Quote:
Originally Posted by Mondo Bungle
My dad says an audio file would take up more space if there's more going on in it. Is that true?
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Yes and No
to answer this, you really have to have a broad understanding of digital sampling technology
Trying to condense what should be a day-long seminar into one paragraph:
A digital audio signal is created when an audio source-file is sampled. This is achieved by super-imposing a high carrier wave over the source wave. Everytime the carrier wave crosses the path of a source file, a "dot" is created at the intersection where data is digitally recorded. When enough of these dots exist, the human brain "draws" in the rest of the digital waveform by "connecting the dots". The higher the carrier wave, the shorter the peak-to-peak distance is and - therefore - more intersecting dots over a given source file area for better sampling resolution. This is why a 44.1 khz carrier has better sampling resolution than a 32 khz wave and, therefore, sounds better. By the way, this is called the 'sample rate'.
With that said, if the structure of the source waveform is complex, the intersecting node may have more digital information stored there. This does NOT necessarily mean more instruments or whatever but, rather, the complexity of the source material. For example, a violin string bowed has a more complex structure than a single oscillator analog synthesizer so each point of the violin string will hold more information than the dots sampling the single osc analog synth for the same time and sample rate.
How it is encoded to different file formats, both in speed, depth, resolution, bit-rate, etc also affects file size
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