Sound

What is sound?

Audio file formats

Analogue sound vs digital sound

Sound editing software

Analogue sound

Digital sound

All sounds are vibrations traveling through the air as sound waves.

Sound waves are caused by the vibrations of objects and radiate outward from their source in all directions. A vibrating object compresses the surrounding air molecules (squeezing them closer together) and then rarefies them (pulling them farther apart).

Although the fluctuations in air pressure travel outward from the object, the air molecules themselves stay in the same average position. As sound travels, it reflects off objects in its path, creating further disturbances in the surrounding air.

When these changes in air pressure vibrate your eardrum, nerve signals are sent to your brain and are interpreted as sound.

An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, often using lossy compression. The data can be a raw bitstream in an audio coding format, but it is usually embedded in a container format or an audio data format with defined storage layer.

Format types

Uncompressed audio formats, such as WAV, AIFF, AU or raw header-less PCM

Formats with lossless compression, such as FLAC, Monkey's Audio (filename extension .ape), WavPack (filename extension .wv), TTA, ATRAC Advanced Lossless, ALAC (filename extension .m4a), MPEG-4 SLS, MPEG-4 ALS, MPEG-4 DST, Windows Media Audio Lossless (WMA Lossless), and Shorten (SHN).

Formats with lossy compression, such as Opus, MP3, Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, ATRAC and Windows Media Audio Lossy (WMA lossy).

Sound itself is a continuous wave; it is an analog signal. This means that one cannot detect the precise moment the pitch changes. Capturing this continuous wave in its entirety requires an analog recording system; what the microphone receives is exactly what's written onto the vinyl disk or cassette. Analog is believed to be the true representation of the sound at the moment it was recorded.

Digital sound is not a recording of the actual sound, but rather a combination of binary code, the utmost simplest machine language of zeros and ones, representing the sound's intensity and pitch at precise intervals with relative accuracy. The binary code is arranged in a specific pattern informing the computer how to recreate the sound itself.

It is not a single wave the way analog sound is, but rather a composite of multiple segments representing consecutive moments of intensity and pitch.

Where an analog recording is similar to the fluency of film, a digital recording is stop motion photography.

This audio editing software is a full-featured professional audio and music editor for Windows and Mac.


It lets you record and edit music, voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio files, you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings, and then add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction.

WavePad works as a wav or mp3 editor, but it also supports a number of other file formats including vox, gsm, wma, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg, and more.

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