Entries Tagged 'digital formats' ↓

I was cleaning out some boxes today and ran across some old exams and assignments from my days at audio engineering school. Apparently in April 1998, I scored 41.5/50 on my Digital Audio Exam. The course was taught by Jim Burgess of Saved by Technology.

My favourite part was my answer to the last question on the exam (remember, this was in 1998):

50) Predict the state of digital audio production technology in the year 2005, and focus on the not-so-obvious developments that you predict will happen. (worth 2 marks)

DVD-Rs and DVD-ROMs will be commonplace. Distribution of audio recordings will take place mainly via the Internet. Aliens will intercept Earth transmissions and return a greeting to us – and it will be digitally encoded. Then top secret NASA digital recordings of the alien transmission will be lost in a tragic Purolator mishap, where they will re-surface two years later in a small UK dance music production studio (containing all digital gear). The recording will be released as an extended mix dance track and become a world-wide top 10 hit which we will listen to on our 96kHz 24-bit DVD audio players and over digital radio.

Amazingly, I only scored 1/2 on that question. Damn you Jim Burgess, my predictions all came true! Gimme my extra mark! -kf

When you send your music out into the digital world you want it to sound as good as possible. Although there any many digital formats available to distribute your music, none are as ubiquitous as the so-called “inferior” MP3. Newer formats include Apple’s AAC (as used in iTunes) and Microsoft’s WMA files. Both create better sounding files at smaller sizes, but you can’t play a WMA file on an iPod, or an AAC on a Zune. This is where LAME comes in.

LAME is not an MP3 encoder itself, but the “back end” of the encoding system. From the LAME website:

LAME is an educational tool to be used for learning about MP3 encoding. The goal of the LAME project is to use the open source model to improve the psycho acoustics, noise shaping and speed of MP3. LAME is not for everyone – it is distributed as source code only and requires the ability to use a C compiler.

Blah, blah, blah… You don’t have to be programmer to reap the rewards that LAME encoding can bring to your MP3s. There are many free open source applications for Windows and Mac OS that use the LAME engine. There are also many commercial products that use LAME. Find a list of applications that use LAME here.

I use LameBrain. It hasn’t been updated since 2003, and it never made it to version 1 (I’ve got version 0.6.2b3) but it makes noticeably better sounding MP3s than iTunes. (And the app icon is an image of Skeletor, so it makes me feel powerful and sinister.) Not everyone has an iPod, and Windows Media Player isn’t available for Mac, so MP3 is still the best option for mass digital distribution. And using a LAME MP3 encoder is the best way to get the most out of this “old” format. -mc