Just wondering if anyone here can point me to some good books on sound in general and others that relate more to a musical standpoint (i.e. mixing/mastering etc). I'm interested in both the low-level mathematics/physics type stuff (i.e. wave processing) and also in the high-level recording/mixing aspect. I guess you could say (in terms of lower level knowledge) I need to accumulate enough skills that I could potentially code my own filters and effects. On the other hand, the mixing/recording type stuff I was after is more to improve my own recordings/mixes as well as to understand better how professional engineers work things out. I've browsed Amazon but I'm not really sure if the books I've seen are really appropriate for what I require. Damn shame I can't find a feasible p/t evening course in Audio Engineering in my neck of the woods either (though a course may well be overkill for my needs)!!! Anyway help is much appreciated.

As far as mixing is concerned you will learn most of the things in Internal Mixing Volume 1 and 2 from Steinberg.

Here's a link : http://www.arbiter.co.uk/steinberg/products/internal_mixing_tutorial_dvd.htm

I'm giving you this instead of a book, because you will learn much more information by seeing AND listening, not only reading. Plus, the teacher and the whole package is of top quality.

For mastering, there is a similar package :
http://www.arbiter.co.uk/steinberg/products/audio_mastering_tutorial_dvd.htm


I would first recommend you buy the necessary monitors and then continue on with the mixing steps.

As for mastering, unless you're dead-dead-dead serious, I would recommend you just leave it to the pro's who have the necessary equipment and years of expertise. Mastering is unfortunately something that cannot be done by an amateur, only pseudo-mastering, a poor one.

Thanks, Vitali. Those DVDs look really good.
But yeah... Definitely I'd still leave most mixing/mastering to professionals. I'm not looking at trying to necessarily replicate what they do... I'm just after a good understanding and at least a reasonable ability to do that kind of work from a personal standpoint... like to the point where I could have a discussion on the workings of these things with them without feeling like a complete dunce :P

Hmm... anybody know any books on the low-level stuff?

Actually, these dvd's cover all the basic stuff about mixing. If you are really interested, then you should also buy monitors and not use consumer speakers for mixing. The whole point of mixing is for your music to sound as good as it comes to every music system, the car, your hifi, the radio etc.

As for music theory, I found a free ebook with the basic stuff.

http://www.questionsink.com/Books/FreeBMT.html

This is the first part, and there are several more for free.
http://www.questionsink.com/PDFs/BMT/Part%201.pdf

Oops, I think I should've described what I was after in terms of 'low-level' a little better. My actual music theory (in terms of scales, modes etc) is all fairly decent.

More what I'm after is something to describe the makeup of sound in terms of the waves (i.e. which would of course involve a lot of mathematics/physics as I do remember doing some of this in high school and uni... lots of integration to 'decompose' a wave into its simplist parts if I remember correctly).
Then from there, I'm interested in such things as (for example) being able to perhaps detect the pitch (automatically via a program I write) of a given, basic sound wave... like for example I could perhaps write a guitar tuner program that listens to incoming audio from a given input, examines the raw sound data and then determines what note is being played (and how flat/sharp it is).

So I'm not really sure where exactly I should be looking for that... like I'm assuming the content would be more maths/physics related than strictly (or even loosely) 'music' related (which makes me wonder if I should've posted the 'mixing/mastering' questions here and the other stuff in the maths/physics forum :P).

But if anyone in this forum can help me out on this one, that'd be much appreciated.

And much thanks Vitali for the suggestions you've given already.