If you are planning to do some recording, the simplest and most convenient method these days entails the use of a PC. Fortunately, all PC’s have a little socket, connected to an audio interface inside the PC, where you can plug in a guitar, microphone or keyboard. There are also a number of free software applications around that will allow you to get up and running in no time. So how does this work?
All sounds that the vocal chords project and ear receives are analog; all audio processing inside your computer is digital (bit streams of digital 1’s and 0’s) encoded and decoded in such a way as to represent its analog counterpart. The purpose of an audio interface is to faithfully convert the analog input into a digital form. The computer you are using has one of these. It is almost certainly a single channel device that converts the input into a 16 bit word sampled at 44.1kHz, exactly the same format as every CD you have ever played. So what wrong with using this to record? Actually, not much, except of course that you can only record one channel at a time. Oh, and 16 bits isn’t really anywhere near enough!
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