Glossary of Digital Audio Terms, Bass, Bitrate

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Index

:: Glossary of Digital Audio Terms

Bass

Bass is the particular low-range area of the sound spectrum where low musical notes and sounds are located. Increasing the bass value will make the low vocals and drums more prominent in your music. You can select the amount of bass in your music by selecting various Equalizer options or setting your own Bass/Treble menu option.

Bitrate

Bitrate denotes the number of bits per second used by a digital music file. The size and quality of a compressed digital audio file is determined by the bitrate used when encoding the file. Generally, the higher the bitrate used, the higher the sound quality, and the larger the file size. For example, a bitrate of 96kbps (96,000 bits per second) is generally thought of as “CD quality” for WMA audio files, and takes up about 0.75 megabytes (MB) per minute of music. At a 64kbps bitrate, the sound quality of WMA is similar to that of an FM radio signal, but approximately two minutes of music will fit in 1MB of space.

Codec

Depending on the context and kind of technology involved, codec can be defined as a compressed digital audio file format (like MP3, WMA, etc.), a “coding/decoding” chip used to translate between digital and analog transmissions (used in modems), or a compression/decompression algorithm. Codecs compress audio data into a file, often for efficient transmission over a network, and then decode it for playback. While all the codecs perform similar compression of digital audio, there are differences in the technology.

The Rio Fuse supports the following digital audio codecs:

•MP3

•WMA

Firmware

Firmware is the read-only software that is installed on the player. Like software it can be updated, but unlike software it can never be deleted from the player.