Glossary, Album art, Compression, Decibel dB

19 Glossary

Album art

Album art is a feature that displays the artwork (cover picture) of a music album. This display enables the user to quickly identify

a music album. The artwork files for music albums can be downloaded from the Internet.

APE

A lossless audio file compression format by Monkey’s Audio that makes bit-for-bit copies without sacrificing quality.

CMMB

China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting (CMMB) is a mobile television and multimedia standard developed and specified in China by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT). It is based on the satellite and terrestrial interactive multiservice infrastructure (STiMi), developed by TiMiTech, a company formed by the Chinese Academy of Broadcasting Science. CMMB it has been described as being similar to Europe’s DVB- SH standard for digital video broadcast from both satellites and terrestrial ‘gap fillers’ to handheld devices.

Compression

In audio terms, this is a process of temporarily or permanently reducing audio data for more efficient storage or transmission. A temporary reduction in file size is called ‘non-lossy’ compression, and no information is lost. A permanent reduction in file size (such as with MP3 files) is called ‘lossy’ compression, and involves discarding unnecessary information which is irretrievably lost.

Decibel (dB)

A unit of measure used to express relative difference in power or intensity of sound.

Digital Audio

Digital Audio is a sound signal that has been converted into numerical values. Digital sound can be transmitted through multiple channels. Analog sound can only be transmitted through two channels.

FLAC [Free Lossless Audio Codec]

An audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without loss in quality.

FM (Frequency Modulation)

In radio broadcasting: a method of modulation in which the frequency of the carrier voltage is varied with the frequency of the modulation voltage.

JPEG

A very common digital still picture format.

Astill-picture data compression system proposed by the Joint Photographic Expert Group, which features small decrease in image quality in spite of its high compression ratio.

Files are recognized by their file extension

‘.jpg’ or ‘.jpeg.’

Kbps

Kilobits per second. A digital-data-rate measurement system which is often used with highly compressed formats such as AAC, DAB, MP3 etc. The higher the amount, the better the quality generally is.

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