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Space Constraints

As I said I would, I have put up a few Skewed updates this week. With a Dungeons and Dragons campaign taking up a majoriy of this week, completely throwing my sleep schedule back off again, I haven't been able to do as much work as I have wanted for the week. I just got the main function of my new scripting system for Spiral Island working properly, and I was going to spend some time with a profiler to make sure it isn't a heavy performance drain before continuing on, but I've been having some difficulty getting profiling tools to work properly.

One of the most amusing things about this apartment is we're all longtime friends, and at any moment something hilarious could happen out of nowhere. There's been so many random things that would have been nice to capture on video to upload to Youtube that just happened spontaneously. Conversation, too, spontaneous humor at any moment, so while playing D&D yesterday I decided to turn on GoldWave and record everything.

Now the problem with that is sessions of course go for a long time. I set it to record 5 hours worth, but since we just had one boss to fight left over from the previous session it was only 3 hours and 40 minutes of recording. The problem with that, though, is later on, trying to save the file. On average, saving MP3's at the usual rate of 128kbps will give you about 1 MB for every minute. Obviously, that would end up being a very large file at length, so that wouldn't work. Knowing some things about human voice range and encoding formats, I ended up going for 32kbps encoding rate at 32000 hertz sampling. I also used WMA format, which is better at lower encoding rates then standard MP3 is (a separate method known as MP3pro was written for lower encoding rates). I would have gone for 22000 sampling, honestly, but GoldWave didn't offer a high enough encoding rate at 22khz for my liking.

In the end, the nearly 4 hour file ended up at a filesize of only 50 MB. It sounds a little tinny due to the highpass of the sampling rate, but it's still easy to comprehend. Also, as a side note, the array microphone on the XPS 1530 is a lot more sensitive than I was expecting of it, I was very impressed.


Date posted: 09 July, 2009
Tags: anecdote computer personal skewed software spiral_island
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