[ad_1]
Classic 90’s song was used to fine-tune MP3 compression – Suzanne Vega, DNA – Tom’s Diner
[ad_2]
View Reddit by loztriforce – View Source
[ad_1]
Classic 90’s song was used to fine-tune MP3 compression – Suzanne Vega, DNA – Tom’s Diner
[ad_2]
View Reddit by loztriforce – View Source
*In 1975, our engineers were among the first engineering teams to do a digital audio recording – about 20 seconds, which back then was quite the feat. The challenges of digitizing music for storage and then being able to play it back have presented themselves to the industry as far back as the late 1960s. As storage size and speed grew, digital music storage for the mass consumer started to become a reality. The CD revolution was in full swing, but even though the CD was leaps and bounds better than analog tape, engineering efforts at the time were exploring even easier and more cost effective ways to store and play music.*
*Sometime between 1989 and 1990, at the AT&T labs in Murray Hill, NJ, a scientist heard a song. That scientist, Karlheinz Brandenburg, was just your average, every day audio engineering genius who also happened to be working on the codec for a new digital music format.*
*”I was ready to fine tune my compression algorithm and somewhere down the corridor a radio was playing Tom’s Diner. I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a cappella voice,” Brandenburg recalled several years later in a magazine interview.*
*In a documentary for Swedish television in 2009, Brandenburg explained how Tom’s Diner continued the journey to becoming the Mother of the MP3. “I was finishing my PhD thesis and I read in some hi-fi magazine that they had used [Tom’s Diner] to test loudspeakers. I said, ‘okay, let’s test what this song does to mp3.’ And the result was, at bit rates where everything else sounded quite nice, Suzanne Vega’s voice sounded horrible.” While Brandenburg and others on his team used a variety of music to test samples of the burgeoning mp3 compression format, Tom’s Diner was a track they repeatedly relied on to test the effects of the data compression on the recording.*
[source](https://us.kef.com/blogs/news/tom-s-diner-and-the-birth-of-the-mp3)
Too bad this isn’t Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega.
[80s song](https://youtu.be/L9x-DENKIts?list=OLAK5uy_msO7Lh05VetvLvh0-ZLZffJTAwL4pJSdw)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r3B7yz6J68&ab_channel=AnnenMayKantereit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r3B7yz6J68&ab_channel=AnnenMayKantereit)
​
Awesome cover
https://youtu.be/lHjn8ffnEKU?si=Rt11rf8IDFvp3vhV
She wrote this song while she was a student at Barnard College on Manhattan’s upper west side. And it describes a real diner (technically called “Tom’s Restaurant”) that is still there at 112th and Broadway and that was also the facade used for the diner scenes in Seinfeld. Terrible food but they survive on Seinfeld tourists.
Luka was a good song.
https://youtu.be/VZt7J0iaUD0?si=QG9_nRbuow8d5sqf
When I hear the song and close my eyes, I have the smell of hot chocolate in my nose and memories of my Amiga 500 and my girlfriend cuddling with me on the couch and the feeling of her long, soft hair on my face. I even remember the smell of her shampoo. I was 17 and happy.
I really miss those times ;(
But what about mp2?
Having worked in audio processing for music tech in the past, I can guarantee you there are software engineers out there who get PTSD symptoms when they hear this song. My trigger songs are “I don’t care” and “Down Under”.