Posts Tagged ‘ Technical ’
‘Bouncing’ to audio is a process of rendering realtime generated audio to audio files. Typically, ‘realtime generated audio’ is software synthesisers, samplers, hardware sound generators, or even audio files being processed by plugins or hardware effects processors. After bouncing, these audio sources are turned into audio files on your hard drive. The audio files are [ READ MORE ]
Noise floor The noise floor of a system is the level at which the background noise occurs. In analogue systems, this will be the hiss and/or hum. In digital systems, this will be the point at which audio has less than one bit to represent it (audio at this level sounds like a crunchy mess). [ READ MORE ]
Masking is a little-understood concept that is important to composers and mix engineers. Essentially, masking is what happens when one sound makes it difficult to hear another sound. An obvious example of this is two instruments playing the same note, with one instrument sounding much louder than the other. This can happen with notes or [ READ MORE ]
Normalisation is a process that changes the volume of a piece of audio. It does this by first analysing the audio, looking for the highest peak. Then an amount of gain is applied to the entire section of audio, so that the highest peak is at 0dBfs. Because of the need to analyse the audio [ READ MORE ]
A “gain stage” is any point in the signal path where gain is applied – where volume can be changed. Gain can be positive (makes the sound louder), negative (makes the sound quieter), or unity (doesn’t change the volume – but it’s still a gain stage!). “Gain staging” is the awareness that there are all [ READ MORE ]
As with bit depths, there are several different samplerates used for digital audio. While bit depth determines the accuracy of low level details, samplerate determines the accuracy of high frequency details. Samplerate is actually the rate at which the digital audio is being processed, and where there are multiple files or audio streams being processed [ READ MORE ]
Occasionally there’s a bit of confusion about bit depth, and about what the best bit depth to use in different situations is. In the digital world, there are three bit depths that we might have to deal with – 16 bit, 24 bit and 32 bit. 16 bit Digital audio at 16 bit is most [ READ MORE ]
Peak levels are the highest digital values that are in the waveform as it exists in the computer (or other digital equipment). While peak levels aren’t directly related to how we hear the sound, they are crucial for correct gain staging in digital gear. Most critically, peak levels must not reach 0dBfs when recording or [ READ MORE ]
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