Whois & Analysis for media.io

A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs.

The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.

Typical uses of sound cards include providing the audio component for multimedia applications such as music composition, editing video or audio, presentation, education and entertainment (games) and video projection.

In signal processing, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction involves encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation.

Compression can be either lossy or lossless.

Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy.

No information is lost in lossless compression.

Lossy compression reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less important information.

Transcoding is the direct analog-to-analog or digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for movie data files (e.g., PAL, SECAM, NTSC), audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859).

This is usually done in cases where a target device (or workflow) does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that mandates a reduced file size, or to convert incompatible or obsolete data to a better-supported or modern format.

Data conversion is the conversion of computer data from one format to another.

Throughout a computer environment, data is encoded in a variety of ways.

For example, computer hardware is built on the basis of certain standards, which requires that data contains, for example, parity bit checks.

Similarly, the operating system is predicated on certain standards for data and file handling.

Furthermore, each computer program handles data in a different manner.

Whenever any one of these variables is changed, data must be converted in some way before it can be used by a different computer, operating system or program.

Even different versions of these elements usually involve different data structures.

For example, the changing of bits from one format to another, usually for the purpose of application interoperability or of capability of using new features, is merely a data conversion.

Data conversions may be as simple as the conversion of a text file from one character encoding system to another; or more complex, such as the conversion of office file formats, or the conversion of image and audio file formats.

A computer file is a computer resource for recording data discretely in a computer storage device.

Just as words can be written to paper, so can information be written to a computer file.