
Timeline of audio formats - kozak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_audio_formats
======
esonderegger
I don't know why this popped up on the front page of HN today, but for anyone
who enjoys the history of audio recordings, I highly recommend checking out
UCSB's cylinder preservation and digitization project:

[http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/](http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/)

~~~
sp332
And the Great 78 Project is preserving 78 RPM records.
[http://great78.archive.org/](http://great78.archive.org/) There are over
100,000 recordings available to stream online now.
[https://archive.org/details/78rpm](https://archive.org/details/78rpm) (This
collection also includes the Cylinder Archive for some reason.) The ones from
George Blood are ripped 4 times at once with four tone arms with different
needles, then each of the four gets equalized by a sound engineer and one is
picked as the best. All 8 copies are uploaded to the Internet Archive.
[http://great78.archive.org/preservation/](http://great78.archive.org/preservation/)

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wink
> An audio format is a medium for sound recording and reproduction.

I expected stuff like AIFF, RIFF, WAV, and MP3 - interesting that that's the
exact same term (non-native speaker here)

In German we have the word Tonträger [0] which doesn't seem to map to any
direct translation on Wikipedia, I know those categories are sometimes
diverging between the languages.

[0]: [https://dict.leo.org/englisch-
deutsch/tontr%C3%A4ger](https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/tontr%C3%A4ger)

~~~
22c
> Tonträger

Closest word in English is phonorecord, it's not really used by the general
population.

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slr555
Did I miss something or should this be near the beginning in 1898
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_recording](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_recording)

~~~
onomonomono
It's there but it's really easy to miss because it doesn't have a picture. I
skimmed right past it on my first read!

That was a really interesting article, especially this part: "In 1949 at Fuld
Hall in Rutgers University, Paul Braverman made a 75-minute recording of a
Woody Guthrie concert using a wire recorder. The recording only came to light
in 2001, and appears to be the only surviving live recording of Woody Guthrie;
it was restored over several years and released on CD in 2007. The CD, The
Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, subsequently won the 2008 Grammy
Award for Best Historical Album."

~~~
slr555
Great pick up!!

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bdefore
All of this innovation and iteration at breakneck speed... and then nothing in
ten years since the introduction of microSD. I imagine a combination of
everything going cloud based and Wikipedia authors losing interest.

~~~
dcwca
Yeah, they could have tracked the arguably fascinating series of digital
formats, from P2P low bitrate mp3, lossless WAV, FLAC, M4A and whatever the
big streaming players are using these days. Not to mention the wild and wooly
world of wireless encoding via Bluetooth and others.

~~~
netule
If you have the knowledge, you could add it. It's likely not disinterest, but
lack of insight.

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JoeDaDude
A related topic, for which I'd like to see a compilation, is an encyclopedia
of voice coding formats. Developed mostly for and by telephone companies,
there have been numerous methods of encoding and compressing human speech for
transmission, security, or storage. There is a Wikipedia page on the topic
[1], but the subject is deep and the list is longer than Wikipeida can cover.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocoder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocoder)

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intopieces
Here I always recommend MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne.
Fascinating read on how MP3 shaped music for a generation.

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Aardwolf
Awesome list! A large bunch of the physical formats have been discussed by
techmoan's channel on youtube.

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sosuke
What about music boxes? Those go back farther and were a format of music.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_box)

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another-cuppa
I would call many of these "music formats" rather than audio formats. Those
punch cards and MIDI etc. don't actually represent audio at all. Even a deaf
person could read and appreciate those.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Many of these formats didn't have enough bandwidth to support music when
introduced. Most cassette formats were introduced specifically for dictation:

> The compact cassette technology was originally designed for dictation
> machines, but improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant
> the Stereo 8-track cartridge and reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-
> professional applications.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette)

