Recording - February 2018 - 73

While inexpensive converters are found in
most computing devices, recording engineers tend to prefer dedicated (and significantly more expensive) recording-specific
converters. These can vary widely in cost,
but are the cornerstone of the modern recording studio.

File formats
Once you've gotten the audio digitized
at your preferred bit depth and sample rate,
you'll want to store it on some sort of media.
Early digital systems stored digital audio on
tape, but now we are focused on hard disks
and solid state drives, which allow rapid random access to any point in a song. Initially,
there were many competing file formats, but
eventually two standards won out: the AIFF
standard (championed by Apple) and the
WAVE standard (championed by Microsoft).
While this looked like it was going to
be a knock-down, drag-out fight among
the standard-bearers, the reality is a lot
more laid back: most software now just
works with either type of file, and they
are both supported on both platforms.

There is one other storage issue that
we should consider: the format that we
provide to end users as 'product'. The
growth of the Internet in the mid- to late
1990s brought with it an explosion of
online music distribution options. But the
speed of the early Internet wasn't up to
full-speed streaming-or any streaming
at all. Instead, files were uploaded and
downloaded; to get them to transfer in
any reasonable amount of time meant
compressing the files to their smallest
possible size.
The Moving Pictures Experts Group at
the Fraunhofer Institut in Germany has
been in the lead of designing methods to
compress video and audio; the MPEG-1
Audio Layer III (commonly called MP3)
format came out of this effort. This became
the most-used compressor, mainly due to a
software implementation produced by the
Fraunhofer IIS. Music, encoded as MP3
files, flooded the Internet, and the modern
musical landscape was born.
We now have compression algorithms
that are in many ways far superior to the

original MP3 format: MPEG-4, AAC, and
Ogg Vorbis are providing superior sonic
results compared to MP3, and lossless
formats like FLAC take size-reduced
audio to the next level of quality. But it is
important to understand the difference
between these delivery formats (what
listeners hear) and the production formats
that we will use as recording engineers.

Conclusion
This part of Studio 101 has been a
whirlwind of details: storage mechanisms,
digital details and digital conversion
systems. When are we going to do
some recording? Soon, my friends-but
we have a little more to learn, first. Next
month, we will dig into the digital (and
mostly computer-based) tools that allow
us to run a studio wherever we find
ourselves. Until then, cheers!
Darwin Grosse (grosse@recordingmag.
com) is a musician, engineer, educator,
podcast host, and digital audio guru, living
and working in the Minneapolis area.

http://www.kiqproductions.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - February 2018