Audicom was the first system in the world to record and play audio from a PC computer, beginning in 1988 the era of digital recording that would eliminate recorders from magnetic and cassette tape used for half a century.
Invention
This technology was created in Argentina by a group of engineers led by Oscar Bonello, professor at the University of Buenos Aires, who began in 1982 to develop the idea of the digital recording on hard disk. This invention has changed the way we today record and reproduce sound or listen to it via streaming.
The Audicom required the creation of a data compression technology that could reduce the size of digital audio files. This technology now named Perceptual Coding is the core of all the systems that we use every day to hear music using audio streaming. From his experience in the field of Psychoacoustics, Bonello considered that the solution to reduce digital data would be to transmit only a small fraction of it, selected to achieve masking of critical ear bands prevent noticing the absence of the missing information. This is a property of the human ear, known for many years, but without practical applications and which was used for the first time in this field. This idea was the forerunner of other forms of compression that appeared later such as MP3, AAC, Opus, etc. that were based exactly on the same principle of psychoacoustics. It was also necessary to invent the world's first audio card to be able to faithfully record and reproduce audio in the 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz range.
The development team included several engineers, including Ricardo Sidoti and Elio Demaria, who made the hardware including the programmable logic gates. In turn, the driver and the user application were developed by Gustavo Pesci.
Later, Sebastian Ledesma was added to the group, author of all the modern versions starting with Audicom 5. He used algorithms of artificial intelligence, to carry out the proposed technology of Bonello of an AutoDJ music scheduling system that works with the perfection of the best human DJ creating exact time blocks, previously impossible in broadcasting programs.
This invention was immediately applied in radio stations, sound systems, recording studios and sound in shows, achieving an immediate impact on audio engineering and even in journalistic media.
The development was carried out in Solidyne, a private company that paid for the costs of this project for 5 years. But the company understood that this invention was too important for millions of people to use it freely and decided not to apply for invention patents. To avoid future discussions about this invention and in order to give constancy of their existence as a commercial product of free availability, Solidyne published a note in the international edition of AES Journal that was the first offer of a product capable of recording and reproducing audio digitally from a standard PC.
The release of patents allowed the rapid spread of audio recording and playback on PCs and later cell phones around the world.
The first PC Radio Automation System
The first application of recording and playback on PC was in the automation of AM and FM radio stations. For this, an automation software was developed for music themes and commercial ads that was presented the following year, in 1989, in the Golden Room of the Argentine Communications Secretariat, today the CFK Cultural Center, before the press and the engineers of the broadcasting stations.
In 1990 it was featured at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters ) Exhibition in Atlanta, USA.
It was the only system of its kind at the exhibition and prompted the NAB president to comment: "This is not just a new technology; it is the re-invention of the Radio ..."
The Audicom was made up of user software that ran on an IBM PC and an audio card with hardware compression as it took many years for a PC to have the computing power necessary to process the audio data compression algorithms. Obviously, since there are no audio cards on the market, there were no manufacturers of integrated circuits for that task. The Audicom board was then designed using CMOS logic chips and performed hardware data compression in real time.