Sample (Sample) is the smallest unit of audio data, representing the amplitude value of the audio signal at a specific point in time. The bit width of the sample determines the value range of each sample, and the common bit widths are 8 bits and 16 bits. Sampling depth (Sample Depth) refers to the accuracy or resolution of each sample, often expressed in bit rate (Bit Depth), which represents the storage space size of each sample.
Channel (Channel) indicates the number of channels of an audio signal. Mono means only one channel, while stereo means two channels, one for left and one for right. Stereo mode (Stereo Mode) refers to the spatial layout between channels, and common modes include left and right channels (LR) and orthogonal channels (AB).
A frame is an audio data block composed of a group of samples, and its size is determined by the sample bit width and the number of channels. For stereo, each frame contains sample values for the left and right channels. The number of bytes of a frame can be calculated from the sample bit width, the number of channels and the sample size (usually bytes).
The sampling rate (Sample rate) , also known as the rate (Rate), indicates the number of times the audio signal is sampled per second, in Hertz (Hz). The choice of sample rate affects audio quality and storage space. At the same time, resampling is the process of changing the sampling rate of audio data, which is often used to adapt to different audio systems or requirements.
Period (Period size) indicates the number of frames of audio data processed by each hardware interrupt in audio processing. Period size (Period size) indicates the number of frames in each period. By setting the period size and period count (Period count), you can determine the buffer size (Buffer size), and the buffer size is usually in units of frames.
Interleaved mode (Interleaved) is a storage method of audio data. In interleaved mode, audio data is stored in an alternating manner, first all samples of one channel, then all samples of the other channel, and so on. This storage method is common in stereo audio.