[linux-audio-user] Linux music editor, greater than 32-bit ?

Paul Winkler pw_lists at slinkp.com
Thu Feb 22 17:48:18 EST 2007


On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 12:24:47PM -1000, david wrote:
> Rick Wright wrote:
> >Yes, but this 48bit representation of color is just 16bit x3 colors 
> >[channels].  In other words the 48bit representation is 3 unrelated 
> >16bit [channel] representations concatenated, one each for the 3 primary 
> >colors/CCD sensors.  The equivilent for audio would be just 16bit as 
> >there is only one channel.
> 
> Hmmm, wouldn't there actually be TWO channels for audio - stereo?

No :-) Sure, two channels is still the most common delivery format
(eg. CD).  But mono files will still be important for a long time
(eg. as individual regions in a multi-channel editor session), and for
delivery, the six-channel "5.1" format is becoming pretty common.

So in the audio world, by convention we talk about bit depth per
channel, not total.  If the graphics people used our conventions,
they'd talk about a "16-bit, 3 channel" image, rather than saying "48
bit" and leaving the number of channels implicit.  (Which is
weird. What about when you switch color spaces, eg. from RGB to CMYK?
Is it still 16 bits per channel? Do you call the CMYK file a "64-bit"
file or what?)

Conversely, if the audio world were to adopt the conventions of the
graphics world, we'd talk about CDs as "32-bit" audio.  But we don't :)


-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com



More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list