CSI110 Exaflood… and other goodies from the past week.

Greetings Beat Readers,

This week in my Computer Science class I learned about the Exaflood, which subsequently I had never heard of. You can watch an interesting video on the subject here:

This is a scary possibility that we may even see in our lifetime. Basically as far as I understand it an exabyte of data is an extremely large amount of data. We are using and generating so much content on the net in these times that according to the video on the exaflood that i gave you the link to above, 20 U.S. households use as much internet capacity as the whole world used back in the mid nineties. The greater percentage of this usage is generated through HD video content and streaming video which takes up a vast amount of bandwidth. With users these days watching movies and television shows on their laptops or even connecting their computers to their HD televisions to do so you can see how much this usage is going up. It is said that the overload of the bandwidth by this extreme usage could in fact overload the networks and drastically slow down the internet.

It’s pretty crazy how many people are connected to the net and how much growth there is. I can remember having a dial up internet connection when I was younger and how long it took just to connect to the net. Imagine that we overload the net with all of our new technology and our need for faster connections and instant gratification wind up leading us back to that ever so slow place. Now I doubt that will happen if the advertising service providers continue to upgrade their fiber optics that are the backbone of the internet as discussed in the video. The service providers really need to see what the future holds and I think they have a good grasp on it. Technology is always going to get faster and less expensive so one day we may end us using the internet as our one and only resource. If this were to happen we would need an extremely vast network that could handle all this exadata. It’s something that most people really don’t think about and I found it interesting.

If you get a chance be sure to check out the youtube link.

I learned quite a bit more in the past week in my other classes and daily life as well. I think that I’ve learned something new every day since I was born and that is one of the beauties in life. Having attended the Boston Area Definitive Audio Student Summit at NEAI this past Saturday I had the opportunity to meet a few industry heavyweights. The 9 time Grammy winning producer/engineer Jim Anderson blow my mind when he took an analog tape two mix recording converted through the best possible A/D converters and rendered the file to a high quality mp3 then brought that mp3 back into the original mix. He then was able to use some phasing techniques to line up the mp3 track with the original tape master to allow the listener the ability to only hear the distortion that is added to each and ever mp3 we hear. This is just one other reason why convenient mp3 audio is inferior to that of cd quality 16 bit 44.1khz sample rate music formats or even better vinyl.

I also had the privilege of attending a discussion on music copyrighting, licensing, publishing, and synchronization with Jordan Tishler . If you read my last posting you’s know that this stuff really is where the rubber meets the pavement as far as achieving a somewhat sustainable income with your recorded works and songs. I received some great advice from Jordan concerning my current endeavors with Long Distance Analog and Absolutely and I’m educating myself further and looking at other opportunities for us that I had not thought of previously. I look forward to meeting up with Jordan in the near future to check out his studio and get his feedback on our music.

We’ll that’s all I’ve got for now. Sweet dreams from audio land…