Glossary
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Gracenote
Gracenote, formerly known as CD Database (CDDB), is an vast database of CD information that includes disc
name, song titles and other information. Gracenote supports hundreds of different third party software CD
players. Access to the Gracenote service is offered free of charge to end-users. Visit the
Gracenote website
for
more information.
Home PNA Network
Enables two or more Windows or Macintosh computers, located in your home or small office, to communicate
through your existing phone lines using standard phone cords.
ID3 Tag
This is the part of the encoded MP3 file that contains information about the digital music file such as song title,
artist, album title, bitrate encoding, time duration of track, and so on.
MP3
MPEG-1, Layer 3 Audio (MP3) is a compressed digital audio file format. This format allows for near CD quality
sound, but at a fraction of the size of normal audio files. MP3 files encoded from CD-ROM may be compressed
to under 10 percent of their former size. This digital sound encoding and compression process was developed
by the Fraunhofer Institut fur Integrierte Schaltungen and Thomson Multimedia. MP3 uses perceptual audio
coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information–more specifically, the redundant
and irrelevant parts of a sound signal that the human ear doesn't hear. It also adds a Modified Discrete Cosine
Transform (MDCT) that implements a filter bank, increasing the frequency resolution 18 times higher than that
of layer 2. MP3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD-ROM with a bitrate of 1411.2 kilobits per one second
of stereo music by a factor of 12 down to 112-128kbps, without sacrificing sound quality. The MP3 encoding
process is well suited for the transfer of high quality audio files with small file size over telephone or ISDN lines,
and over the Internet.
PCI Slot - Peripheral Component Interface
A 32-bit slot found in Pentium Class systems. Generally used by IDE/SCSI controllers, video cards, network
cards, video capture boards, and some sound cards.
SDMI
The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is a forum of over 130 companies in the fields of recorded
audio content, computers, and consumer electronics, for the purpose of developing an integrated
method of copyright protection technology that can be used worldwide. SDMI is working to create a
framework for preventing improper usage of audio files and to promote legal music distribution services.
