Week #5- Bits and Bytes

So as i create this application i am becoming increasingly aware of how big the application actually is, or rather how much space it will take up. Now when looking at the application running on a computer, this may not appear to worry most people, as computers have tons of space, whereas when the application is downloaded onto a mobile device, such as an iPhone, i can see how it may take up a considerable amount of space, as a handheld device like an iPhone has limited space, sometimes only 16GB. One way to improve this that is used with music files is to look at converting from .wav files into .mp3 files. This process takes the .wav file, which is the sound, exactly as recorded in the studio, and removes all sound frequencies that are out of an average human's hearing range, in some cases this can be a considerable amount.
We can use Lossy's Compression to work out how large a .wav file will be, and therefore we can work out if we need to convert it into .mp3, the way this works is we use the formula "seconds x KHZ x # of channels" so we multiply the number of seconds the track is in length by the CD quality audio sample rate of 44.1KHZ by the 2 channels a stereo sound uses. This gives us the size in 16bit, however we measure in 8bit bytes, so we multiply the result by 2.
To help in the understanding of these terms when looking at the size of the data used in the application i look at breaking them down like this; a "bit" is either a 1 or a 0. 2 bits will have 4 possible values (00, 11, 01, 10). 8 Bits give 256 different values, we call this 1 Byte. The way we use this "binary code" is in "unicode" where every letter and every symbol from every language is given a binary representation (a combination of 1's and 0's). We can use binary code to write anything on a computer.