These principles of digital audio have a major impact on the size of files that are created as you're working in a, in a DAW. Every time you record audio, everything has to be stored on the hard drive. And you'll find that if you increase bit depth and sample rate, you get much, much larger files. We also want to be conscious of the file types that we're, we're creating. this term compression gets used in a variety of ways throughout audio production. And we want to understand just by context what we're really talking about. We can talk about data compression, which is what we're going to be referring to here. But we can also have audio compression. They're two different things, though people usually won't qualify by saying data or audio. We talk about data compression. It's kind of like a zip file. Have you ever noticed when you take a Word doc and you zip it and make a compressed file type, it gets much smaller. We've, we've reduced the data but we've retained all the information. That's a lossless type of compression. And we can also have things like MP3 which is also a kind of data compression that loses some of the information. You've heard a poor MP3 doesn't sound so good, right? We've lost some of the, some of the audio. We want to make sure that when we're working with DAWs and when recording, we're using the highest possible quality of audio files. It's going to create larger files, but it makes it so that you can, you can manipulate the audio files more, you can use more audio effects. And you're not going to get that ugly MP3 kind of sound. So we have to make sure we're using a lossless type of file. And primarily when a DAW is recording, it's going to be creating a WAV or AIFF file. And this is the full quality, uncompressed audio and it's important that you're using one of these file types. As you load up your DAW, they'll be questions or in the preferences they'll be options for which file type you're going to use in that project. And you want to make sure it's a WAV or AAFF file. Those are both totally uncompressed, they'll be very large but they're going to be of highest quality. If possible, choose broadcast WAV files. It stores more metadata which can be useful if the project file does crash. The other parameter you're going to have to adjust when working with your DAW is going to be if it's an interleaved or non-interleaved file. You're used to, in your iTunes library, dealing with interlead files which means you have a single file that includes both the left and right audio channel. You can just play it back in your iTunes library. Some DAW's are set up by default to make de-interleave files which is actually saves a separate audio file for left and a separate one for right. I would recommend right at the beginning of the process make sure using interleave files. It's easier to work with and you'll just find it's more natural when recording with those type of files. So again, when you're setting up your DAW, you want to use an uncompressed file type which would be AFF or WAV. I would suggest 24 bit recording, a 48,000 Hz sample rate, and make sure they're interleaved files. I'd like to take a moment to show you where these setting are in a variety of DAWs. Now there are many Digital Audio Workstations out there and I can't cover them all. And the new ones are coming up all the time. But the truth is these settings are the same everywhere. They are in different locations but no matter what DAW use, you need to find how to set these settings. So let's check it out in four different DAWs. The first is Pro Tools, right when you start a new Pro Tools project, you're asked to set many of these preferences up. You have Audio file type and you can choose BWF which is Broadcast WAV and is what I would suggest recording at. We have options for bit depth, we can choose 24 bit. I can choose my sample rate of 48 kilohertz, and I can choose interleave files here. In the playback engine preferences in Pro Tools, I have options for my buffer size and I can set it to 128 if we're going to be doing some recording. I also set in the DAW application which output device I want to use and I'm choosing one of my interfaces here. We'll see similar settings over in Digital Performer. when I go to the Configure Hardware Driver window in Digital Performer, I have an option for the device I want to record with. I can choose sample rate, and I have my buffer size option there. Over in the Preferences under audio files, I can choose Broadcast WAV, Interleave, 24 bit. If we look at Logic, we're going to see similar things. In the audio preferences, I can choose my in/out device, and I can show my buffer size there. I can also choose 24 bit recording. Over in the general preferences under audio, I can choose recording file type. And we again, have Broadcast WAV as the recording file type. In the project settings, I could choose Sample rate. Same stuff everywhere, right? These are the really important preferences. And you're going to see a lot of other preferences in many of these windows. But these ones I'm pointing out are really the most important and the ones you're going to change most often. Ableton Live. The audio preferences we see a similar thing. I can choose input and output device. I have my sample rate. I have my buffer size. And in the recording settings, I can choose my bit depth and file type. So, we see that no matter what the application, these settings are the most important ones. And they are the ones that you need to know how to configure. I'd recommend you pause working in this video here and go to your DAW and find these settings. Again were looking for in/out device, Audio device, Sample rate, Bit depth, Buffer size, and Recording file type.
