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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1998 Why disk space is music to my ears OVER my life I have developed a taste for a wide variety of music, spanning the classics, jazz, country and western, native and pop. But during the past 10 years I have increasingly been impressed by the scores produced by the movie industry, and judging by the number of soundtrack CDs now on sale, it would appear that I am not alone in this respect. To my mind many of these scores rival the classics produced in the 17th to 19th centuries, and I certainly take great pleasure in listening to them whenever I can. For me, a key feature of this enjoyment is the process of mentally revisiting scenes, and the related social occasions. Because I travel a lot I rely on family and friends to capture radio and TV footage on tape so that I can listen to or watch it on my return home. Much of my listening time is during car journeys when I can do little else, and on flights when I sometimes take a few CDs for those periods when I need to relax. Audio tape is too bulky, and needs yet another lump of hardware, while CDs are extremely compact and play on my laptop. For me the primary limitation of the audio CD is an efficiency one. I never found a CD with more than 30 per cent of music I actually like, and I know many people who compile audio tapes that contain only their specific choice of music from CD and tape. With the growing availability of CD burners a rising number now do this with CDs, too. I have refrained from going down this path for a number of practical problems, and the desire to do something even more efficient, and specifically, perhaps to carry all my favourite music with me at all times. A partial answer to my dream came in the dual availability of a small shareware package that compresses and encodes CD music files into an MPEG format, and my new laptop, which has an eight gigabyte hard drive. The compressor allows, for example, the theme to AirForce One to be reduced from its 55Mbytes CD format to about 4Mbytes. This is impressive, and all the more so as even the golden-eared hi-fi buffs have difficulty discerning the increased distortion. Today's CDs have a total capacity of around 650Mb and can accommodate 10 or more such movie themes. When MPEG-encoded, the capacity can be expanded to well over 100. So I decided to allocate 1Gb of my new laptop hard drive to my favourite music, which I estimate will ultimately see a library of some 300 tracks. The final number depends on my specific choice, and most in my collection are significantly smaller than the 55Mbytes of AirForce One. This prompted me to compare the cost of cabinets and shelving in my house dedicated to the storage of CDs, audio and video tapes, with that of hard drives. To my great surprise, I have spent over twice what I need for a 23Gb drive on wood, glass and plastic for audio tape and CD storage alone. My entire music collection will now fit on a single drive. Given the rate of memory growth per pound expended, the same will be true of all my video material within a decade. So it looks like an interesting era for the bit producers, and I shall be soon be having a furniture sale. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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