Music Production
This is Music Production. A place to share anything and everything you want about your music making journey! Learning is the goal, so discussion is encouraged!
RIP Waveform.
Rules are as follows:
- Don't share other people's music without commentary, analysis or questions. This is not a music discovery community.
- No elitism or bigotry towards other people's music tastes. Be polite in disagreement.
I will update rules as necessary, but I promise we'll stay light on them and only add new ones after discussion!
Here are some useful examples of what a great post would be about:
(in no particular order)
- Stuff you made/are making. Get valuable feedback and criticism!
- Learning resources - videos, articles, posts on any topic concerning a production process, be it composition, sound design, sampling, mixing, mastering, DAW workflow or any other.
- Free plugins, presets and samplepacks. Giveaways and self-made stuff included!
- News about production software, releases and personalities.
- Questions and general advice about music production.
- Essays on your favorite productions. Inspirations and insights!
- Your physical analog gear! Let us know how it performs!
Good to know: As a general word of caution, avoid posting complete compositions, mixes and tracks on the internet before backing them up on a remote and reputable server. Even small snippets or watermarked tracks should be posted AFTER backing it up to cloud. Timestamps from cloud services will help you in case of theft. And, as a public resource, lemmy is not a safe place to post your unpublished work, so please make sure your work is protected.
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What you’ll find is most modern files for video, like .mp4, are what are called container files. They have to provide a video and audio stream as well as sometimes an embedded subtitle stream. At the end of the day, it’s a folder.
Then those streams are often compressed, which aren’t readable at a file level. They have to be decompressed first before having any sensible output.
It helps to understand how a byte stream is taken from the binary values to a usually 16-bit range at usually 44,100 times per second and you’ll quickly realize that you’d be hard-pressed to read the raw bits and be able to imagine the sound in your head. There’s far too much to break down here, but there’s whole college courses focused on just this concept.
Something that probably resembles a lot more of what you’re expecting is MIDI. That doesn’t contain audio itself, as such, but instead a series of instructions for the computer to play notes with instructions, like pitch, octave, velocity, length, and many custom channels for anything you could think of.
And that’s all just audio. Video is a dark art that I’ve yet to approach. The things we’ve managed to make happen with the tiny files we use are just wild when you get into the science of it.