Introduction Understanding basic DSP (Digital Signal Processing) theory is really helpful to get the most of digital audio recording and processing. This series of articles is directed toward musicians and sound engineers, so, the issues will be covered mostly in a practical way, and the necessary theory will be explained as good backgrounder or just to understand the practical consequences, not to be a deep or complete reference for DSP math. The series will begin with the more basic issues, assuming that the reader doesn't know DSP theory at all, allowing anybody to follow and understand the explanations. Very often, it's difficult to understand issue A without first understanding issue B, while B cannot be fully understood without first understanding issue A, so, don't worry if you can't understand completely something, accept it as a hypothesis, and you will understand better each time as you follow the series. If you have questions, you can use the DSP theory forum...

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Recording audio on a computer places demands on the computer never anticipated by the computer's creators or operating system manufacturers. For example, if you record on a large disk formatted with FAT32 in Windows 95, Windows will format the disk with small block sizes. This is an attempt to avoid wasting space, since the entire block is consumed even if it only contains a single byte. With "normal" sized files, small block sizes mean less wasted space. With audio, however, small block sizes mean excessive reads and poor disk throughput. In a future article I will discuss the proper techniques for setting the right block sizes. For the moment I want to discuss Virtual Memory. Windows' default Virtual Memory settings are usually not good for audio. First of all, Windows likes to maintain a flexible swapfile size. This is good for typical usage because it allows Windows to increase the size of the swapfile as you load more and more programs into memory. With audio recording, however, disasterous...

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