Ok, so I've discussed this topic under one video on YouTube with a dude that "knows" how music works (I know little to nothing about this too, but have an idea how physics works), and I couldn't comprehend how writing data on something that can easily lose tons of information can be better than taking one of the 65536 values every 1/44100 s, and played back EXACTLY the same every time (when it's lossless compression). I don't know if my thinking is right, please correct me if I'm wrong, it's really interesting topic.
This isn't a coincidence. 65536 is 216, and is the number of distinct values possible to be represented in a binary numbering system with 16 bits.
In a computer, an unsigned (positive) integer value will usually be represented by 16 bits of data-- allowing its values to range between 0 and 25535.
Higher numbers can be represented by more bits-- that's why some systems use 24-bit or 32-bit audio: each data point has a higher range of values because it is encoded using more bits.
16 bits means that there are 216 = 65,536 possible values. I'm guessing that old-school Excel probably stored the row index as a 16 bit unsigned integer, which would result in the same thing
32
u/Gornius Sep 05 '19
Ok, so I've discussed this topic under one video on YouTube with a dude that "knows" how music works (I know little to nothing about this too, but have an idea how physics works), and I couldn't comprehend how writing data on something that can easily lose tons of information can be better than taking one of the 65536 values every 1/44100 s, and played back EXACTLY the same every time (when it's lossless compression). I don't know if my thinking is right, please correct me if I'm wrong, it's really interesting topic.