An audio file is what format and what extension?

Few people know that since the advent of sound in computer systems, technology has gone far ahead. It's now all used to that tracks are reproduced at best in MP3 format. In fact, this was not always the case, and audio in computer systems was oriented only to the use of system dynamics. The same games created under DOS, worked in this mode.

First Sound

In fact, the first sound production in the series of what could be "squeezed" out of the then computer systems is due to the appearance of the DOS system and primitive games designed to work in it. Not to mention the Super Mario, borrowed from Nintendo, there were also 3D shooters such as Duke Nukem, who tried to convey the essence of the game process with stereo sound. Nevertheless, all this did not make absolutely no impression, because professional music and editing of audio tracks remained inaccessible.

The appearance of codecs

The revolution occurred when a universal codec was released, allowing you to compress files and play everything that can be recorded from the microphone. By the time the expansion of sound files had only one conditional representation, namely WAV (from the abridged "wave").

However, WAV-files took up too much space on the hard drive. Let's just say, even today the track in this format for five minutes can "weigh" up to 25-50 MB, depending on the quality. Over time, it became clear that the size of the sound file should not be too large.

Studio Audio

Now a little bit about technology. From the recording point of view, an audio file is what every musician can play in real time and record on a computer or a special device in the studio. This is not the point. The fact is that absolutely all programs intended for recording sessions in the studio, still use the WAV format, no matter how much they want to do without it. In some cases, it can automatically be transformed into another (after the end of the recording). Most often, this happens with programs like (Pro Tools), which are designed for use exclusively in Mac OS X.

But even in this case, the audio file is a component of the initial format, which does not lose its relevance. The explanation is simple. In fact, in professional level studios, no one ever uses compressed files, considering them a parody of pure sound. Of course, the extension of sound files after recording can be anything. In some cases, WAV files may be temporary. That is, after recording the audio track, they are simply deleted from the hard disk.

Modern audio formats

Today, there are many codecs compatible with audio devices or software players. However, if anyone noticed, even in the descriptions of some movies there are codecs such as AAC, H.264 or something like that. Do not create a problem for yourself. It's enough to install the latest version on your computer, say, K-Lite Codec Pack, and the problems will disappear by themselves. But this is not the main thing. Here we mean the encoding of audio files and the decoding of audio. And with this there can be quite a lot of difficulties.

Sound reproduction: main features

The sound file formats are directly related to their parameters, in which they were created or saved initially. But not only this affects the quality of playback.

First of all, you need to pay attention to the frequency characteristics. Programs are able to give an understanding that an audio file is a typical frequency or amplitude characteristic in the form of a wave, previously reproduced on the same oscilloscopes. The main characteristics in this case are the playback depth, expressed in bits (16, 24, 32), frame rate (data reproduction rate per second), usually at the level of 32 to 450 kbit / s, as well as the sampling rate up to 96 kHz.

In general, the standard accepts a frequency of 44,100 Hz, although professional musicians and producers use values of the order of 48 or 96 kHz.

Without which you can not do without

Now a little bit about the fact that the extension of sound files has a very large resource. It's no longer customary to talk only about MP3, after all, the FLAC format is more qualitative .

It has its drawbacks. The fact is that if a codec is not installed in the system, switching between tracks will be impossible in the usual mode. Roughly speaking, any software player will perceive the recording as a whole audio track. The same AIMP initially sets its codecs and initial settings in terms of what audio formats this player can play.

So, if you decided to download audio in this format, you need to be sure that the player will take it. In addition, the frequency response can overload any player (especially when using third-party plug-ins and extensions).

Processing of sound and subtleties associated with this process

Now we should separately discuss the problem of how audio processing can be done, even if the original track is available in the video. For this, there are a lot of software packages, among which it is especially worth highlighting programs such as Sound Forge, Adobe Audition, Mixcraft, etc.

All of them are subject to the same principle of sound processing - namely, the representation of any format in the form of a "wave".

Editing in this way allows you not only to understand what "types of sound files" are, but also to realize that any audio recording can be saved in an acceptable variant.

There are a lot of tools not only for audio editing, but also for the use of additional tools, which today are called "plugins". In other words, this is a third-party application that connects to the interface of the main package programmatically, which is an addition to the main functionality. The processing of sound files with their use becomes more perfect than using the own resources of a program.

In the end, you can understand that the sound file is something that we constantly hear now on the same radio. Even after recording the conversation on the recorder, we still get the sound file. In some older models of mobile devices, the format may vary. For example, the extension of audio files is preserved even in the outdated AMR format.

Final presentation of sound

Now it's worth to mention that today any kinds of multimedia files can be opened with the help of applications that perform cross-platform communication between the main components of the systems.

For example, if earlier WAV-file was represented in the form of a wave, now any other format is assembled in exactly the same way. Despite the format, many software products are able to open the same OGG, which in the standard version simply does not work (without the codec installed).

In fact, everything is simple. If you understand what audio (audio) files are, then you can even write music, which is exactly what DJs are doing, representing dubstep or something like that. The main thing is that the crowd "rave".

Here, too, has its own nuances. The fact is that in modern discotheques sound files in the form of drum sequences can be programmed initially. For this purpose, special "rack" racks for DJs are created.

From the point of view of a professional musician, a sound file created in a disco, when a people raves, can not be compared with what "live" performers offer.

Even banks of instruments of the most popular synthesizers and workstations from the Roland Fantom X series (any series) or Yamaha Motif X8 (and above) are now available in SF2 format.

Of course, this is not all that professional tools can do. But! If someone at least once played on them, immediately feel that the program sound file when encoding is no different from the original sound, even in SF2 format.

In conclusion, we note that the sound file is a set of synthesizer commands that has a MIDI structure (internal) that distributes the instruments along one track, and effects on others. In any case, there are universal modules that combine all these possibilities. This is how the tracks are divided into "Tools" and "Effects".