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4. Re: artifact in spectrogram created using Raven

Subject: 4. Re: artifact in spectrogram created using Raven
From: "Dan Dugan" dandugan_1999
Date: Mon Jul 16, 2012 10:29 pm ((PDT))
> Well, at least one other thing that went wrong is that it is recorded in mp3. 
> Others have said this, but it may be good to reiterate that for research 
> purposes this is simply unacceptable and will lead to problems with peer 
> review later.

I suppose so, because of the hide-bound mentality of academics. But in fact, 
higher-bit-rate ATRAC- or MP3-encoded audio is every bit as good as 
uncompressed WAV files for spectral analysis. Over the many years that I 
recorded with MiniDisc (ATRAC compression), only once did I see an artifact in 
a spectrogram attributable to the compression system, and that was obvious and 
didn't interfere with the interpretation of the graphic. Walter Knapp's 
ATRAC-encoded frog recordings were accepted happily by scientists.

Of course low-rate data compression is crap; but I don't think one should 
devalue a useful process because it can be misused. Nowadays memory and storage 
are much cheaper, and the only situation where one might want to use data 
compression might be very long monitoring, like 24 hour runs.

-Dan





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