[Lexicog] audio recording

[William J Poser (by way of Nicholas Thieberger)]

MP3 compression is definitely not a good idea for linguistic recordings.
The ATRAC compression used by minidisc recorders is not as bad as MP3
compression, and contrary to some claims, data recorded on minidisc
recorders can be used for most kinds of phonetic analysis. The
distortion introduced by ATRAC compression will not affect things
like vowel formant measurements, duration measurements, and F0
analysis in any significant way. It is most likely to be relevant to
subtle spectral measurements.

That said, there is simply no reason today to use ANY kind of lossy
compression. Both the storage devices available for the recorders
themselves (flash cards, PCMCIA disks) and the storage devices
available for your computer and for archiving are large enough and
cheap enough that there isn't any point in it. Just record straight
uncompressed PCM data. If you want to save space, you can then use
FLAC compression on it. FLAC compression is lossless, meaning that
the result of decompressing a compressed file is identical to the
original. Depending on the nature of your material, FLAC compression
will reduce your file size to about 0.75 of the original (worst case,
very fluent speech with no silences to speak of) or 0.25 of the
original (best case, e.g. someone telling a story with long pauses
between sentences).

A few suggestions for saving space without distortion can be found at:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/SavingSpace.html

Bill

--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu


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