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Jewish World Review How digital music works By Marshall Brain http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT) When you listen to your music collection, chances are that you do it using either a CD player, a computer or some sort of MP3 player. All three of these devices play digital music in one form or another, and the technology is fascinating. Let's take a look at how it works. To understand digital music, it helps to understand "normal" or "analog" music first. Take, for example, a normal acoustic guitar. When you pluck a string on the guitar, the string vibrates. Those vibrations transfer to the air, which starts moving back and forth with the string. Those back and forth movements in the air make their way to your ear drums, which vibrate back and forth with the air. Your brain senses the ear drum vibrating, and thus you "hear" the sound of the guitar string. In the pre-digital world, if you wanted to record the vibrations, you would set up a microphone. Like your ear drums, the microphone would sense the vibrations in the air. As the diaphragm in the microphone moved back and forth, the waveform of those movements would be recorded. In an old vinyl LP, the waveform was literally recorded by scratching the waveform onto a metal disk. By pressing the metal disk into hot vinyl, the waveform was copied onto thousands of records. As we now know, analog recording has a number of problems. The waveform in a vinyl LP wears down, picks up scratches and dust, and contains a certain amount of "noise" that cannot be eliminated. The goal of digital music is to solve these problems, and the CD was the first medium to take advantage of digital music on a large scale. To make a CD, you start with the same waveform coming from the microphone. But now you look at that wave form 44,100 times per second. In other words, you measure the waveform every 22 microseconds and give it a numeric value. The device that creates the numeric value is called an analog-to-digital converter. The song turns from a waveform into a series of millions of numbers. Digital music is nothing more than that. Whenever you take music and turn it into a string of millions of numbers, you have digital music. Now you have to store the numbers somewhere. In the case of a CD, you store the numbers on a mirror filled with microscopic scratches. If you look at the surface of a CD you can see this - you can see your reflection in the CD, but it is not a very clear reflection. That lack of clarity is caused by all the scratches on the mirror, and the scratches are so tiny that they actually interfere with light, causing bands of color. Here's what happens to record the music. First, you take the millions of numbers and convert them to binary. In a stream of binary numbers, there are nothing but ones and zeros. For example, the number 183 becomes 10110111 in binary. The CD starts as a clean mirror, but for every zero in the binary stream, the mirror gets a scratch. The scratches are arranged in a long spiral track. To read the CD, a laser tracks the spiral as the CD spins. When the laser hits the surface of the CD, it will either hit clean mirror or a scratch. A sensor can tell the difference between a clean reflection or the scattering caused by a scratch. The CD player turns the pattern of laser reflections that it sees into ones and zeros, and recreates the stream of numbers. It then runs the numbers through a device called a digital-to-analog converter to recreate the original waveform. You hear the original music free of any noise or degradation. If you put a music CD into a computer, the computer can "rip" the stream of numbers off the CD and store them on the hard disk. The problem with a CD is that the stream of numbers is huge - maybe 50 megabytes per song. So a computer can take it one step further and compress numbers. The term "MP3" refers to one of these compression schemes. The computer can look for patterns of repeated numbers, patterns of numbers that your ears would not be able to hear, etc. and shrink the file. A 50 megabyte song from a CD might become three megabytes once compressed. With a small file like this, it is now possible to store the song in a pocket-size MP3 player. The player uses flash memory or a small hard disk to hold the song. A small computer inside the MP3 player opens the file, decompresses it, and recreates the original stream of numbers from the CD. It then sends the stream of numbers to a digital-to-analog converter, and you hear the song in your headphones. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here. Previously: How coal mining works How an economic depression works How the liver works How 3D movies work How oil pipelines work How jet packs work How seismographs work How Olympic technology works How Personal Rapid Transit works How 3G works How the Global Position System (GPS) works How octane works How cruise missiles work How submarines work How miles work How octane works How food preservation works How beer works How holding your breath works How smoke detectors work How heat pumps work How your night vision works How concentrating solar collectors work How your key fob works How the common cold works How the Large Hadron Collider Works How making a TV show works How dry cleaning works How exoskeletons work How an oil refinery works How landfills work How the Orion spacecraft works The cutting edge in HDTV Redefining the CD How the HDMI cable scam works How glow-in-the-dark toys work How the subprime mortgage crisis works How gift cards work How Tasers work How giant TV screens work How foreclosure works How Air Force One works How wildfire fighting works How vitamins work How ejection seats work How reattaching limbs works How hot air balloons work How paparazzi work How counterfeiting works How CDs work How the Edsel worked How Stinger missiles work How hybrid cars work How sharks work How mosquitoes work How diesel engines work How water towers work How the Dawn mission works How Kassam rockets work How the North American Eagle works Why aren't we flying to work? How tofu and soy milk work How Colony Collapse Disorder works How airbags work How the U.S. income tax works How gum works How caffeine works How Daylight Saving Time works How a cruise missile works How snow making works © 2007, How Stuff Works Inc. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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