Re: Why CompactFlash, Damon ?

[Mark Pulver <mark@redmoon-music.com>]

PERILLE (07:55 AM 08.05.2000) wrote:

 >Repeater works with CompactFlash ?
 >
 >But why not Smartmedia which is 5 times faster and much more communly
 >used with japaneese samplers now ?

I've been thinking about this and have some thoughts...

- Density. In having a camera that's based on SmartMedia, I've been 
looking 
for larger parts and I can't find anything on the market larger than 
64meg. 
CompactFlash is generally available up to 128meg, and it looks like 
Electrix found 256meg parts.

- Durability. While I love the small size of SmartMedia, my impression is 
that it is a medium which was designed for thin applications such as 
digital cameras. Short of storing it in an external plastic shell, it is 
not exactly resilient to bending. I cringe every time that I move the 
wafer 
from the camera to my USB reader.

- Cost. CompactFlash seems to be slightly less expensive on the street 
(about $20 less for commonly available 64meg parts). This isn't a 
significant difference to the consumer, but the *value* is greater when 
you 
add in the durability question.


I don't think that the part speed will be much of an issue. I would think 
that the Repeater will *not* try to play _directly_ from the media, but it 
will instead buffer the data stream first. This solution would be much 
more 
cost effective in the terms of being able to use slower/less expensive 
media, and allows for various data manipulation tricks along the way.

Given the price of RAM these days, I would suspect that there is a healthy 
buffer available in the machine for stream buffering as well as scratch 
pad 
area for time/pitch shift magic.

If this is all correct guessing, then I personally would option for the 
larger and more durable media at a lower cost, CompactFlash.

If we figure that the machine is *not* using any compression, and that it 
is sampling/storing data at 44.1khz, 16 bit, then we're looking at the 
general numbers of 5meg/minute for a mono track. Given a 256meg part, that 
would give us about 50 track minutes. Obviously, even simple data 
compression would double that.

100 track minutes on a looper box? And the ability to slam in another 100 
minutes on a dark stage without worrying about breaking the media if you 
insert it off-center?

Cool. :)


Mark