|
Au File Format
The Au file format is a simple audio file format introduced by Sun Microsystems. The format was common on NeXT systems and on early Web pages. Originally it was headerless, being 8-bit μ-law algorithm, μ-law-encoded data at an 8000 Hz sample rate. Hardware from other vendors often used sample rates as high as 8192 Hz, often integer multiples of video clock signal frequencies. Newer files have a header that consists of six Signedness, unsigned 32-bit computing, 32-bit words, an optional information chunk which is always of non-zero size, and then the data (in Endianness, big-endian format). Although the format now supports many digital audio, audio encoding formats, it remains associated with the μ-law logarithmic encoding. This encoding was native to the SPARCstation 1 hardware, where SunOS exposed the encoding to application programs through the /dev/audio device file interface. This encoding and interface became a de facto standard for Unix sound. New format All fields a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apple Inc
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Company by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, the company was incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak as Apple Computer, Inc. the following year. It was renamed Apple Inc. in 2007 as the company had expanded its focus from computers to consumer electronics. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue, with billion in the 2024 fiscal year. The company was founded to produce and market Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Its second computer, the Apple II, became a best seller as one of the first mass-produced microcomputers. Apple introduced the Lisa in 1983 and the Macintosh in 1984, as some of the first computers to use a graphical user interface and a mouse. By 1985, internal company problems led to Jobs leavin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Byte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as the Internet Protocol () refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet. Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness. The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer File Formats
A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or open. Some file formats are designed for very particular types of data: PNG files, for example, store bitmapped images using lossless data compression. Other file formats, however, are designed for storage of several different types of data: the Ogg format can act as a container for different types of multimedia including any combination of audio and video, with or without text (such as subtitles), and metadata. A text file can contain any stream of characters, including possible control characters, and is encoded in one of various character encoding schemes. Some file formats, such as HTML, scalable vector graphics, and the source code of computer software are text files with defined syntaxes that allow them to be used for specific purposes. Specificat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Music Kit
The Music Kit was a software package for the NeXT Computer system. First developed by David A. Jaffe and Julius O. Smith, it supported the Motorola 56001 DSP that was included on the NeXT Computer's motherboard. It was also the first architecture to unify the Music-N and MIDI paradigms. Thus it combined the generality of the former with the interactivity and performance capabilities of the latter. The Music Kit was integrated with the Sound Kit. First demonstrated in 1988 at Davies Symphony Hall, the 1.0 release shipped in 1989 with the NeXT computer and included an Objective-C library for creating music and sound applications, a score language that included expression evaluation, MIDI, sound and DSP drivers, several command-line utilities and a simple score-playing application called ScorePlayer. The Music Kit was integrated into a variety of music applications, including Finale and Creation Station. It was also used in video games and even document processors. The 2.0 relea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Signal Processing
Digital signal processing (DSP) is the use of digital processing, such as by computers or more specialized digital signal processors, to perform a wide variety of signal processing operations. The digital signals processed in this manner are a sequence of numbers that represent Sampling (signal processing), samples of a continuous variable in a domain such as time, space, or frequency. In digital electronics, a digital signal is represented as a pulse train, which is typically generated by the switching of a transistor. Digital signal processing and analog signal processing are subfields of signal processing. DSP applications include Audio signal processing, audio and speech processing, sonar, radar and other sensor array processing, spectral density estimation, statistical signal processing, digital image processing, data compression, video coding, audio coding, image compression, signal processing for telecommunications, control systems, biomedical engineering, and seismology ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lossy Compression
In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size for storing, handling, and transmitting content. Higher degrees of approximation create coarser images as more details are removed. This is opposed to lossless data compression (reversible data compression) which does not degrade the data. The amount of data reduction possible using lossy compression is much higher than using lossless techniques. Well-designed lossy compression technology often reduces file sizes significantly before degradation is noticed by the end-user. Even when noticeable by the user, further data reduction may be desirable (e.g., for real-time communication or to reduce transmission times or storage needs). The most widely used lossy compression algorithm is the discrete cosine transform (DCT), first published by N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Companding
In telecommunications and signal processing, companding (occasionally called compansion) is a method of mitigating the detrimental effects of a channel with limited dynamic range. The name is a portmanteau of the words compressing and expanding, which are the functions of a compander at the transmitting and receiving ends, respectively. The use of companding allows signals with a large dynamic range to be transmitted over facilities that have a smaller dynamic range capability. Companding is employed in telephony and other audio applications such as professional wireless microphones and analog recording. How it works The dynamic range of a signal is compressed before transmission and is expanded to the original value at the receiver. The electronic circuit that does this is called a compander and works by compressing or expanding the dynamic range of an analog electronic signal such as sound recorded by a microphone. One variety is a triplet of amplifiers: a logarithmic a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantization (signal Processing)
Quantization, in mathematics and digital signal processing, is the process of mapping input values from a large set (often a continuous set) to output values in a (countable) smaller set, often with a finite number of elements. Rounding and truncation are typical examples of quantization processes. Quantization is involved to some degree in nearly all digital signal processing, as the process of representing a signal in digital form ordinarily involves rounding. Quantization also forms the core of essentially all lossy compression algorithms. The difference between an input value and its quantized value (such as round-off error) is referred to as quantization error, noise or distortion. A device or algorithm function, algorithmic function that performs quantization is called a quantizer. An analog-to-digital converter is an example of a quantizer. Example For example, Rounding#Round half up, rounding a real number x to the nearest integer value forms a very basic type of q ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lossless Compression
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy. By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates (and therefore reduced media sizes). By operation of the pigeonhole principle, no lossless compression algorithm can shrink the size of all possible data: Some data will get longer by at least one symbol or bit. Compression algorithms are usually effective for human- and machine-readable documents and cannot shrink the size of random data that contain no redundancy. Different algorithms exist that are designed either with a specific type of input data in mind or with specific assumptions about what kinds of redundancy the uncompressed data are likely to contain. Lo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A-law Algorithm
An A-law algorithm is a standard companding algorithm, used in European 8-bit PCM digital communications systems to optimize, i.e. modify, the dynamic range of an analog signal for digitizing. It is one of the two companding algorithms in the G.711 standard from ITU-T, the other being the similar μ-law, used in North America and Japan. For a given input x, the equation for A-law encoding is as follows: F(x) = \sgn(x) \begin \dfrac, & , x, < \dfrac, \\ ex \dfrac, & \dfrac \leq , x, \leq 1, \end where is the compression parameter. In Europe, . A-law expansion is given by the inverse function: The reason for this encoding is that the wide |
Adaptive Differential Pulse-code Modulation
Adaptive differential pulse-code modulation (ADPCM) is a variant of differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM) that varies the size of the quantization step, to allow further reduction of the required data bandwidth for a given signal-to-noise ratio. Typically, the adaptation to signal statistics in ADPCM consists simply of an adaptive scale factor before quantizing the difference in the DPCM encoder. ADPCM was developed for speech coding by P. Cummiskey, Nikil S. Jayant and James L. Flanagan at Bell Labs in 1973. In telephony In telephony, a standard audio signal for a single phone call is encoded as 8000 analog samples per second, of 8 bits each, giving a 64 kbit/s digital signal known as DS0. The default signal compression encoding on a DS0 is either μ-law (mu-law) PCM (North America and Japan) or A-law PCM (Europe and most of the rest of the world). These are logarithmic compression systems where a 13- or 14-bit linear PCM sample number is mapped into an 8-bit value ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Squelch
In telecommunications, squelch is a circuit function that acts to suppress the audio (or video) output of a receiver in the absence of a strong input signal. Essentially, squelch is a specialized type of noise gate designed to suppress weak signals. Squelch is used in two-way radios and VHF/UHF radio scanners to eliminate the sound of noise when the radio is not receiving a desired transmission. Squelch In some designs, the squelch threshold is preset. For example, television squelch settings are usually preset. Receivers in base stations, or repeaters at remote mountain top sites, are usually not adjustable remotely from the control point. In two-way radios (also known as radiotelephones), the received signal level required to unsquelch (un-mute) the receiver may be fixed or adjustable with a knob or a sequence of button presses. Typically the operator will adjust the control until noise is heard, and then adjust in the opposite direction until the noise is squelched. At ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
