October 22, 2011

Evolution Of Electronic Music Media

Phonograph Record

The primary author of the word phonograph was F.B. Fenby an originator in Worcester, Massachusetts; he was granted a patent in 1863 for an unsuccessful device called the "Electro-Magnetic Phonograph". His idea detailed a system that would description a sequence of keyboard strokes onto paper tape. Although no model or workable device was ever made, it is often seen as a link to the idea of punched paper for player piano rolls. Arguably, any device used to description sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in coarse custom it has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the alternative term talking motor was sometimes used. The phonograph, or gramophone, was the most coarse device for playing recorded sound from the 1870s through the 1980s. Usage of these terms is not uniform over the English-speaking world. In more modern usage, this device is often called a turntable, description player, or description changer. The phonograph was the first device for recording and replaying sound.

Magnetic Encoder Tape

A gramophone description (also phonograph record, or plainly record) is an analogue sound recording medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed modulated spiral groove beginning near the periphery and ending near the town of the disc. Gramophone records were the primary medium used for commercial music fertilization for most of the 20th century. They replaced the phonograph cylinder as the most favorite recording medium in the 1900s, and although they were replaced in popularity in the late 1980s by digital media, they continue to be manufactured and sold as of 2007.

The terms Lp description (Lp, 33, or 33-1/3 rpm record), Ep, 16-2/3 rpm description (16), 45 rpm description (45), and 78 rpm description (78) each refer to exact types of gramophone records. Except for the Lp and Ep (which are acronyms of Long Play and Extended Play respectively), these type designations refer to their rotational speeds in revolutions per exiguous (Rpm). Lps, 45s, and 16s are regularly made of polyvinyl chloride (Pvc), and hence may be referred to as vinyl records or plainly vinyl.

Tapes

The covenant Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or plainly tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. Although it was originally intended as a medium for dictation, improvements in fidelity led the covenant Cassette to supplant reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Its uses ranged from transportable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers. In the middle of the 1960s and early 2000s, the cassette was one of the three most coarse formats for prerecorded music, alongside the Lp and later the covenant Disc. The word cassette is a French word meaning "little box."

Compact Cassettes consist of two exiguous spools, In the middle of which a magnetic tape is passed and wound. These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell. Two stereo pairs of tracks (four total) or two monaural audio tracks are ready on the tape; one stereo pair or one monophonic track is played or recorded when the tape is exciting in one direction and the second pair when exciting in the other direction. This reversal is achieved either by manually flipping the cassette or by having the motor itself change the direction of tape movement ("auto-reverse").

Stereo 8, generally known as the 8-track cartridge, is a magnetic tape technology for audio storage, favorite from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Stereo 8 was created by a consortium led by Bill Lear in 1964 of the Lear Jet Corporation, along with Ampex, Ford, Motorola, and Rca Records. It followed the similar Stereo-Pak 4-track cartridge. A later quadraphonic version of the format was known as Quad 8 or Q8.

The primary format for magnetic tape sound fertilization was reel-to-reel audio tape recording, first made widely ready after World War Ii in the late 1940s. However, threading tape into the recorders was more difficult than plainly putting a disc description onto a phonograph player. Manufacturers introduced a succession of cartridges which held the tape inside a metal or plastic housing to eliminate handling. The first was Rca Victor, which in 1958 introduced a cartridge system, but until the introduction of the covenant Cassette in 1963 and Stereo 8 in 1964, none was very successful.

Compact Disc

A covenant Disc or Cd is an optic disc used to store digital data, originally industrialized for storing digital audio. The Cd, ready on the store in late 1982, remains the standard bodily medium for commercial audio recordings as of 2007. An audio Cd consists of one or more stereo tracks stored using 16-bit Pcm coding at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. standard Cds have a diameter of 120 mm and can hold approximately 80 minutes of audio. There are also 80 mm discs, sometimes used for Cd singles, which hold approximately 20 minutes of audio. covenant Disc technology was later adapted for use as a data storage device, known as a Cd-Rom, and to comprise record-once and re-writable media (Cd-R and Cd-Rw respectively). Cd-Roms and Cd-Rs remain widely used technologies in the Computer business as of 2007. The Cd and its extensions have been very successful: in 2004, the yearly worldwide sales of Cd-Audio, Cd-Rom, and Cd-R reached about 30 billion discs.

The covenant Disc reached the store in late 1982 in Asia, and early the following year in the United States and other markets. The first Cds ready were 16 Japanese-made titles from Cbs/Sony. This event is often seen as the "Big Bang" of the digital audio revolution. The new audio disc was enthusiastically received, especially in the early-adopting classical music and audiophile communities and its handling quality received particular praise. As the price of players sank rapidly, the Cd began to gain popularity in the larger favorite and rock music markets.

The Cd was originally idea of as an evolution of the gramophone record, rather than primarily as a data storage medium. Only later did the idea of an 'audio file' arise, and the generalizing of this to any data file. From its origins as a music format, covenant Disc has grown to encompass other applications. In June 1985, the Cd-Rom (read-only memory) and, in 1990, Cd-Recordable was introduced, also industrialized by Sony and Philips. While Cds are significantly more durable than earlier audio formats, they are susceptible to damage from daily usage and environmental factors.

Mp3

Mpeg-1 Audio Layer 3, more generally referred to as Mp3, is a favorite audio encoding format. It uses a loosy compression algorithm that is designed to greatly sacrifice the number of data required to record the audio recording, yet still sound like a particular fertilization of the primary uncompressed audio to most listeners. It was invented by a team of European engineers.

Mp3 is an audio-specific format. The compression takes off safe bet sounds that cannot be heard by the listener, i.e. Surface the general human hearing range. It provides a representation of pulse-code modulation encoded audio in much less space than simple methods, by using psychoacoustic models to discard components less audible to human hearing, and recording the remaining information in an efficient manner. Similar system are used by Jpeg, an image compression format.

Modern lossy bit compression technologies, along with Mpeg, Mp3, etc, are based on the early work of Prof Oscar Bonello of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was complicated in Studio equipment construct for Broadcast radio automation. At the same time he taught Acoustics at the University, Psychoacoustics being his main field of research. In 1983 he started researching the idea of using the important Band Masking principle (a property of the ear) in order to sacrifice the bit stream needed to encode an audio signal. The masking principle was discovered in 1924 and added industrialized by in 1959. Bonello's work created, in 1987, the world's first bit compression system, named Ecam, working in real time and implemented by hardware on an Ibm Pc computer. This plug in card and the linked operate software was demonstrated for the first time in 1988 as a fully working goods named Audicom and introduced to the world at the international Nab Radio Exhibition in Atlanta, Usa on 1990. The basic Bonello implementation is now used in Mp3 and other systems. Bonello refuses to apply for any patents colse to this technology.

A reference simulation software implementation, written in the C language and known as Iso 11172-5, was industrialized by the members of the Iso Mpeg Audio committee in order to furnish bit compliant Mpeg Audio files (Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3). Working in non-real time on a number of operating systems, it was able to demonstrate the first real time hardware decoding (Dsp based) of compressed audio. Some other real time implementation of Mpeg Audio encoders were ready for the purpose of digital broadcasting (radio Dab, television Dvb) towards consumer receivers and set top boxes.

Later, on July 7, 1994 the Fraunhofer community released the first software Mp3 encoder called l3enc. The filename postponement .mp3 was chosen by the Fraunhofer team on July 14, 1995 (previously, the files had been named .bit). With the first real-time software Mp3 player Winplay3 (released September 9, 1995) many people were able to encode and playback Mp3 files on their Pcs. Because of the relatively small hard drives back in that time (500 Mb) the technology was important to store non-instrument based music for listening on a computer.

In October 1993, Mp2 (Mpeg-1 Audio Layer 2) files appeared on the Internet and were often played back using the Xing Mpeg Audio Player, and later in a program for Unix by Tobias Bading called Maplay, which was initially released on February 22, 1994 (Maplay was also ported to Microsoft Windows).

Initially the only encoder ready for Mp2 production was the Xing Encoder, accompanied by the program cdda2wav, a Cd ripper used for extracting Cd audio tracks to Waveform Audio Files.The Internet inexpressive Music Archive (Iuma) is generally recognized as the start of the on-line music revolution. Iuma was the Internet's first high-fidelity music web site, hosting thousands of authorized Mp2 recordings before Mp3 or the web was popularized.

In the first half of 1995 through the late 1990s, Mp3 files began to spread on the Internet. Mp3's popularity began to rise rapidly with the coming of Nullsoft's audio player Winamp (released in 1997), the Unix audio player mpg123 and the peer-to-peer file sharing network Napster (released in 1999). These programs made it simple for median users to play back, create, share and fetch Mp3s.

The small size of Mp3 files has enabled allembracing peer-to-peer file sharing of music, which would previously have been near impossible. The major description companies, who argue that such free sharing of music reduces sales, reacted to this by pursuing law-suits against Napster, which was at last complete down, and at last against individual users who engaged in file sharing.

Despite the popularity of Mp3, online music retailers often use other possession formats that are encrypted (known as Digital possession Management) to forestall users from using purchased music in ways not specifically authorized by the description companies. The description fellowships argue that this is important to forestall the files from being made ready on peer-to-peer file sharing networks. However, this has other side effects such as preventing users from playing back their purchased music on dissimilar types of devices. Some services, such as eMusic, continue to offer the Mp3 format, which allows users to playback their music on virtually any device.

When creating an Mp3 file, there is a trade-off In the middle of the number of space used and the sound quality of the result. Typically, the originator of the Mp3 file is allowed to set a bit rate, which specifies how many kilobits the file may use per second of audio, for example, when ripping a covenant disc to this format. The lower the bit rate used, the lower the audio quality will be, but the smaller the file size. Likewise, the higher the bit rate used, the higher quality, and therefore, larger the file size the resulting Mp3 will be.

As described, Mp3 files encoded with a lower bit rate will generally play back at a lower quality. With too low a bit rate, "compression artifacts" (i.e., sounds that were not gift in the primary recording) may be audible in the reproduction. Some audio is hard to compress because of its randomness and sharp attacks. When this type of audio is compressed, artifacts such as ringing or pre-echo are regularly heard. A sample of applause compressed with a relatively nominal bit rate provides a good example of compression artifacts.

Besides the bit rate of an encoded piece of audio, the quality of Mp3 files also depends on the quality of the encoder itself, and the mystery of the signal being encoded. As the Mp3 standard allows quite a bit of free time with encoding algorithms, dissimilar encoders may feature quite dissimilar quality, even when targeting similar bit rates.

Quality is heavily dependent on the choice of encoder and encoding parameters. While quality colse to 128kbps was somewhere In the middle of annoying and standard with older encoders, modern Mp3 encoders can furnish very good quality at those bit rates.

The advances in this technology is exploding as is the quality of the devices, will our grandchildren be as shocked at our current media as we are with our grandparents?

Evolution Of Electronic Music Media

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