If it’s any useful to you, i can say that i’m on a slow connection (2Mb), and loading the wav’s took me only 20 seconds or so. Not a terribly long wait.

All the best to you people at Noteflight and thanks again.

I said “theoretically” because there is an interesting problem. Many of Noteflight’s samples are kept short by using looping techniques to repeat a trailing segment of the sample to make a longer note. But the MP3 encoding/decoding process introduces a slight loss of accuracy into the sample, meaning that the loops we calculated for WAV samples will no longer work for the same samples after they have been encoded and decoded in the MP3 format which introduces small errors into the waveform. You might think we could just not bother looping the MP3s, but the savings in compression is in some cases outweighed by the increased size of an unlooped sample. To loop an MP3 sample correctly, we’ll need to run it through the Player MP3 codec, write it back out as a WAV filea again and then redetermine the loop points in a DAW. This all takes time!

Noteflight is great initiative. Thanks for that.

I have a technical question : Isn’t it more efficient to provide the samples as mp3 instead of wav, which is about 10 times more data?
I also remember the guys from Hobnox, using a proprietary OGG Vorbis encoder. Of course that would be more taxing on the client’s cpu.

Just some thoughts.