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Music and Audio Programmer's Glossary |
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The world of computer music and audio programming has a long list of acronyms and phrases that can be difficult to figure out. This glossary is a great place to check when you come across a term you don't understand on The Sonic Spot or in any other computer music and audio programming related material. If you are looking for a term related to music and audio only check out the regular glossary. If you are looking for a term that doesn't appear in the
glossary, please submit the new term and the definition will be
added and e-mailed to you.
Big-Endian - refers to the most significant byte first order in which bytes of a multi-byte value (such as a 32-bit dword value) are stored. For example a decimal value of 457,851 is represented as 0x0006FC7B in hexidecimal and would be stored in a file as: 0x00, 0x06, 0xFC, 0x7B. Many Moterola proccessors (Macintosh) use Big-Endian. The opposite byte ordering method is called Little Endian. Little-Endian - refers to the least significant byte first order in which bytes of a multi-byte value (such as a 32-bit dword value) are stored. For example a decimal value of 457,851 is represented as 0x0006FC7B in hexidecimal and would be stored in a file as: 0x7B, 0xFC, 0x06, 0x00. Intel processors (PC) use Little-Endian. The opposite byte ordering method is called Big Endian. RIFF - the Resource Interchange File Format is the storage structure commonly used for multimedia data on the Windows platform. It organizes data in chunks which each have a small header that describe the chunk type and size. This structure allows programs that do not recognize specific chunk types to skip over the unknown data and continue correctly processing known chunks in the file. Data chunks may contain smaller "sub-chunks" of data. In fact, all RIFF files are supposed to store all data chunks inside a master "RIFF" chunk that defines the type of resource data the file contains. WAVE and AVI files are examples of data stored in the RIFF format. |
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