Week 4: Muddy COding & DEcoding

The information presented in the "Multimedia-Audio" lecture was new to me. The only topics that I was pretty familiar with were MP3 files and software that enables you to create audio content. I was never aware of technicalities that go into producing and recording audio. The "core concept" of audio content that I had a difficult time grasping was CODEC. In order to understand the logistics of audio it is critical for you to familiar with CODEC.

The process of "coding" (analog-->digital) and "decoding" (digital-->analog) was so "muddy" to me, and I retrieved a better understanding of it when I did further research.

CODEC is basically the support system for audio. It allows us to play the audio and also edit a certain audio file into a different format. To put it into more familiar terms, I thought of CODEC as a foreign language translator. You have a sentence in Japaneses that you can't read, and obviously cannot speak the sentence out loud. You then take the sentence and enter it into the foreign language translator. This would represent the "coding" or "CO" of CODEC. The translator then translates the sentence into English (or whatever language you are familiar with) and reads it out loud. This represents the "decoding" or "DEC" part of CODEC.