The the world of digital audio is full of abbreviations and technical terms. Some times texts are so stuffed with both that even insiders are puzzled !
To help you understand texts like this and to bring you a step further in being an eXpert on
digital audio matters - MPeX.net brings you the most common and widely known abbreviations and tech
terms in the MPeX.net Enzyclopedia.
If you have a term that does not appear - and you do not know its meaning - do not hesitate to write an eMail. We will try our best to inform you in the shortest possible time and we will add the term to the list below !
AAC
Advanced Audio Coding
The follow-up codec to MPeG1 Layer3 (MP3). AAC was developed (just like MP3) by the "Fraunhofer Institut für integrierte Schaltungen". AAC sounds better than MP3 - 96kbps compression are sufficient for good sound quality. Moreover AAC is secure - that is why Liquid Audio makes use of AAC.
AMP
Audio MPEG Player
Is a MP3-Player that is able to play back audiofiles.
Way back AMP in WinAMP stood for a decoding engine called "AMP"
Appears as a certain mode to
Loginto a
FTP Server (Anonymous Login).To anonymously log into a FTP Server you do neither have to have a user-id nor a password.
AOD
Audio On Demand
All the major lables are working on AOD solutions where a certain fee is charged to download a music file. The secure music formats which are necessary to put AOD in action are - inspite of AAC - not released.
CD-Ripper
A type of program that copies the digital data of audio CD´s onto the hard disk drive of the computer. The copy process is called DAC.
The data is stored in theWAVE-Format .
Compact-Disc-DataBase
Certain porgrams (eg. WinAMP, Realjukebox etc.) are able to connect to these online databases. The serial number of the CD in your CD- ROM device is read out. The CDDB sends back all the detailed information about the CD(an thus maybe as well titles you ripped off of it) like title, the names of the tracks an their lenght.
To connect to a CDDB is a handy way to spare the time you would need to type in all the titles of the tracks of your CD that you just ripped.
Disk At Once
If you want the tracks of a CD you are about to toast to appear in the original order - use the mode Disk At Once
Decoder
Program to uncompress audio data which comes in a compressed format. An example to use a decoder would be if you wanted to change MP3 to WAV.
EQ
Equalizer
A piece of hardware or software (comes with MP3 Software players like eg. WinAMP) to change the loudness of the different frequency bands (for instants to add bass and take treble away).
File Transfer Protocol
An Internet service (just like the WWW is an Internet service) that solely serves the purpose of transferring digital data in the shortest time and most efficient way. FTP servers host data that can be downloaded in binary or ASCII form. A widely spread FTP client is CuteFTP.
Hardware
MP3 hardware are portable devices (just like Walkmans), stand alones and car devices. The MPeX.net Hardware section covers most of the MP3 hardware devices currently available.
ID3 TAG
MP3 songs have an id3-tag that holds the songtitle, artisttitle, the name of the album that it originally appeared on, the year and the music style.
Jitter Correction
Many CD-ROM devices are unable to read a single sector of a audio - CD.
The sectors are read as blocks of many sectors. The consequence
are little gaps because of the variation of the datastream. Jitter correction synchronizes the data stream by overlapping the sectors and thus no gaps are produced.
Some CD-ROM devices such as
Plextor have built-in jitter correction - others have software solutions to handle jitter correction.
kbps
Kilobit Per Second
When talking about MP3´s the kbps in which it was encoded are of great interest. The scale of kpbs in which MP3 files are compressed rage from 8kbps to 256kbps. The standard encoding depth for music in the Internet today is 128kbps - one minute of music is just about one Mb big.
8kbps are used for cellular phone speech (thus the poor quality :), 24kbps are enough to understand radio plays (eg. shoutcast) and 256kbps is said to be Minidisc quality.
Some people say the quality of 128kbps MP3´s is still too poor for music - they use 160 kbps or even 192kbps for encoding.
KHZ
Kilo Hertz
Scale metre for frequencies.
Login
To gain acess to a FTP server you have to have a password (pw) and a user-id (login). If you are logging on anonymously you are acessing another part (the public one) of an FTP server and thus need no password and id !
Moving Picture Experts Group
As you can see the full name of the today widely spread MP3 reveals that it is originally coming from a movie compression format.
Mehr in der MPeX.net "Was ist MP3?" Sektion.
MS-Audio is Microsoft´s audio (streaming) format. The MS - Media player and newer versions of WinAMP are able to play back MS-Audio which was invented as a secure alternative to MP3. MS-Audio files are copy protected and are thus a step towards virtual music distribution. Too bad MS-Audio files are laking the quality ofMP3 files encoded with the same bitrate. This is why it is rather an alternative to the widely used Real-Audioin the streaming format sector.
Normalize
A Normalizer program ( for instants in the Audiograbber software ) searches for the peak volume levels of the songs that are about to be converted to MP3´s. The peak levels are proportionally euqalized to the same volume level.
A playlist shows a table of the songs you have currently loaded into a MP3 (software) player.
The playlist gives you the order, the lenght and the title of the tracks - and various options - e.g. to shuffle the songs - that is to play them in random order.
Plug-In
WinAMP is THE example for a plug-in based software. Everybody can write pug-ins for WinAMP to add features the makers of WinAMP did not even dream of ! See the MPeX.net Software section
under plug-ins to get to know more about WinAMP plugins (Geiss rocks :)
Ratio
There are so called ratio (FTP) servers. If you want to download (copy it to your own harddisk) some file you first have to upload ( copy to the FTP server ) a certain amount of data. A file ratio of 1:5 means you have to upload 5 files before you are allowed to download one.
Real-Audio
Real-Audio is a widely spread format for streaming on the Internet. Real-Audio enables users to view and hear a real-audio stream that looks like very low quality television.
Renamer
Renamer are programs that handle the renaming of MP3 databases - just like yours ! So if you want to order your MP3´s in a logical tree, you want to rename them systematically following ceratin rules - a renamer is what you want to use.
Download
RenameIt!
if you are currently searching for a renamer.
Recording Industry Association of America
The RIAA is an alliance of the biggest record labels and companies from the music industry. The RIAA is the fiercest opponent of "wild" MP3 copying as it takes place today. The RIAA fights a lawsuit against the well known MP3 trading platform Napster and against the the well known site mp3.com with the concept they use to bring the people my.mp3.com.
Secure Digital Music Initiative
The SDMI is a union formed by more than 160 companies from the music industry. The initiative aims at bringing the secure music formats of tomorrows big scale virtual music distribution. As well the SDMI members agree on accepting the specification standards for hard- and software announced by the union.
SHOUTcast
SHOUTcast is the Streaming System developed by Nullsoft that works with WinAMP. With SHOUTcast everybody can listen to SHOUTcast radioprograms or even broadcast her/his own radioprogram. What you need to SHOUTcast is an installed SHOUTcast plug-in under WinAMP - and to find a SHOUTcast stream that fits your gusto via a shoutcast server.
Graphical surface for MP3 (software) players. For WinAMP more than a thousand skins are existing (due to the fact that you can do-yourself skins with easy to use software). As well other software players like WPlay have the option to apply different skins.
A stream of data is transmitted via the Internet. The sent data is not stored on your computer - it is played back as the stream hits your computer. The quality of a stream is dependent on the bandwith with which you are connected to the Internet. The widest spread streaming software for video and audio together is the RealPlayer - a so called "sure" stream on the RealPlayer receives 34kbps for both the pictures AND the tone (that is nothing - and that is why the quality is lousy). SHOUTcast MP3 streaming is just audio - but here you can receive streams up to 128kbps - if you are sitting directly inside the Internet you will be able to receive this quality without gaps.
Wait until the bandwith gets broader and the streams are going to look like television !
VBR
Variable Bitrate Coding
VBR is a method to encode MP3´s dynamically. Depending on what is going on in a song the bitrate (kbps) of encoding is varying. As brilliant as the idea is - it is only used by software that uses the Xing encoder (AudioCatalyst, Xing Encoder). Too bad the Xing encoder itself lacks quality when encoding songs to MP3. The Fraunhofer encoding engine is said to produce the highest quality MP3´s - not only because MP3 is a Fraunhofer invention....
WinAMP
Windows Audio MPEG Player
The peoples choice when it comes to the widest spread MP3 (software) player worldwide. Nullsoft´s WinAMP takes that medal thanks to its open architecture. You can program your own plug-in´s for sound out- and input, your own visualization, you own skins and furthermore WinAMP plays all the formats in use (MP3, MS-Audio, WAV etc.). With WinAMP you can hear SHOUTcast streamed radio and one of the last clues of the Nullsoft boys was - you can trade your MP3´s in a decentralized network (without central servers) via Gnutella
There is also a WinAMp for MAC platforms called MacAMP.
Plugins und Skins.
WAV is the Masterformat originally delveloped to play back music on PC´s - it is uncompressed digital audio data. One minute of WAV music takes up to 30 (!) Mb of storage capacity.
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The the world of digital audio is full of abbreviations and technical terms. Some times texts are so stuffed with both that even insiders are puzzled !
AAC
