Reply to this post | Go Back

View Post [edit]

Poster:	Musiceater	Date:	Oct 10, 2020 4:20pm
Forum:	general	Subject:	Basic question about download options

When I am on the page of a music upload, there are flac and torrent options in the download options box. Below all those there are two grey texts, 'files' and 'original', which I can click to download. What's the difference between all them?

Attachment: caparchive.PNG

Reply to this post

Reply [edit]

Poster:	bzc6p	Date:	Dec 6, 2020 1:00am
Forum:	general	Subject:	Re: Basic question about download options

When you upload multimedia files, the Archive creates other versions of it (i.e. converts the files to other formats, e.g. ogg, mp3 etc.), as part of the process they call Derive. The numbers in this example suggest that 273 files were uploaded to the item (they are the original ones), and the Archive created ~1000 additional files from these as derivatives.

There are several purposes for conversion, among others, creating formats that work with the embedded player, using open source (non-proprietary) formats, creating lower quality (preview) versions etc. In case of video files, the thumbnail images also count into the number of derivative files.