A tip on audio recordings

I'm posing this while I remember it: for all you pronunciation-
comparers out there, remember to store the original recording in a
*lossless* compression-format. You won't save as much space as saving it
in MP3 or similar, but it's better than .wav anyway.

For comparisons of different formats see
<http://www.firstpr.com.au/audiocomp/lossless/>

"Why save in a lossless format" you might say. As the name says, you
don't lose anything (but space) by doing it :) Lossy formats work by
chopping away bits and pieces of the original, and they are meant to be
used on music. However, talking isn't music and the chopping-techniques
might remove important pieces of the puzzle, like higher formants or the
noise that is fricatives, so that you get invalid data! It's much like
you should always have an original copy of (digital) photos laying
about, as just about whatever you do in a photo-editing-program removes
information from the picture, making it unusable for other operations
later on.

</jumps down from the soap-box>


t.

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