Glossary Of Digital Audio Terms - Rio Sport S30S User Manual

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.
Adjusting this level too high can cause distortion at
high volumes in some music files.
Bitrate
Bitrate denotes the number of bits per second used
to represent a digital music file. The size and quality
of a compressed digital audio file is determined by
the bitrate used when encoding the file. The higher
the bitrate used, the higher the sound quality, and
the larger the file size. For example, with MP3, a
bitrate of 128kbps (128,000 bits per second) is gen-
erally thought of as "CD quality", and takes up
about 1 megabyte (MB) per minute of music. At a
64kbps bitrate, the sound quality is similar to that
of an FM radio signal, but you can get around two
minutes of music in that same 1MB of storage
space. CD audio has a bitrate of 1.4Mbits per sec-
ond (1,400,000 bits/second).
Codec
Depending on the context and kind of technology
involved, codec can be defined as a compressed
digital audio file format (like MP3, WMA, and so on),
a "coding/decoding" chip used to translate between
digital and analog transmissions (used in modems),
or a compression/decompression algorithm. Codecs
Glossary of Digital Audio Terms
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 com-
pression of digital audio, there are differences in the
technology.
The Rio player supports the following digital audio
codecs:
• MP3
• WMA
Encoding
Encoding, sometimes referred to as "ripping" and
encoding, refers to extracting audio from a music
CD (ripping) and converting it into a compressed
digital audio format (encoding), such as MP3 or
WMA, that can be played on your Rio player or on
the computer.
Firmware
Firmware is software — programs or data — that
has been written onto read-only memory (ROM).
Firmware is a combination of software and hard-
ware that is comparable to an operating system on
a computer. The Rio player's firmware controls
everything from the liquid crystal display and codec
support to the Rio player's other functions.
How to update the Rio player firmware
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