The document discusses various methods for acquiring audio from different sources, including buying individual files or full albums online or from stores, extracting audio from existing video or audio files, and recording audio using devices. It also covers characteristics of paid downloads, issues around copyright and ownership of content, royalty-free music options, and distinguishing between audio file formats and codecs.

1.  Describe the process to acquire audio from various
sources using appropriate software

2. In This Chapter, you’ll learn on:
 Source for different materials based on the
copyright policy guidelines
 Acquire and convert between different audio
formats
o Uncompressed audio formats Modes and Channels
o Lossless compressed audio formats
o Lossy compressed audio formats

3. Acquiring Audio
 There are a few ways you can acquire audio files
 Buy individual files from online music /audio stores
 Record with any audio recording device e.g.
mobile phones
 Purchase albums from CDs stores
 Extract or import audio from CDs, DVDs or existing
video or audio files
 Recording from an analogue sound card with a
microphone

4. Using audio material
 Audio Material or music downloads is referred to as
the transferral of music from an Internet-facing
computer or website to a user's local computer. This
term encompasses both legal downloads and
downloads of copyright material without permission
or payment.
 Popular examples of online music stores that sell
digital singles and albums include the iTunes Store,
Tune App, Napster, Zune Marketplace, Amazon
MP3, Nokia Music Store, TuneTribe, Kazaa and
eMusic.

5. Characteristics of paid downloads
 Paid downloads are mostly encoded with Digital Rights
Management that restricts making extra copies of the
music or playing purchased songs on certain digital
audio players.
 They are usually compressed using a lossy codec (usually
MPEG-1 Layer 3 or Windows Media), reducing file size
and therefore bandwidth requirements. However, this
may cause an apparent loss in quality to a listener when
compared to a CD, and cause compatibility issues with
certain software and devices.
 Uncompressed files and losslessly compressed files are
also available at some sites, but not common.

6.  When you purchase a piece of music online, you
only pay for the rights to play back on your player,
in other words, for personal usage. You DO NOT
own the copyright for that piece of work.
 The Internet might be a medium that’s accessible
to anyone with an Internet connection. But the
content posted online, unless specified otherwise, is
not in the public domain. You cannot just take and
use whatever you feel like. This basically means, you
need to create the content, if you did not create it
yourself, it’s not for you to share.

7. Owning the Copyright
 When you own the copyright of a piece of work, it
means literally that you have the “right to make
copies” of that work. By extension you also have the
right to license that work to others who want to use
it. It is a form of intellectual property law that
protects an original piece of work from being
pirated and used without permission of its creator.
However you can do use copyrighted works for
non-profit documentaries or educational purposes
are more likely to be considered fair use, but just
remember you need to ask for permission when you
do.

8. Royalty Free Music
 Royalty-Free refers to the right to use copyrighted
material or intellectual property without the need to pay
royalties for each use or per volume sold, or some time
period of use or sales. To avoid anything illegal, it’s best
to consider purchasing a legal music license from royalty
free music websites such as www.premiumbeat.com. All
you have to do is pay a one-time, reasonable amount
as fee through a secure payment gateway and you are
free to use the royalty free music on the Internet in any
way you want for lifetime. Inexpensive licensing is also
available for Broadcast advertising and mass
duplication of DVDs or CDs.

9. File Formats
 We will cover more of this in the later chapters but it
is important to distinguish between a file format and
an audio codec.
o A format is how the data is stored with a specific audio file
format in a file.
o A codec performs the encoding and decoding of the raw
audio data

10. There are three major groups of audio file formats:
 Uncompressed audio formats, such as WAV, AIFF,
AU or raw header-less PCM
 Formats with lossless compression, such as FLAC,
Monkey's Audio Apple Lossless (filename extension
m4a
 Formats with lossy compression, such as MP3, AAC,
ATRAC and Windows Media Audio Lossy.