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A 20 Million Song iPod Is Coming

Can you imagine carrying virtually every song ever recorded around in your pocket? It’s possible thanks to a new compression technology being developed at the University of
Rochester that digitally reproduces music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3. Ipod_80g

"This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music," says Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-creator of the technology. "Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn’t really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music."

An 80G iPod can currently hold about 20,000 songs. Multiply that by 1000 and the player could hold 20 million songs.  Finding that many tracks may actually be the hard part. The World’s Largest Record Collection only boasts 6 million songs and Amazon offers a mere 4,683,676 tracks for sale.

But bring on that ISP flat tax on music. I’m feeling up for the challenge.

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7 Comments

  1. It sounds like a big stretch to say that this compression technology is in the same vein as MP3 encoding. Synthesizing an instrument is a very different process than just compressing an existing recording (of anything). Plus, they modeled their recording on a particular clarinet, which may not sound like any other clarinet, and they haven’t gotten this to work for anything other than that single instrument.
    Maybe someday, music players would be able to synthesize instruments data to replay a song, but it wouldn’t be able to synth singers (like myself), since they’d have to learn to synth my particular voice (and every other singer known to man). It could start a whole new genre of music that only uses these modeled instruments that are perfectly reproduced on any synth-enabled music player.
    It would be pretty cool to have every song known to man on a single iPod though…

  2. yeah, what cj said seems correct. the process they seem to have used would mean that if we wanted to “compress” say abbey road, we’d need to go back to the 1960s and create complex computer models for every single instrument, voice, room, microphone and piece of audio gear that the beatles used to make that record….

  3. Am I the only one here to notice the date on which the article referred to here was posted? Perhaps we shouldn’t take it quite so seriously. Ahem.

  4. i’ll use my 20 million song iPod while i’m eating my new Burger King left-handed whopper

  5. Its safe to say that the entire repertoire for solo clarinet from the last 500 years would fit in a MB. Along these same lines, where’s the article on how many MIDI files can fit on an iPod?

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