Now for some techie stuff.

Recently, I have been to exposed to a lot of good techie stuff. There were some really cool seminars/tutorials in I2R. And me being the me. I had to go for all, even when they were during exam period. I feel that such things should matter more than exams. But anyway.

So the highlight were these talks by Dr. Jürgen Herre from Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS). He has been contributing to MPEG audio standards since the time of MPEG-1. So he’s like pretty big in the field.

The talks were so cool. He talked abt the evolution of the MPEG standards. Its really amazing to see that. I mean how much progress people have made! Whats even more amazing is the amount of efforts that have been put in in these things!

For the un-initiated, MPEG-1 or specifically MPEG-1 Layer 3 is what u know as mp3.

In the talk Dr. Jürgen was talking abt the latest MPEG standards. The MPEG-4. For general audio, one can acheive ‘good quality’, rather acceptably good quality at as low as 24kbps! And he demoed it. And it sounded nice. A bit synth, but that’s if you are very very picky about things. But come on, for 24kbps, I’d take that anyday.

Today Dr. Jürgen had a ‘tutorial’ about Multi-Channel encoding. The stuff they do so that you can have ur precious 5.1 audio over channels ment for stereo or mono. Another amazing field. Man I wish I could understand 1/2 the stuff that they were talking about. I mean I kinda got it but not fully. There is so much that people have done. MPEG-Surround the new standards that is gives ‘good quality’ 5.1 in as low as 42kbps! Just amazing.

Parametric Coding is the way to go!.

I am so gratefull to I2R allowing me to do my FYP there. I get a chance to meet and rub shoulder(in a figurative way) with all these great ppl. I hope I2R has more such cool talks.

Anyway, so much for MPEG and mp3s. I still prefer my ATRAC. S o back to my Mini-Disk.