Audio Essentials

Course Overview

Do you work with audio and have some understanding but need to know more about compression, file-formats and limitations of digital audio files?

If so then this course is ideal. The essentials are stripped down and presented in as non-technical a way as possible (we can get technical if you like!).

Throughout the course audio samples are used so you can hear the result of what is being talked about.

Course Outline

INTRODUCTION

AUDIO BASICS

• The audio spectrum
• Audio dynamic range
• Recording analogue audio
• Analogue media - LPs and tape

CONVERTING TO DIGITAL AUDIO

• Digitising audio
• PCM encoding
• Explanation of sampling rates
• The Nyquist frequency
• Aliasing and anti-aliasing
• Bit depth and dynamic range
• Dither noise and masking dither noise
• Examples of different types of sampling
• Storing PCM Recordings
• PCM as WAV and AIFF

BIT-RATE COMPRESSION OF DIGITAL AUDIO

• Why do we need to compress?
• Examples of file formats - mp3, AAF, mpeg4 etc
• How compression works
• Using different software for compression
• Identifying compression defects and artefacts
• Streaming compressed files
• A-B comparison between uncompressed and compressed examples

ENCODING AUDIO

• The need for aggressive error correction
• Information carried on the PQ channels

DYNAMIC RANGE COMPRESSION

• Why compress your dynamic range?
• Dynamic range compression vs. bitrate compression
• When to apply compression
• Different examples - different sounds
• Threshold, ratio and gain understanding the controls

EDITING AUDIO

• Simple examples of editing
• Speech editing
• Music editing