AC97
Audio codec 97, an open standard defined by Intel and popular with many hardware manufacturers.
ADC
Analog to digital converter (audio recording).
ADPCM
Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation. A form of PCM that produces a digital signal with a lower bit rate than standard PCM.
Audio Manager
Component of the Multimedia framework that processes sound requests.
Audio Manager Library
A shared library included in the SDK that allows audio clients to access audio features.
Audio sample
A single number representing the amplitude of a waveform at a particular time.
Audio Stream
In the audio driver, a sequence of stereo sample pairs.
Buffer
Channel
An audio stream may consist of multiple interleaved channels. A mono stream has one channel, and a stereo stream has two channels. There is one sample per channel.
DAC
Digital to analog converter (audio playback).
Decoder
Converts a particular encoded data format, such as MS-ADPCM or MPEG-1 video into a format that the output device can understand.
Encoder
Converts one multimedia format (typically a raw format) to another encoded format for the purposes of storing that format.
Extractor
Extracts a particular multimedia format from a byte stream and passes it to one or more decoders.
Frame
For audio, a frame consists of interleaved audio samples (one sample per channel) that are output during one quantized time unit. For video, a frame consists of an entire picture.
Media Session
A media session provides a context for an application's media playback or recording tasks.
Media Session Library
A shared library included in the SDK that allows multimedia clients to access multimedia features.
Media time
The temporal position within media data.
Pan
Stereo balance between left and right speakers.
Performance time
The time as specified by an external time source while media data is recorded or played.
PCM
Pulse Code Modulation. A sampling technique for digitizing analog signals.
Sound Library
Added support to allow developers to use the ALSA library instead of the Audio Manager API calls.
Track
A route for media data from a source device to a destination device.
