Some Sound Terminology When working with sound in Captivate, it helps to understand what much of the terminology used actually means. WAV The default sound file format on the PC. MP3 A compression format for sound. The official name is Moving Pictures Expert Group Level-2 Layer-3 Audio. These files are very small because, in very basic terms, they "throw away" sounds that are inaudible to humans. kHz Kilohertz. A hertz is the frequency of one sound wave; a kilohertz is 1000 sound waves per second. An 11 kHz sound is less accurate than a 44 kHz sound. 8 bit/16 bit The number of samples, measured from peak to peak, in a sound wave. An 8-bit sound wave is broken into 256 samples; a 16-bit sound wave is broken into 66,000 samples. The more samples there are per wave, the higher the file size and the better the sound quality. Mono/Stereo One sound channel or two sound channels. A stereo sound has a file size twice that of its mono counterpart. |