Video game music remixes

[geoboy]

Well I wasn't really talking about any of that. I just had never seen those sound formats before. What purpose they have in sub cultures is fairly irrelevent to me.

The thing is, it's just annoying to deal with so many formats like that. If the issue is compression, there are plenty of lossless compression formats out there. They take up a lot more space than an MP3, but they are there are it's better than wave. A format can easily be lossless. Think zip files. Write as complicated a text file as you please, zip it, which compresses it, and then unzip it. Since it uses a standard compression of just replacing common repeting bits with a number telling how often the bit repeats (instead of "dog dog dog cat cat dog dog dog dog dog", just state "Dx3 Cx2 Dx5" and you have conveyed the same info using less data, though the solution does need to be on there, some sort of zip program :D), there is zero data loss. This can be checked with simple bit comparison. Anyway, they can do that with sound and video just like any other data format because it's all stored the same way. Data is data.

So anyway, yeah I can say I would prefer MP3 or something lossless (and really the loss from MP3s isn't noticable to me) to needing to download an unending stream of players or plugins. It's nice and all, but hey if I'm playing a directly ripped sound captured from my sound card it's even better than if it's emulated, right?

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you ranting just for the sake of ranting? An .mp3 and an .nsf file are so fundamentally different. The only real thing they have in common is that, in the end, they produce sound. It's like talking about food and comparing an orange to a steak and saying "why must oranges exist when I can always eat steak for sustenance instead!" They're both food, but they're totally different.

Another example I can give you -- this time in the data world -- is images. Do you know the difference between a rasterized image and a vector image? A rasterized image is basically a map of pixels, and vector images (like those drawn in Macromedia Flash) are composed of mathematical expressions that represent lines and curves. They both produce images, but the way they do it is so fundamentally different.

MP3s are like rasterized images, and an .nsf file (for example) is like a vector image. NSF files have dynamic properties to them (similar to MIDI files). For example, they can loop forever seamlessly like they would in game. You can also change their tempo and pitch . You can do that with MP3's, but you get considerable distortion. The same thing happens when you blow up a rasterized image. It'll get all pixelly, but a vector image won't because it is represented by equations that can take dynamic parameters.

So you see, there is room for other file formats, especially when they work on completely different underlying technologies and have distinctly different properties and abilities.