How to make music REALLY small

Miniaturisation is a wonderful thing - a few years back I would have needed a small truck to carry around with me the amount of music that I regularly do. That's not because I take a lot of music around with me, it was more because I'm weak and lazy. But now I don't need a truck at all because within the last couple of years they have invented Hard Disks which store everything I want quite compactly, like an old vinyl record without the scratches.

And the way they've got round the problem of scratches is by keeping the disk in a box the whole time! Genius really - imagine how many scratched LPs could have been avoided in the 70s if we'd had a way to play them without removing them from the sleeves first! But I don't think things have gone small enough yet, so I was having a think earlier about how we can store more things in my iPod at once. It's all about compression.

Compression is all about squeezing something big until it becomes something small. You can do it with sleeping bags, and you can also do it with music if you know the tricks. The boffins know lots of tricks, but I've got some that they may not have considered...

Number One: In the majority of digital storage media, information is stored as a succession of ones and zeroes. Like this: 11100010100210001. The easiest way to store this in a smaller space is to write smaller! I know that it sounds too easy, too obvious, but really just imagine how much more information could be stored on a hard disk that used really small writing! I estimate that nearly 1.4 times as much tunage could be stored on current hard disks using just this method alone.

Number Two: The compression methods used have to be able to cope with a wide variety of noises: singing, trombones, pigeon noises, screams and several others. It’s not easy to encode all these types of noise since a different algorithm is needed for each one. And each of these algorithms takes up space and makes the whole thing less efficient. So my idea is to cut out the ability to encode the less used noises and hence make a more efficient (albeit slightly less comprehensive) algorithm. Possibly the best thing to cut out is French. No longer will unnecessary time and space be used up encoding and compressing a silly language that nobody wants to hear. It means that I won’t be able to listen to Je t’aime or Joe le taxi on the iPod anymore, but I think this is something I will learn to live with.

Number Three: The final method is so secret, so cunning and so plain brilliant that I can only write it here in a special code, at least until I am able to obtain the proper patents. It would be truly terrible were some industry bigwig from Sony to see this, steal my idea and rob me of my rightful royalties. Here it is:

XHG

It's quite a good code, so I doubt you'll be able to crack it.

And that concludes my selection of excellent ideas to make music really small. Yes, I am a genius.