The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording.
Digital recording
The invention of digital sound recording and the compact disc in 1983 brought massive improvements in the durability and sound quality of consumer recordings. The CD initiated another massive wave of change in the consumer music industry, with vinyl records effectively relegated to a small niche market by the mid-1990s.

The most recent and revolutionary developments have been in digital recording, with the invention of purely electronic consumer recording formats such as the WAV digital music file and the compressed file type, the MP3. This generated a new type of portable solid-state computerised digital audio player, the MP3 player. The most popular variety is the Apple iPod. Another invention, by Sony, was the minidisc player, using ATRAC compression on small, cheap, re-writeable discs. This was in vogue in the 1990s, and is still popular, especially in a newer, longer playing and higher fidelity version. New technologies such as Super Audio CD and DVD-A continue to set very hi-fi digital standards.

This technology spreads across various associated fields, from Hi-Fi to Professional audio, Internet radio and Podcasting.

Technological developments in recording and editing have transformed the record, movie and television industries in recent decades. Audio editing became practicable with the invention of magnetic tape recording, but the use of computers has made editing operations faster and easier to execute, and the use of hard-drives for storage has made recording cheaper. We now divide the process of making a recording into tracking, mixing and mastering. Multitrack recording makes it possible to capture sound from several microphones, or from different 'takes' to tape or disc with maximum headroom and quality, allowing maximum flexibility in the mixing and mastering stages for editing, level balancing, compressing and limiting, and the addition of effects such as reverberation, equalisation, flanging and many more.

The first multitrack recording made using magnetic tape was "How High the Moon" by Les Paul, on which Paul played eight overdubbed guitar tracks. In the 1960s Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and The Beatles (with producer George Martin) were among the first popular artists to explore the possibilities of multitrack techniques and effects on their landmark albums Pet Sounds, Freak Out! and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

In the 1920s, the first talkies came out, featuring the new sound-on-film technology which used photoelectric cells to record and reproduce sound signals that were optically recorded directly onto the movie film. The advent of talkies, spearheaded by The Jazz Singer in 1927, saw the rapid demise of live cinema musicians and orchestras, which were replaced with pre-recorded soundtracks, causing the loss of many jobs.[1] The American Federation of Musicians took out ads in newspapers, protesting the replacement of real musicians with mechanical playing devices, especially in theatres.