Giving a speech on MP3 Players and how they operate..

[Juice Box]

Can anyone think of a form of Audience Adaptation to explain the concept of Bitrate to them? My TA said i need to explain it better, and I just cannot come up with an analogy for it.

edit: now i need to figure out an easy way to explain hard drives....hmm

 

[FoBoT]

equate it to picture resolution
show them a low resolution picture 320x240 and then a 1600x1200 picture, blow them up so they can see the grainyness of the low resolution picture. low bit rate sound is like that, grainy, poor sound definition

 

[Juice Box]

Originally posted by: FoBoT
equate it to picture resolution
show them a low resolution picture 320x240 and then a 1600x1200 picture, blow them up so they can see the grainyness of the low resolution picture. low bit rate sound is like that, grainy, poor sound definition

thats actually a good idea....I dont know if they will know what the term "resolution" means....but I think a visual representation will do the trick....thanks a bunch man! :beer:

 

[Lonyo]

You could also explain variable bitrate to them at the same time by using pictures with very little detail and showing how even at different resolutions they look the same (ie: 50/50 split with 2 blocks of colour).
If you wanted to go into more depth that is.

 

[Juice Box]

Now.....how do I explain how hard drives work to them? There are a few angles I could take with this concept, but Id like to hear what you guys think about it.

 

[FoBoT]

the drive itself? or how it relates to the computer, ie the OS's file system?

 

[Fingolfin269]

You have to explain to people what a 'hard drive ' is? WTF? Imagine a house. One house has one closet and another has 15 closets. If you are a woman, which would you choose and why? That is what determines how good your hard drive is!

 

[Juice Box]

Originally posted by: FoBoT
the drive itself? or how it relates to the computer, ie the OS's file system?

more just about how the drive stores the MP3s...I know its basically a system of sectors and 1s and 0s...but I dont know how I can explain that to some of these people...

 

[Juice Box]

any ideas?

 

[Cerb]

As for bitrate...IMO, a JPEG. Take an image. A photo maybe. Get like 10:1 compression (pretty good, actually). Then save it as another image, but with much more compression. It aught to look much worse right there. Use a zoom in on a portion, then the whole image (IE, zoom in you see it's missing a ton, zoom out and you barely see it).

You're not worried about the hard drive, but the file system. It's a big cluttered filing cabinet (actually, it tends to be a very organized one, but...). You open a drawer, and there's stuff there. If there's empty space, you can put new stuff in. If not, you have to take stuff out. When playing, you have a paper out of one of the folders and are reading it.

 

[Jzero]

The hard drive is the box full of CDs (or perhaps your audience needs to hear "box full of phonograph cylinders").