statement and also asking a question.

AFAIK, wav files should be independent of the OS but I am curios about your actual experience in this regard.

Regarding your question: I don't know that I've seen anything distribution specific that is suitable, or aimed at, little ones. What age group are you thinking about? In the more general sense of computers and open source, there might be something around. The subject was brought up on Linux.com but I don't know if the idea got developed further. It's a great idea! Maybe it would be a good thing to bring up in the "Community Cafe Social", or "Forums Feedback Ideas" here.

[StarWolf]

Re: gen wav question

well i haven't tried porting any sounds in the last few months for that reason. my wav files are very old as well. the wav files arent allowed here so that answers that

[Ole Juul]

Re: gen wav question

For what reason? What do you mean old? Why does that matter? Why aren't wav files allowed? Now you really got me curious about what you're talking about.

By the way, what about the little ones? Did you find out the age group?

[dibl]

Re: gen wav question

often the old windows wav sound odd

I'm curious to learn more about this. I don't think any of my music .wav files originated on a Windows machine, so it's no problem for me, but I thought .wav files were pretty much treated the same across OSs. No? A couple years ago I built a setup to capture my father's collection of 78 RPM records, using Ubuntu and Audacity and Gnome Wave Cleaner (gwc) and a stack of audio hardware, and those are all in .wav files. I have played them on a Windows machine and they sound fine there, as well as here on Amarok or alsaplayer. Just curious what would be the issue with files originating on the Windows box.

[StarWolf]

Re: gen wav question

For what reason? What do you mean old?

i mean as old as 93 or 1995

Why does that matter? Why aren't wav files allowed?

I don't know im not a moderator here

well i did find this to be only a problem with amarok as i have mplayer plugin for my browser and it plays the flies. now i realize these are really old and could be poor quality ? but heres a most of them . so be careful if you down load these there may b r-rated . https://www.qdrive.net/download/shar...xGxXvEXXXCpJ5A

[Ole Juul]

Re: gen wav question

Thanks for bringing this up StarWolf. It's more complicated than I thought. Now that I'm looking into it, I see that even though wav files are flat, they still vary a lot. I was thinking that the old files could be 8 bit instead of the now common 16 bit and that was all there was to it. I was wrong and the sample rate varies as well. That means that there could indeed be a codec problem.

Regarding the small ones. I thought you were talking about children, since you didn't say otherwise. Your grammar threw me for a loop. Now I know.

[StarWolf]

Re: gen wav question

no worries hope you enjoy the sounds there is quite the eclectic collection :-)

[dibl]

Re: gen wav question

I just got a chance to download and check your sound snippets, using Audacity. Interesting. The first one I opened has a sampling rate of 21,739 -- that's an odd one. The second one I tried shows 11,025 -- another strange rate. The recordings that I captured are all at 48,000. So I'm going to speculate that there's probably a noticeable quality difference when you go below the 44,100 that is used for "CD quality" sound recordings.

[Ole Juul]

Re: gen wav question

From looking into the differences in sound chips, I see that performance varies with the sampling rate in different ways on different chips. Sometimes it looks like it could be a function of the clock rate and sometimes it has to do with the implementation of AC97 or downsampling. You can get more aliasing at some sample rates than others and the low pass filter implementation also varies. It's actually amazing how well some sound cards can do considering that good converters are much more expensive than sound cards. There are obviously very many more sound cards sold than audio specific devices so I would think there's the economics of scale, but keeping the price down also involves some tricks - which is why quality can vary with sampling rate. Here is a (slightly out of date) site with some real world analysis. http://www.baudline.com/solutions/fu...lex/index.html

[muzicman0]

Re: gen wav question

it's probably not a codec issue, since (for wave files) a codec would not be used. Wave files are uncompressed. Codec is short for COmpress/DECompress. What you are probably noticing is the bit/sample rate as others have suggested.

If you picture a sine wave, bit rate has to do with how many 'steps' are between the top of the sine wave and the bottom of the sign wave. 8 bit audio translates to to 256 possible steps. 16 bit audio has 65536 steps (hopefully you can see that 16 bit has way higher resolution)...

Sampling rate on the otherhand, is how often sound is sampled. The human ear can hear 20hz to 20 Khz (the lower the hz, the lower the pitch)...the general rule of thumb of sampling rate is that you can reproduce frequencies up to half the sampling rate...thus at 44,100 (44.1Khz), you can recreate frequencies all the way through what a human can hear.

So, to sum up...again, picture the sine wave (~)...the bit rate is the resolution top to bottom. The sampling frequency is the resolution from left to right.

8 bit audio is very bad quality. anything below 22050 sampling rate will probably sound muffled to most people.

This is probably way more info than any of you wanted, but I figured why not...Sound is my thing.

mm0

[StarWolf]

Re: gen wav question

so is there a program to update the quality in Batch form or will it be a 1 by 1 process ?

[muzicman0]

Re: gen wav question

There is no real way to upgrade the quality...I should say, no easy way...I suppose you could run them through some effects processors....but a high resolution copy of a low resolution image still looks the same...

mm0

[Ole Juul]

Re: gen wav question

I got the impression that the files were originally OK. Do we know that the files themselves are bad and it is not just the way that they are converted by his particular DAC? Perhaps muzicman0 knows something of this.

BTW muzicman0, I read your statement about the meaning of codec. Thanks, I hadn't thought about the real meaning (blush) I was really thinking about the driver. Apparently there are sound quality differences between ALSA and OSS on some chips. Could we not be seeing this effect here?

PS: I'm an old analogue audio guy and have quite a lot of catching up to do on the digital end.

[muzicman0]

Re: gen wav question

It is possible that the files are bad...but it would be a little wierd...the header of a wave file has information in it that shows the exact amount of audio data in the file. I would be surprised if the file is corrupt that this value would still be correct...thus most players wouldn't even play it...but it is possible.

It is definitely possible that the drivers would play the sound differently, but I would think that it would play all files differently...but I don't know much about how a driver works, so I could be way off.

@Ole Jule: I learned all about digital when I was trying to program a windows component that recorded audio, but I had to have access to the data...the problem is that most 'tutorials' out there make it way more complicated than it actually is.

mm0