Audio Links

Welcome to the audio pages. These are set up to provide easy access to useful information and resources. Please report outdated or bad links. Comments and suggestions are appreciated.

Audio freeware. Low cost / high performance software for beginners and professionals. Page is in development, so check back often. Currently Mac only.

Theatre-Sound Home Page. Audio resources for theater artists. Also a theater sound list-serve with hundreds of participants ranging from Broadway Designers to High School Students. Very high signal-to-noise ratio and always interesting.

Audio Systems Group, Inc. Publications. Consultant Jim Brown has posted a terrific set of audio documents including a great discussion of the characteristics of sound broadcast outdoors in the "Acoustics of Sound Systems for Baseball" article.

Richmond Sound Design Home Page. Home to the Audiobox and several very useful collections of audio links, including a very exhaustive list of Pro Audio manufacturers.

The Aural Imagination. Mic Pool's Resource for Sound Design Students. Lots of good stuff here including his "Step-by-step Guide to Sound Design for Drama".

USITT Software page : collection of audio software links, all priced under $100.
Tech Info

Lessons In Electrical Circuits. 6 free downloadable textbooks on electricity and electronics.

The Audio Glossary. Courtesy of Raphael Sound Design.

Microphones . How they work and other general info.

Using Wireless Microphones. A primer at the Audio-Technica site.

MiniDisc Community Page. All things MiniDisc, including: modifications, hacks, reviews, and links.

Digital Domain. Mastering facility but with great articles about dither, compression, bit depth, and other audio bugaboos.

Media Info. Recording, CD-R and DAT info on the Cassette House Web Site. Cassette House is also a good vendor for digital media - check out their sale page for good deals on bulk CDR, MD and DAT tapes.

ProTools Tutorial. Roger Pardee, professor of recording arts at Loyola Marymount Univ. and film sound designer, has a hypertext tutorial for his classes online. There's other worthwhile stuff related to film sound here too.

All Music Guide. A decent on-line database for information about recordings, artists, and songs. Be warned that some information posted is incorrect (and e-mail to the "Your Corrections" address seem to go unheeded) but all-in-all, a good place to start a search.

Blank Music Paper. The Library at the University of Virginia (my alma mater) has PDFs of all sizes and types of music papers - 6-stave, 8-stave, ensembles, orchestra, choral - for download.

Circuit Symbols. The Electronics Club website has a really comprehensive guide to electrical symbols. Their entire site is pretty useful, with pages on soldering, components and the all-powerful 555 timer IC. I like that the soldering page has a section on First Aid for burns.

CXI Schematics. A large collection of useful circuits and schematics - amplifiers, power supplies, filters, electric canaries, and much much more.

Telephone Ringing Circuits. More than you ever wanted to know about making telephones ring.

Bell Labs: Heritage. A pretty fair number of audio advances and discoveries came out of Bell Labs. Read about them here.

Audiophile@ILikejam. "Attaching the electrodes of knowledge to the nipples of ignorance since 1999" is their motto. Some of the funniest (or scariest, depending on your view) sites devoted to bogus audio products. Things like $485 wooden knobs that eliminate the "problem" of vibrations introduced into the audio signal caused by plastic knobs. Or $9000 speaker cable.

Audioholics. A companion site to the above, it has articles and links to debunk every idiotic claim audio snake oil salesmen make. Rock on.

The Freesound Community. An online repository of Creative Commons licenced sound files. You have to join to access them -- there are tens of thousands of files and a 1/2 million users . Some pretty odd and interesting things available. Also has a forum for discussion of field and effects recording.

Epic Sound's Guide To Sound Effects. Collection of tips and techniques for making your own sound effects.

Soundsnap. Growing collection of free sounds and music loops. Like Freesound it requires you to join to download and uses a version of the Creative Commons licence.

SoundDogs. Online vendor of sound effects. Audition through streaming audio then purchase by the second at the sample rate of your choice.

Findsounds. A search engine for locating sound effects and instrument samples.

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. Over 5000 Edison cylinders available online for listening and download. Fascinating listening.

PAiA. DIY electronic kits of all types and for all skill levels, from analog synth modules to ring modulators to preamps to vocoders. Nice folks supplying good quality projects at reasonable prices - this is a great way to learn a bit about electronics (I built my first kit from them in the 70's and my most recent last year...).

Version Tracker. Mac users can find the current versions of software, control panels, and extensions at this very useful site.

More to come...

Comments, suggestions, broken links or cool stuff to Joe -- jpinoATandrewDOTcmuDOTedu.

Last updated on 26 February 2009.

insomnia?