How to digitize audio

How to Digitize Audio for playback through a computer.

Dispelling The Myths

Dispelling the Myths about Digital Audio

There's a mystique about digital audio that makes people think that you need a fully equipped studio, skilled technicians or engineers and a vast investment in hardware/software to create it. That's patently untrue. If you can play a sound through your computer, you can digitize it and if you can hear it, you can play it through your computer.

Another digital audio mystique is that it produces better sound. Not true either.

Like the great pyramids of Egypt, digital sound is made up of thousands if individual blocks yet, from a distance this great pyramid looks like a smooth triangle.

As illustrated in the left panel, digital sounds are clipped as square waves but to the human ear, digital sounds are a smooth transition from one tone to another. For example, digital audio for CD's uses a process called over-sampling to smooth the transition from byte to byte.

To date, the best sound media is still a record played on a quality turntable.