Sonic Blue 800 64MB, Руководство пользователя

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Digital audio terms
Encoding, or ripping (a CD)
Encoding, sometimes referred to as “ripping”, refers to extracting audio from a music CD and
converting it into a compressed digital audio format, such as MP3 or WMA, that can be
played on your portable 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 hardware that is comparable to an operat-
ing system on a computer. The Rio 800 firmware controls everything from the liquid crystal
display and codec support to the Rio 800’s other functions.
How to upgrade the Rio 800 firmware
MP3
MP3 is short for Moving Pictures Experts Group Audio Layer 3. MP3 is the most well known
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 conversion of an audio track from CD-ROM
reduces the file size by approximately a 12:1 ratio with virtually no perceptible loss in quality.
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 the redundant and irrelevant parts of a
sound signal that the human ear doesn't hear. It also adds a Modified Discrete Cosine Trans-
form (MDCT) that implements a filter bank, increasing the frequency resolution 18 times
higher than that of layer 2. The MP3 encoding process is well suited for the transfer of high
quality audio files with small file size over the Internet. Despite the prevalence of MP3s, there
are a number of competing technologies to the MP3 format.
Playlist
Playlists let you organize lists of tracks to play in the order you choose. Playlists make it eas-
ier to manage large collections of music.
Skin
The skin is the software option that lets you change how digital audio player software applica-
tions appear on your computer screen. Some software applications allow you to customize
the interface color and window design by changing the skin. Some skins omit certain play-
back controls for simplicity.
Streaming
Streaming technology lets you play audio or video directly from the Internet without first sav-
ing it on your computer. You can listen to or watch the file right away, without waiting for it to
completely download.