Digital Audio Essentials
By Bruce Fries, Marty Fries
1st Edition April 2005
ISBN: 0-596-00856-2
374 pages, $34.95 US, $48.95 CA, £24.95 UK
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/digaudio/

Bruce and Marty Fries did a good job in writing this book in a fashion that is easily understood by this music fan who knew nothing about how recording techniques work. It is very well organized and caters to a wide audience from computer users who are learning new things they can do with their computer to seasoned musicians who can utilize the technology to gain widespread recognition of their art. Although most of the information is useful, the “Computer Basics” portion of Chapter 2 is very rudimentary and I believe that it should be assumed that someone working with digital audio would already know this very basic computer information.

One might argue that this book is too complete, as it spends a good amount of time explaining the devices used for digital audio, how to purchase and manage your music and the various hardware and software devices used. It really doesn’t start to get technical until you reach Chapter 8, which describes what digital audio actually is and how it differs from analog audio.

Although I found the book to be easy to understand even in the technical aspects, I did not get to the topic that I was interested in until Chapter 14, entitled “Digitizing Your Records and Tapes”. Since “ripping” CDs is a fairly straight forward task that takes about five minutes to understand, with the exception of knowing which format and bit-rate to rip the CDs to, one would not expect so much time to be spent on these basic concepts.

If you have any interest in streaming your digital music collection to the Internet, you will find Chapter 16 entitled “Setting Up an Internet Radio Station” which gives you all of the information on how the technology works and what you’ll need in order to setup your own Internet radio station. Coincidentally, O’Reilly has made this chapter available on their website at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/digaudio/chapter/ch16.pdf.

If you are a relatively new computer user and wish to learn more about your computer as well as how to bring your audio library to the digital frontier, this book is definitely for you. However, if you are looking for a book that gets to the “meat and potatoes” of digital audio, you will have to wade through a lot of information that would be irrelevant and may wish to look elsewhere.