Digital Audio
1. Sounds are pressure waves of air.
2. The speed of sound in 340 meters per second.
3. When you clap your hands the air that was between your hands is pushed
aside in all directions, when the pressure wave reaches your ear, it pushes
your eardrum slightly causing you to hear the clap.
4.
8. The sample rate is the rate at which the samples are captured or played back,
measured in Hertz (Hz), or samples per second.
9. An audio CD has a sample rate of 44,100 Hz, often written as 44 KHz.
10. Sample format or sample size is the number of digits in the digital representation of
each sample.
11. Humans can't hear frequencies above about 20,000 Hz.
12. Higher sample sizes allow for more dynamic range - louder and softer softs.
13. Your computer has a soundcard and your sound card comes with an Analog-to-Digital
Converter (ADC) for recording, and a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) for playing
audio. Your operating system (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.) talks to the sound card
to actually handle the recording and playback, and Audacity talks to your operating
system so that you can capture sounds to a file, edit them, and mix multiple tracks
while playing.
14. Two main types of audio files on a computer or Pulse Code Modulation and Compressed
Files.
File Formats
1. AUP: audacity projects are stored in an AUP file, this format has been highly optimized
for audacity so that it can save projects extremely quickly.
WAV: the default uncompressed audio format on windows, this is supported on almost all
computer systems.
AIFF: is the default uncompressed audio format on the macintosh, this is supported by most
computer systems but is not quite as common as WAV format.
MP3: is a compressed audio format that is a very popular way to store music, it can compress
audio by a factor of 10:1 with little degradation.
Oggs Vorbis: is a new compressed audio format that was designed to be a free alternative to
MP3 files, they are not as common but are about the same size as MP3 with better quality and
no patent restrictions.