Digitizing Audio
Audio is an important component of most media productions. Like video, analog sound
must be digitized, or sampled, to be used along with digitized videotape. Fortunately,
audio is not nearly as hard to digitize as is video. Sampling analog sound breaks
up the sound into discrete frequencies. There are two steps in digitizing audio-
The quality (or resolution) of digitized audio and the size of the audio file depend
on the sampling rate and bit depth of the audio. The sampling rate, similar to the
frame rate for digitizing video, measures the number of frequencies into which the
sound is broken. The bit depth, similar to color depth, measures the number of tones
per sample. The higher the sampling rate and bit depth, the better the sound quality.
Think of audio sampled at 11 kHz and 8-
