The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This post focuses on the availability of free, open source software for audio production.

Free Open Source Software (or FOSS for short) has been with us for a good while now, the most popular example of it being the high profile alternative web browser Firefox, sponsored by the Mozilla corporation. Open Source software means that anybody can download the code, use it, and redistribute it - and it’s completely legal. Obviously this can be a huge advantage to folks with modest budgets or who are strong supporters of intellectual property freedom. Ubuntu Linux, my operating system of choice, has been making strong inroads in taking a share of the market. Recently there has been a lot of progress made on audio software in the open source community. Since I featured the FOSS program Audacity in my last post on noise reduction, I got inspired to feature some of the exciting projects coming out of the community.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post will focus on lossy audio data compression: the types, the pros and cons, and how to get the most out of the most popular format.

In the audio world you will no doubt run across some very paranoid people who believe that anything that touches your audio will degrade its quality and, in the realm of analog this is often true. One world-class, platinum-caliber mastering engineer that I worked with was convinced that transferring my 24-bit broadcast wav files from my hard drive to his would cause fidelity loss. So, in the interest of easing his concerns, we ran the entire session directly from my drive. Now that digital has firmly seated itself as the storage and transfer medium of choice, it’s important to know what steps do and do not influence the quality of our audio. When something does influence the quality of our audio, it’s important to know when and how. There are, in the most general terms, two kinds of compression: lossy and lossless. Lossy compression reduces the quality of the material while lossless compression can reproduce the original source material perfectly, as if it were never compressed at all. This post is going to focus on the lossy side of things. Tune in tomorrow for a crash course on lossless.

Read the rest of this entry »