Sending audio through the web bad?

sonicpaint

sonicpaint

New member
Hey guys in another thread the question came up as to sending files through the web. Would anyone in here FTP a whole LP through the web to be mastered? Does the quality suffer? Would you trust it?

I personally wouldn't do it but I'd like to know if anyone has the answer as to if the quality of the file are reduced during transfer.

sonicpaint
 
Actually after reading the mastering thread it occurred to me, I saw a low-budget arthouse film a while ago, you may have seen it (Lord of the Rings).

Anyway, those guys were working with FTP sites to move audio around from sessions in London back to Wellington and vice-versa, it was ok for them, so I would assume it is ok for the rest of us?

Everything you download is error checked anyway, if you have a
look at your connection before you log off, you'll see "sent" and "received" columns, now a lot of the stuff in the sent column is (for example) the text I'm typing right now, or info being collected by spyware, credit card details, etc. But a good chunk of that is error checking data that your PC is sending back to the site you're downloading from to make sure everything is in order.
 
Would you believe I haven't seen it?

I haven't seem The Lord Of The Rings yet, none of them. I'm sure I will sooner or later. As to the file being send back and forth? Do you know if the files that were transfered where the ones used in the final cut of the movie?

You've brought up some good points though and I'm interested as to see what the others have to say.

Thanks for your reply.
sonicpaint
 
I don't see any problem in moving audio back and forth via the web. Just save the file as data... (.wav file) and you're golden. As long as the file completes it's transfer and hasn't been tampered with, it should be identical to the origional. I use my ftp server all the time to send files back and forth to guys I work with in Canada, Europe, and Australia. Never had any problems to date.

ls
 
As long as you had enough bandwidth I wouldn't see any problem with it. It's just digital information. As knightsy says, each data packet is error checked on receipt. If data loss has occurred, the protocol allows for packets to be resent.

Financial institutions ship billions of $ in transactions around the world every day using FTP. If it's safe enough for them...
 
Bulls Hit said:
As long as you had enough bandwidth I wouldn't see any problem with it. It's just digital information. As knightsy says, each data packet is error checked on receipt. If data loss has occurred, the protocol allows for packets to be resent.

Financial institutions ship billions of $ in transactions around the world every day using FTP. If it's safe enough for them...
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agreed.
 
sonicpaint said:
Would anyone in here FTP a whole LP through the web to be mastered?
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Sure... why not????????


sonicpaint said:
Does the quality suffer?
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Why would you think the quality would suffer??? The only degradation that could occur would be if you converted it to some form of lossy compression format (ie, MP3, etc...) before you send it....


sonicpaint said:
Would you trust it?
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Well yeah, what's there not to trust???? Data is data....


Pickup a copy of John Watkinson's The Art of Digital Audio - it will help with your understanding of the data I/O aspects!
 
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Not understanding how that works is a common problem. Witness the fight that was here many years ago, after somebody linked to a page claiming that ALL copying of digital data will cause soundloss.

There are really loads of people who have no idea how any of this works at all. For them, the internet is magic.
 
It just occurred to me.

It just accrued to me when Blue mentioned how I/O and data transmission works. It makes sense that the data is just being transfered bit by bit until the whole file has been sent or received.

I have a hypothetical explanation to why I think that there could be some loss somewhere, though I think I should do some reading on the subject before I post it. I'll have to check it out.

I'll post soon.
sonicpaint
 
There should be no difference between sending a file to another HD within your computer or sending it to a HD across the globe.
 
Although there are certain [very short] point-to-point parts of a path on some computer subsystems that aren't properly error protected I tend to more or less trust digital transission.

There are plenty of points on the data path that are properly protected with CRC, checksum, parity bits, packet protection, etc that add up to data integrity.

So my answer is that I would fully trust digital audio transmitted across the internet. There should be no data loss or anything like that - it should be a transparent ransfer.

I still give it the final check with my ears just to make sure - that's my own 'trust checking' error algorithm ! It hasn't let me down yet. :)

kylen
 
apparently you all haven't heard...
if you send audio data over 23 times thru webspace...
say you and your bud swap the same file 12 times, when you get
it back it will be remixed.

I do that all the time when my beats don't come together.
I hit my man up and we AOL IM the .aiff back and forth until
I have the desired result.

This only works on a 14K modem tho.
 
I do it all the time. There is not data loss, like was said earlier in the thread Downloading is checksummed every 256 bytes is checksummed for accuracy. Imagine a prgram being downlaoded and half the code getting screwed up. It won;t work. Same with audio it's all litlle 0's and 1's when you get down to it. And the Q is are all the 0's and 1's accurate. if so then cool. if not then resend the data packet.

Bryan Giles
 
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