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Music Technology & Home Recording Glossary JK

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"Jack" plug: - Very popular form of audio connector, available in stereo or mono formats. A full sized Jack plug has a spur of a quarter of an inch, but there are also smaller "mini" jack plugs.

JACK: Commonly used audio connector. May be mono or stereo.

JARGON: Specialised words associated with a specialist subject.

Jitter: - A form of digital distortion caused by a very slight imprecision of digital sampling times (when sound is recoded digitally, it is done by "slicing" the signal into many segments, see Sample for a further explaination), leading to amplitude (signal level) errors. The distortion is more pronounced at the higher end of the frequency spectrum. Jitter also refers to timing errors where the word clock is an embedded part of the datastream (self-clocking).

Just Intonation: A system of tuning in which the distances between pitches are based on the natural harmonic series instead of the octave being equally divided.

k: - Prefix, an abbreviation of kilo or 1000, eg kiloHertz / kHz - 1000 Hertz, kiloByte / kB - 1000 bytes (oop's! sorry, that one's 1024 but you know what I mean!).

kbps - "kilobytes per second", a measurement that is used to judge the size of an audio file. Uncompressed audio such as WAV format is 1411 kbps, MP3 compresses this size to about 1/10 on average (varies depending on user settings when encoding)

Keyboard Assignment: The assignment of specific sounds to an area of the keyboard. For example, the lowest octave could be drum sounds, the next octave could be an electric bass, the rest of the keyboard could have various piano samples assigned to it.

KEYBOARD SPLIT- a setup of a keyboard where different notes trigger different sounds. Also known as zoning.

Keygrouping: - see Sample (Multisampling) .

kHz: 1000Hz