| Sound Card: Sound cards plug into the bus slots on your motherboard, and have speaker outputs and microphone inputs on a slot on the back of the computer. Some motherboards contain built in sound, so that no expansion card is needed. As with motherboards that contain built in video, motherboards with built in sound have connectors built right into the board, which can be accessed though the back of the computer case. Sound cards typically include a "game port" that allows you to connect joysticks, MIDI musical instruments (via a specially made cable), and other game controllers to the computer. VIDEOS: sound card install, built in sound cable install, speaker cable back panel, joystick into back panel, CD ROM sound cable, CD ROM sound cable into MB (AT), CD ROM sound cable into MB (white connector) Sound cards are used to play and record sounds that are saved on disk in one of several digital formats. ".WAV" files on your hard disk, CD's, or floppies are converted, with sound software, and output through the soundcard and attached speakers. Sounds can also be input and saved on your system using recording software, your sound card, and an attached microphone. Most sound cards also have a built in "synthesizer" which can emulate the sounds of many types of instruments and sound sources. ".MID" or "MIDI" files represent sounds as a series of numbers that indicate pitch, duration, instrument, etc., and can be translated into sounds by the synthesizer on your sound card. Midi files cannot record actual sounds (like your voice saying "hello"), but they take up much less disk space than .wav files, and are most often used for game sounds and other types of background music which can be stored as MIDI information. |
