Data compression for sound effects over a network

Laurence wrote on 10/28/2008, 8:02 AM
I have been looking at the possibility of having a sound effects library available over my home network, possibly over WiFi N. Obviously I would have to data compress the sound effects so that they would be able to stream in real time over the network. Does anyone have experience with this? Should I use mpeg3? How does data compression affect the more random nature of sound effects vs music? Is WiFi N fast enough to stream sound effects at any kind of decent quality?

A related question:

I've been looking at replacing my Netgear N router with a Linksys WRT610N. The reason is that the 610 can broadcast on two N bands at once, each one with a different sign on. It also has a USB port designed for using a USB2 hard drive as a common network drive. The advantage of this for me would be that I could set up two bands: one for me and one for everyone else in the family. That way I could still be streaming sound effects from the drive plugged into the 610 even when my daughter is playing music and video on the other N channel. Has anyone here done anything like this and if so, how well does it work? Some of the user reviews seem to indicate that the WRT610N overheats when it is driven hard and starts dropping signal.

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 10/28/2008, 2:03 PM
You don't have to data compress the audio for it to stream over a network. Uncompressed 48k 16bit stereo PCM audio is only 1.536 megabits/sec, which can easily be handled by even an old 802.11b wireless network. Wireless N is massive overkill for streaming audio, whether it compressed or uncompressed. Heck, I regularly stream HDV video and off-air transport streams over my wireless network.
musicvid10 wrote on 10/28/2008, 7:09 PM
John is correct about streaming over wireless.
However, in my current experience, Wireless N is not overkill, but only a modest improvement over Wireless G.

Wireless B gives 11 Mbs. Wireless G gives 54 Mbs. Correct so far.
Wireless N gives a whopping 300 Mbs? Faster than your 100 Mbs LAN? Right?
Wrong! More than 70% of N bandwdith is chewed up in protocols and overhead.
A realistic throughput for N is in the 70-80 Mbs range, and that is with your laptop in the same room as the access router. My max is 72 Mbs best case. Wikipedia reports a 74 Mbs "average." Actually, that's fast enough for almost any video streaming (except uncompressed) and even some rendering, but represents only a modest 33% increase over Wireless G. Not even close to the 500% hype being put out by the manufacturers (shame on you, Linksys).

I am soooo glad I didn't buy into the hype and buy the $200 N Router option with gigabit LAN to accommodate the added "speed" of Wireless N on my network -- it just doesn't exist. If you want some improvement over G go ahead and spend $50 - 60, but don't expect 300 Mbs in the consumer world. At least not yet.