Differences between 'Re-Mastering' & 'Re-mixing'

[ranjeetrain]

I do not disagree. It it is not very expensive these days, considering that I have unmuxed Bluray rips @35 GB per movie so going by that, it is totally justified to have 5 GB for one album of high quality music for those who believe.

But a 5TB HDD is not out yet, I guess!

Your guess is correct but calculation isn't

Not every album is full 60 minutes unless all of them happen to be "Hum Saath Saath Hain" type albums :lol: In west they release a lot of albums with less than 30-40 minutes of content.

Besides, you haven't taken into account compression. Using any lossless compression format will reduce the storage requirement by 30-40%. Even currently available largest capacity (4TB) drives are enough to store 1000 albums.

If a single file is of the order of 5.x GB, does it means the RAM will have to increase substantially? A hi-res at 24/96 is typically 100 to 150 MB. 24/192 is bigger. But even 2 GB RAM on a regular PC or laptop, theoretically, is more than enough to buffer one hi-res audio file. So will we need larger memory? In any case, this is only a "nice-to-know" question, and hardly a deal breaker, as memory will become ever cheaper.

When memory was scarce and expensive, software players implemented configurable buffers. They defaulted at a few hundred milliseconds and allowed for up to a few second of buffer. That was enough to compensate for occasional unavailability of CPU to read the required data. Even such a small buffer worked reasonably well because operating systems were much simpler and they didn't have 50+ processes running 500+ threads at any point in time, causing CPU to perform several hundred million calculations even on a seemingly idle computer.

Now a days with increasing complexity of operating systems, a few hundred millisecond of buffer is no longer good enough. There are way too many things happening in a computer in the background, potentially increasing the risk of higher jitter. It's due to this reason that many software players started full buffering. IIRC WinAmp 5 was the first software to implement full-track buffering. Buffering of full track is a great measure to reduce jitter. WinAmp's implementation was real. Real as in many software/hardware player that claim to be "memory playback" are just using it as marketing terminology.

A couple months ago I performed a comparison on some top software players to understand their behavior. I noticed that some players performed a lot more disk I/O in the beginning of a track compared to others, which performed I/O regularly, in a almost uniform pattern throughout the track. Clearly, if a software was performing I/O in the middle of playing a track, it wasn't doing a genuine "memory-playback".

From that experiment my conclusion was that many software that claim to be "memory playback" software are just plainly lying. Moral of the story? The idea that a software buffers an entire track before playing back is not really a reality. It doesn't need to be. Buffering a 10-15 seconds of data is more than sufficient in practice. So the apprehension that a computer will need to have the ability to buffer a 5GB file is an unfounded one.

In any case, one doesn't need to create one single file for an entire album. I never do. There are hardly any albums I can hear from first to last track. If I have to choose tracks individually anyway, there is no point in storing an entire album in one file. And if one is storing individual tracks the idea of "memory-playback" is indeed feasible, so long as a software can really implement it.