Audio transcription which at one point relied heavily on analog technologies is now almost a completely digital experience. Then again, it is impossible to imagine a completely digital world of transcription. This is because the world is slowly migrating to a digital world but we have been using analog methods of audio recording for so long, almost every company will have one or other information that is stored in the old fashioned magnetic tapes and similar previous decade technology.
You either have a foot already on the digital boat or you are thinking of taking some steps in that regard, you will immediately come across some audio related digital terms. We are talking about terms such as audio – compressed and uncompressed, formats, memory storage capacity and cloud storage. It would be simpler if you could find an easy to understand explanation to all these terms. That is precisely what is on our agenda today.
Compressed Or Not
Any type of recording that you do will be recorded in its original uncompressed form. Uncompressed audio contains all the audio information, including sounds that we can hear and sounds that the human ear cannot understand. It is called raw audio.
When you decide to store this audio, you have a choice to store this audio in its true form with all the information intact. This way, when you play it back on your playback device, you get the most authentic experience and this is ideally desirable. Unfortunately, uncompressed audio in its truest form takes up a lot of space. To give you an example, let us suppose that you need to get some work done and currently have a team of a hundred people working for you. When you use the entire collection of hundred workers, you get the full output.
Now, let us say that out of this hundred workers, you realize that you can get ninety percent of the output by picking only ten of these workers. To add fuel to this strategy, we will suppose that your business will run just fine with ninety percent efficiency. With this thinking, you get rid of ninety workings and save on their daily wage.
Audio compression is something like that. You use one of the many available compression techniques to reduce the amount of storage space – as in wages for workers in our example – with a little loss in audio fidelity. In our case, the loss of fidelity should never be a problem because we are not recording music sessions with a hundred different beats. It is just human voice which occupies a small fraction of the audio frequency.
File Formats
Formats are like containers that hold the audio files. Taking the food example, you could say that milk is a container for all the things that it packs like water, fat, calcium and so on. A format is a direct factor when you choose to go with compressed audio.
Of all the audio file formats that you might have heard about, two of the most popular variants are ‘wav’ and ‘mp3’. Wav format is mostly used with uncompressed audio and hence takes up a lot of space on the storage media. On the other hand, mp3 is always compressed audio and gives the same length of audio at a very small file size.
A cool factor about mp3 is that when you are encoding or converting audio from its raw format to compress format, you get to choose the quality of the audio and the compression level you want to choose. If you are not happy with a particular compression quality, then you can always choose different compression settings and get a better sounding audio. Of course, this comes at a price in terms of storage space occupied.
Storage
There are two kinds of storage that you will need to know, and this knowledge is useful not just with audio files. Storage is a requirement for the documents that are developed after transcription too.
You have local storage, where the audio resides on the same device that did the recording. For instance, you have a digital recorder that works on battery and comes with a memory card of some capacity. This memory card is the local storage for the recording device. If you are recording on a computer, then that computer’s hard drive becomes the local storage.
Then you have network storage which could be storage space that is either part of a cloud storage service or a network storage service that is run by your own company.
The author has extensive knowledge of transcription services and how they relate to audio encryption. They work great with audio typing services.
You either have a foot already on the digital boat or you are thinking of taking some steps in that regard, you will immediately come across some audio related digital terms. We are talking about terms such as audio – compressed and uncompressed, formats, memory storage capacity and cloud storage. It would be simpler if you could find an easy to understand explanation to all these terms. That is precisely what is on our agenda today.
Compressed Or Not
Any type of recording that you do will be recorded in its original uncompressed form. Uncompressed audio contains all the audio information, including sounds that we can hear and sounds that the human ear cannot understand. It is called raw audio.
When you decide to store this audio, you have a choice to store this audio in its true form with all the information intact. This way, when you play it back on your playback device, you get the most authentic experience and this is ideally desirable. Unfortunately, uncompressed audio in its truest form takes up a lot of space. To give you an example, let us suppose that you need to get some work done and currently have a team of a hundred people working for you. When you use the entire collection of hundred workers, you get the full output.
Now, let us say that out of this hundred workers, you realize that you can get ninety percent of the output by picking only ten of these workers. To add fuel to this strategy, we will suppose that your business will run just fine with ninety percent efficiency. With this thinking, you get rid of ninety workings and save on their daily wage.
Audio compression is something like that. You use one of the many available compression techniques to reduce the amount of storage space – as in wages for workers in our example – with a little loss in audio fidelity. In our case, the loss of fidelity should never be a problem because we are not recording music sessions with a hundred different beats. It is just human voice which occupies a small fraction of the audio frequency.
File Formats
Formats are like containers that hold the audio files. Taking the food example, you could say that milk is a container for all the things that it packs like water, fat, calcium and so on. A format is a direct factor when you choose to go with compressed audio.
Of all the audio file formats that you might have heard about, two of the most popular variants are ‘wav’ and ‘mp3’. Wav format is mostly used with uncompressed audio and hence takes up a lot of space on the storage media. On the other hand, mp3 is always compressed audio and gives the same length of audio at a very small file size.
A cool factor about mp3 is that when you are encoding or converting audio from its raw format to compress format, you get to choose the quality of the audio and the compression level you want to choose. If you are not happy with a particular compression quality, then you can always choose different compression settings and get a better sounding audio. Of course, this comes at a price in terms of storage space occupied.
Storage
There are two kinds of storage that you will need to know, and this knowledge is useful not just with audio files. Storage is a requirement for the documents that are developed after transcription too.
You have local storage, where the audio resides on the same device that did the recording. For instance, you have a digital recorder that works on battery and comes with a memory card of some capacity. This memory card is the local storage for the recording device. If you are recording on a computer, then that computer’s hard drive becomes the local storage.
Then you have network storage which could be storage space that is either part of a cloud storage service or a network storage service that is run by your own company.
The author has extensive knowledge of transcription services and how they relate to audio encryption. They work great with audio typing services.
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