Representing audio
The effect of bit and sampling rate
What is sampling?
Sample rates are a unit of measuring the frequency in sound signals. They use Hertz (used in the clock speed of the CPU) to measure the sample rate of an mp3 file. It can alter the quality of the audio file, with the low sample rate being bad and high sample rate being high quality.
What is bit rate?
Audio bit rate is the number of bits processed in a unit of time. It can alter the amount of bits per second and it can worsen the quality (if lowered). Many people download mp3 files at the default 128kbps. At 320kbps, the quality of the music is very high.
Effects and representation
What effect does it have on size and quality?
It can make the file smaller and more compressed than the original audio file. The quality is also compressed, with it being in bad quality. The higher the bit rate and sampling rate, the better the quality and the more storage space needed for the audio file to be downloaded.
How can audio be represented in binary?
Unlike analogue signals - which have an infinite amount of values, digital signals only have two states. On (1) and off (0). This produces a code (which is in binary) that only the computer can understand. Converting the amplitude of each sample to a binary number is called quantification.