Quite often, novice musicians and sound engineers are faced with the need to process sound files or recorded live instrumental and vocal parts in a representation in the form of a recording format PCM. There are a lot of misconceptions about what it is, for many uninformed users, because they consider this type of audio to be a file extension. In fact, this concept is common to several types of audio. For the most part, sound files in their current computer representation, with rare exceptions, are just related to the PCM format. But in order to prevent further confusion, let's look at its purpose, understanding and editing.
What is the PCM format?
To understand the term itself, you simply need to decipher the abbreviation. It is derived from the English Pulse Code Modulation, which translates as "pulse-code modulation." This technology was previously used exclusively for digitizing analog audio, but now it is used everywhere for encoding sound, and for recording in studios, in film production, etc. The PCM audio format is a kind of generalized group of sound objects for which recording or storage are used. similar processing technologies. These include WAV, MP3, BWF, AMB, RF64, AIFF and many others. As one of the bloggers on the Internet correctly noted, today it’s easier to say that it does not belong to the PCM format than to endlessly list all the PCM digital standards. An alternative can be called mainly audio of new formats related to the DSD standard.
How to open files for listening?
By and large, if it is exclusively about computer technology, you can open digital audio in PCM format with any convenient player (either built into the operating system itself or created by third-party developers).
Another thing is that in this extensive category there may be files with different extensions, which the system’s own tools may not support. In this situation, either players or audio editors come to the rescue. If we are talking about household appliances, some formats can be reproduced without problems on the most ordinary DVD-players.
However, the largest number of known audio types, including all PCM formats, are supported by Blue-ray players. But sometimes there is a need to edit sound files. What to do in this case?
How to edit PCM digital audio format?
It is quite natural that with the increasing capabilities of modern computers in terms of sound processing, special software products have also appeared that allow you to edit sound files of almost any known type.
All currently known programs in this direction easily work with any objects that support PCM technology, opening them in the form of the most ordinary wave. In some applications, such as Audition, when you open or save in the format field, the PCM category is selected, after which you can only work with files of certain formats.
How to change file format to PCM standard in audio editors?
As already clear, if you open a sound file in an audio editor that is not supported by the operating system or some playback device format, you can use the simplest method to convert (convert) the format.
It consists in simply saving the original audio in another desired format by selecting one from the list that you can work with in the future.
Format conversion
But you understand, when you have a huge collection of files, including thousands and tens of thousands of tracks, and even in different formats, it is better to use specialized programs (audio converters) that support batch processing of files to convert to a single type.
But in this case, it is necessary to pay attention to one significant aspect. But what if the files were recorded at different volumes, and you need to bring them to a common denominator, so to speak? Changing the level settings for each file will also be quite problematic! Here, converters come to the rescue, allowing you to "adjust" the volume of all files to any one selected template. There are a lot of such converters on the Internet. And most of them are free. But if you want to achieve maximum sound quality, you will have to work on your own, because you may need to change, say, bitrate, sample rate or audio depth. The work is painstaking, but the result, as they say, is worth the candle.
Custom Audio Types
Finally, let's see what can be done with non-PCM formats or with files that just have the .pcm extension. In principle, to work with such objects, it is best to use the same audio editors or converters with advanced features. In addition to Adobe Audition, you can offer good studios like Audacity, Sound Forge, or even some sequencers or entire virtual sound studios that support working with such objects (for example, Cubase, Sonar, Avid Pro Tools, Cockos Reaper, etc.).
In general, among musicians and sound engineers it has been unofficially believed that the optimal extension for processing digital audio on computers is still the most common WAV standard, although to many it seems somewhat outdated. By default, almost all studios and editors save the material in this format, however, the depth indicator is set at 24 or 32 bits (depending on the type of software product), the sampling frequency is at 48 or 96 kHz, and the bitrate ranges from 192 up to 320 kbps. Such inflated indicators are used only to achieve the best quality audio material after processing.