Sound Recording - the WellMixed.com Blog

CD Baby founder Derek Sivers’ e-Book on Music Marketing (available HERE) has long been a favorite of entrepreneuring musicians.

I just came across this free e-book/blog by a gent in England named Andrew Dubber that focuses on promoting one’s music in the Web 2.0 era.

The blog version is more informative (or more distracting), as there are plenty of nice hyperlinked references.

Written about 2 years ago, it contains twenty still-fairly-relevant tips that aim to “help independent musicians and music businesses cope and thrive in a changing media environment.” It creates an excellent companion to the Sivers book.

Dubber lectures at the Birmingham School of Media at Birmingham City University so he knows a little bit about the subject. But as always, I advocate thinking for oneself and disagreeing where appropriate.

You may have seen 44.1 KHz on CD packaging. This number indicates that the audio on the CD is composed of 44,100 “samples” every second.

What are these samples of?

They are samples of loudness. (Click here to read about loudness and bit-depth.)

So this means ——> There are 44,100 different loudness levels stored on every second of CD audio.

AND (theoretically) —–> The speaker in your car, home stereo, or headphones moves between 44,100 distinct spots every second.

So, in digital recording, we want to have a lot of samples every second; at least as many as are going to be played back for CD quality audio.

During recording, computers take “samples” to determine how a microphone’s diaphragm is being moved by air. (This trading of information is known as transduction.)

When a loud noise pushes air against a microphone’s diaphragm, that diaphragm is moved far from its resting place. If the diaphragm position is sampled when it is far from its neutral resting place, the computer will record a large number.

If the diaphragm position is sampled when it is at rest, the computer will record a zero.

There are, of course, many numbers in between.

Since the introduction of the CD in the early 1980’s, we have been listening to 44,100 unique volume levels every second whenever we play our favorite music. With DVD Audio, SACD, or digital download, we may begin to hear 48,000  or  96,000  samples per second.

41,000 samples per second, however, are more than adequate for reproducing all frequencies that human beings are capable of hearing.

Mr. Reznor began in the business more than 20 years ago with his band, Nine Inch Nails. In this excerpt from Digg.com, he gives advice to musical artists planning on distributing themselves via the internet.

Reznor gives his music away for free nowadays. You can download Nine Inch Nails’ most recent album, The Slip, at NIN.com for free.

You can check out TopSpin here: www.topspinmedia.com

The full interview with Reznor can be found at Digg Dialogg