Experimental Long Form, sixty minutes six megabytes

Two questions:

1) Does anyone know if the flash player here supports bitrates down to 16kbps?

2) Is there any interest here for a very experimental, very abstract track that intentionally uses high loss compression as an integral aspect of the composition?

Since it's under 10MB, I think this composition would fit under the guidelines but since it's nearly 60 minutes in length, I'm concerned it might not be kosher.

posted by chimaera (7 comments total)

1. The flash player we use is the JW player; I don't know if it supports 16kpbs or not, honestly—maybe check to see if there's documentation there that covers it. We could always try an experiment to see if it does or not, if you can't find an answer that way.

2. I like the idea of using compression artifacts as a compositional element, yeah. It's a neat idea.

A 60 minute long abstract track would definitely be on the weird side—I don't think there's anything wrong with it as a one-off type experiment, but a rash of such things might sort of send the wrong message as far as what flies or doesn't.
posted by cortex at 10:15 PM on February 20, 2009

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Everything sounds better when stretched out over a long period of time.
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 10:17 PM on February 20, 2009

P.S. If this is your RPM challenge submission, I call foul.
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 10:18 PM on February 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

In all seriousness, the link cortex provided to the JW player page led me to this blogpost about supported Flash formats, which included the follwing:

Will the Flash Player be limited to 11Khz, 22Khz and 44.1Khz sampling rates like for MP3? No, we support all sampling rates from 8Khz to 96Khz.

Not sure if this is taken in the wrong context. You might want to check out the page and see for yourself.
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 10:28 PM on February 20, 2009

Yeah, that's talking about the sample rate of the recording, not the bitrate of the compressed mp3. The two both have an effect on audio quality, but in different ways, and what chimaera is talking about is the bitrate—how much raw data space the file will use to represent a second of encoded audio.
posted by cortex at 8:28 AM on February 21, 2009

Thanks for the info cortex and abc123..... I'm going to give it a shot, but will definitely put a lot of qualifiers and warnings.
posted by chimaera at 12:33 PM on February 21, 2009

OK, all posted now. I hope you like it!
posted by chimaera at 12:59 PM on February 21, 2009