How does LAME work?

[Special K]

This is probably a pretty broad question (and the answer may get too technical), but I don't understand how a program can take binary data as input (CD-quality stereo sound) and decide what can be "heard" and what can't, just on the basis of 1s and 0s.

 

[singh]

This probably belongs in the HT forum

 

[Adrian Tung]

Read up a good book on Psychoacoustics, the science of how we hear and perceive sound. That should give you some ideas.


atwl

 

[Workin']

Well, first of all those 1's and 0's aren't just random - they are a digital representation of an analog waveform. So the encoder isn't *really* just looking at 1's and 0's.

Here's a pretty good explanation of MPEG Layer 3 (commonly called MP3) that isn't too technical.