How It Works

Pro Tools records digital audio and MIDI data and provides software tools for editing both. It’s important to have a clear understanding of the differences between the two types of data.

Digital Audio Data Represents Audio Waveforms

In digital-audio recording, an input signal from an analog source (a varying voltage from a microphone or other device) arrives at an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter (often abbreviated as ADC). This converter periodically measures the level (amplitude) of the incoming audio signal and stores a numerical value representing this measurement in a file or encodes it onto a tape. This is the digitizing process, where a continuous, real-world phenomenon is converted into a series of numbers (samples) at a fixed rate over time. When audio is recorded digitally, the continuous variations of the audio waveform are captured at a fixed resolution, converted into a series of numbers, and then saved within a file.