Articles Natural Sound:
1) A+ Multi-media studio 86

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A+ MAGAZINE/MAY 1986 Pg 107
BY ANTHONY REVEAUX

SoundCap from MacNifty Central and Natural Sound from Magnum Software can help turn your Mac into a multimedia studio.


In the beginning there was MacPaint - with it we could create graphics with astounding ease and clarity. But there was a limit to what most of us could draw by ourselves. So then came video and optical digitizers such as MacVision and Thunder scan, capable of taking pictures of anything and bringing them to the Mac screen.

With composition programs such as MusicWorks and ConcertWare, we could make the Mac a Tin Pan Alley, spinning tunes of our own. But even backed up by the Macintosh's hip sound chip, we still weren't a big band. Now- (trumpet fanfare)-we have sound digitizers for the Mac.

They can capture any sound-voices, music or sound effects--digitally "sample" it, and record it to a sound file.

  Systems such as SoundCap and Natural Sound permit the creative manipulation of audio information in ways similar to how MacPaint helps you modify visual material. You can raise and lower the volume of selected parts of the sound; stretch or compress, repeat, invert, echo, and reverberate sounds; and mix different ones together. With the ability to include sounds as well as pictures, your Mac can become an experimental media studio. You can use SoundCap files with VideoWorks and Natural Sound files with Slide Show Magician.

Sound Resolution
Digital sound, the principle behind the crystalline fidelity of compact discs (CDs), is what makes it all possible. Sound waves are analog in nature; they are continuous and - well, wavy, The computer, however, needs information in the form of bits-like a fire-hose stream of dots. The hardware components of the Sound Cap and Natural Sound digitizers are circuits within small boxes with cables that connect to the Mac's modem or printer port. 		  Analog-to-digital converters, they squeeze waves into dots at speeds your Mac can accept. They do so in "samples," which are like clusters of dots. The sampling rate determines the resolution of the digitized sound. The more clusters per second (between 5000 and 22,232 here), the higher the resolution, or fidelity, of the sampled sound.

Sound digitizers can capture any sound, digitally (sample' it and record it to a sound file.

The analogy to hi-fi CDs stops about here. The converted dots-from waves are true sounds, not synthesized ones, but the 11-kilohertz playback-frequency aperture-or Nyquist limit-of the Mac is of a comparatively low fidelity about equal to the
quality' of an AM radio. Therefore, even a Walkman-type personal cassette player is an acceptable audio-input source for these products. If offers tabletop convenience as well as impedances that will not cause voltage problems.

 
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