DLC Technoquickie of the Week • Friday 2/12/99 • 8:55-9:05 • Steve Bergen

VOCABULARY du jour: The basic unit of information is the BYTE which is equivalent to one character or symbol of text. 1000 BYTES = 1 K: How many BYTES on a piece of paper? Well, a good approach is to consider double-spaced text with wide margins. For example, you might have 50 characters across the page, with a total of 20 lines down. Therefore, we have 20 X 50 bytes or 1000 bytes on the page. Computer people refer to 1000 bytes as 1 KILOBYTE and abbreviate it as 1 K. Just as 1000 bytes equals 1 kilobyte (1K), 1 million bytes (1000K) is 1 MEGABYTE (usually pronounced MEG) and 1 billion bytes (1000 megabytes) is 1 GIGABYTE. Hard disks range from 40 meg to 8 gigabytes.

This chart summarizes basic computer literacy for various disks
• double density floppy disk 800K 800,000 bytes .8 meg

• high density floppy disk 1,400K 1,400,000 bytes 1.4 meg
• typical hard disk drive 500,000K 500,000,00 bytes 500 meg 1/2 gig
• CD ROM disk 650,000K 650,000,000 650 meg over 1/2 gig

VOICE DIGITIZERS allow you to record voices and sounds and do something like word processing on the recorded sound. The package usually consists of a microphone and software that turns the sounds into 1’s and 0’s to be stored in RAM and on a disk. Once the sound is turned into a wave form on your screen, the software may allow special effects such as reversing the sound, amplifying it, making it reverb as if it comes from outer space or a concert hall.

Popular SHAREWARE programs for the Mac include SoundEffects by Alberto Ricci (ricci@torino.ALPcom.it) and Ultra-Recorder by EJ Campbell (ecampbel@scf.usc.edu)

Understanding Digital Sound (One second of stereo = 176K)¹
With the solid base of bits and bytes, we are now able to understand how sound is stored digitally, e.g. CD or computer. A sampling rate of 44,100 means that the sound waves are “inspected” that many times each second to determine its qualities: note, tone and amplitude. 8 bit recording is medium quality. 16 bit recording is high quality -- each sampled sound consumes 2 bytes of data.

Upcoming techno-quickie:s •t ypes of sound files: AIFF, SND, WAV • macros

¹ The Boston Globe, Monday March 16, 1998, page C3.

Quick Updates: 4) Ultra Recorder lets you save LONGER sound bites
1) the DLC web page is part of www.noblesweb.org 5) check out West Coast, translate feature .. use full name
2) there are now two printers in the corner of http://www.noblesweb.org/DLC.html
3) feel free to snag any “office hours” on my resume for an occasional one-on-one session with me or Ellie