i’ve had a draft titled “compression” for a few days and i’d forgotten what i wanted to write about until i ended up back at bluesky (i know, i know), and it hit me like a ton of bricks. compression bricks, even.
there’s something so insidious about the modern web’s insistence on converting everything. bluesky’s sound compression on its videos is so unbelievably bad that it’s seriously giving “128kbps Napster mp3 download” vibes, but it’s everywhere: posting a gif? nah, it’s a video file or webp or whatever now. posting a png? jpg. flac? mp4. every time you put something on the mainstream web it gets messed up by the website you’re putting it on. all of this stuff is (usually) nonreversible. and it didn’t used to be this way!
i am HIGHLY aware of size limitations and the benefit of good compression in every sense of the word. i used to write GBA soundtracks and the entire samplebank would be less than 1mb. using trackers allowed me to do a lot with very little, but this required precise control. using real time synthesis, you can get even further and create fully produced music in kilobytes of data (see demoscene 64kb & 4kb intros). same with pixel art–it can be stunning with just a few colors, as pc98 pixel art readily demonstrates, but once again this is a careful balancing act.
all these beautiful things get mangled when they go through the content machine. watch any 64kb intro on youtube and watch the particles turn into artefacted rubbish, look at the nightmare of any pc-98 screenshot saved as a jpg, or of course, just listen to literally any song uploaded to bluesky.
even bandcamp isn’t completely exempt from this: yes they make you upload lossless files and then convert to various lossless and lossy on their end–so far so good. but their naming convention is absolutely atrocious, and there’s no way around that. when you download an album, unless it’s all by one artist with no guest features, it’ll be out of order. yes, renaming is trivial, but what if you had any intention with naming your files? like, “the penis (eek!)” is actually just called “eek!” with the filename thepenis.it. see what i mean?
cohost let us upload whatever we wanted and just have us a size limit. if your song could be loselessly compressed in 10mb–upload it! same with photos and art. and if it was too big, it wouldn’t try to compress it, instead giving you control over it. and filenames were preserved, too
think having spaces we actually control is important. this isn’t the only reason, likely not the most important either, but… as an artist i think it’s AN important reason.
Leave a Reply