Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) is a standard interface for connecting storage devices such as hard disks and CD-ROM drives inside personal computers.
The standard is maintained by X3/INCITS committee T13. Many synonyms and near-synonyms for ATA exist, including abbreviations such as IDE and ATAPI. Also, with the market introduction of Serial ATA in 2003, the original ATA was retroactively renamed Parallel ATA (PATA).
In line with the original naming, this article covers only Parallel ATA.
Parallel ATA standards allow cable lengths up to only 18 inches (46 centimetres) although cables up to 36 inches (91 cm) can be readily purchased. Because of this length limit, the technology normally appears as an internal computer storage interface. It provides the most common and the least expensive interface for this application.
A Synthesizer is generally any kind of electronic musical instrument, or electronic device capable of producing or manipulating audio tones, such as musical notes, through audio signal processing.
Synthesizers work by manipulating electrical signals which appear as sound when they are used to drive audio amplifiers. These tones are generated by electrical circuits which may work by manipulating a signal through a series of oscillators and filters in an analog circuit (as in analog synthesizers), or may perform mathematical manipulation of signals using a microprocessor and digital signal processing (as in digital synthesizers), or by a combination of both methods. Synthesized sounds may sound dramatically different than recordings of natural sounds, though sampling synthesizers significantly blur this distinction.
