Why aren the sound samples of better quality and longer?
The sound samples are in “.au” format. This is the most widely used format in the internet, supported by most browsers. It would take us more time to publish the list if we had to include the samples in more than one format simultaneously, and it would delay the publication of the list. The samples are taken in 8bits, mono, 8khz. This is the sound format that uses less disk space per time unit.. This way we can include 10 to 15 seconds of a song in a 100-120 Kb file. At 14.4 Kbps, this takes about 1.5 minutes to download. We consider this to be a reasonable wait for a 15 second sample. If we posted a bigger file, probably a lot of our visitors wouldn’t have the time or patience to wait. On the same token, we don’t want to incur in copyright or distribution issues if we publish a longer portion of the songs. I need information about this dominican instrument/musician.
