[MPlayer-users] A question...

[Jon Larabee]

Hello all of you,

First of all, I would like to thank the entire community for hours of both
interesting commentary, helpful advice, and a product that is unrivaled
(my opinion) to any other media player out there! Secondly, I hope that I
could basically trouble you all for a little bit of help in answering a
question. Recently, I have been playing around with OSS programming in
Linux. It has gone rather well. My current problem revolves around the
format of audio know as:

AFMT_S16_LE

Which is a little endian and is defaulted to 16 bit samples. I have been
using a signed short to pull them out of a file after recording for
analyzation. This has worked quite well indeed. I have svga graphing
software I have written to handle and scale the values, it makes a pretty
picture, but unfortunatly... I am having trouble conceptionalizing what it
is supposed to mean. From the OSS site, the proposed meaning of a sample
is the volume of the signal when it is measured. The thing is... How does
one have negative volume? The threshold I imagine is zero, or is it that I
am simply looking at it wrong and that some other value is the threshold
that I should be concerned with? Is there a way I can relate this value to
frequancy? Any help anyone could offer in this direction would be most
helpful...

					Jon Larabee