New Terms relating to audio files

Stereo: Sound that is directed through two or more speakers so that it seems to surround the listener and to come from more than one source; stereophonic sound

Channel: Channel is one individual audio track. A channel is just one separate stream of audio information. There is only one channel in mono audio sources. More commonly, there are sources that hold two channels - stereo sources. Sources with more than two channels are referred to as multichannel.

Track: A track is a single stream of any audio which contains channel(s). Digital audio tracks let you store audio data as digital sound values rather than as musical symbols.A digital audio track works like a recording tape that you can include in a musical document and on which you can record whatever you want for subsequent playback.

Frequency:represent the range of signals that are audible to the human ear. The range of audio frequencies is usually considered to be in the region between 20 and 20,000 hertz.

Hertz:  is the unit used to measure frequency and is equal to one cycle per second. Named after Heinrich Hertz who first discovered electromagnetic waves. 

Decibel: A unit used to measure the intensity of a sound or the power level of an electrical signal by comparing it with a given level on a logarithmic scale...general use; the degree of loudness

Wav: short for Waveform Audio File Format.also known as 'wave', 'movie sound file' and 'Windows sound format', is a video file used to save and record short sound clips. They are normally not used for recording and saving long pieces of music or sound.the file extension (.wav), stores information about the file's number of tracks (mono or stereo), sample rate, bit depth, as well as the uncompressed raw audio data.

mp3:   MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (differnet layers such as layer 1, layer 2 and layer 3) Digital audio compression algorithm that achieves a compression factor of about one twelfth while preserving sound quality. It does this by optimising the compression according to the range of sound that people can actually hear.

aiff:Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices.It supports a variety of bit resolutions, sample rates, and channels of audio.