Audio File Formats - MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
1,066 words · ~5 min read
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get your 160k Aug vorbis on Spotify get
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your 256 AC on iTunes get your lossless
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Flack on title well if you're one of the two dozen people that has a title
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subscription that is boy if you're into music it might seem like there are just
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way too many audio formats to choose from can't we all just use MP3 no no we
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can't there's a very good reason for all of the madness different audio formats
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make things more optimized for different types of users electronic music artists
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home theater enthusiasts or just straight up bass
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heads let's start by looking at common formats used by average listeners MP3
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AAC and vorbis these all store audio
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using lossy compression which means these formats are often defined by the
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fact that they discard some information from the original audio Source well hold
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on now is is that like an MP3 of Don't Fear the Reaper doesn't include the
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cowbell I got to have more cowbell not exactly you see most people simply can't
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hear much of the information in the uncompressed audio files you'd find on a
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retail CD we're talking sounds that are
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so low in volume so high in pitch or so
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close in time to other sounds that the vast vast majority of people can hardly
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perceive them so lossy formats just cut them out
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oh and they also save space by using a different bit rate you see when a song
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gets digitally recorded in a studio the recording equipment takes samples of the
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analog sound waves coming out of a guitar or a singer's mouth and stores
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them as digital bits just standard ones
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and zeros on an uncompressed CD the audio you hear is typically stored at a
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bit rate of 1,411 kilobits per second but lossy
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compression discards a lot of these bits to make the file often many times
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smaller for example a 4minute uncompressed song that takes up about 42
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megabytes would only be about 8
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megabytes as a relatively high quality 256 kilobits per second MP3 and although
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MP3 is probably the most familiar lossi
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format others are widely used for different reasons such as AAC which
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pitches higher quality at lower bit rates due to to a fancy compression
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algorithm and Aug vorbis which is completely open source and patent-free
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unlike MP3 but some folks aren't satisfied with the level of quality you
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get with lossi audio especially audio
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files who want to get the most out of their high-end headphones and speakers
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and instead they turn to formats like flak or AAC which offer lossless
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compression these files contain all of the original audio data but with smaller
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file sizes if that sounds like magic
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it's not lossless compression is accomplished by looking for ways to more
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efficiently store redundant data so this string would be expressed this way
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instead and by predicting what sound
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should come next lossless codec can store only the difference between the
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predicted data and the actual data which takes up much less space and because
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formats like flak and AAC are specifically designed for audio they can
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compress sound Clips much more than general purpose compression schemes like
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Zip in fact a typical audio file with
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lossless compression will only take up about half as much space as an
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uncompressed equivalent and if you're wondering about the difference between
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flak and AAC you'll need to use the ladder if you want to listen to lossless
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music in iTunes and yeah that's about it but
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there are also other lossless codecs like Dolby true HD and D TSH HD Master
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audio for both home theaters and commercial multiplexes that have proved
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popular with movie studios so look out for these logos when you're out buying
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Blu-rays if you're a home theater Enthusiast even more interesting is
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Dolby Atmos which incord each sound in a movie soundtrack spatially meaning it
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can scale to a huge number of speakers because the audio is mapped in space
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instead of being coded for just one speaker you can learn more about that
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right up here but despite the popularity of compressed formats keeping audio in
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uncompressed form does have its advantages uncompressed files stored in
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wave or AF format are not only compatible across a huge range of
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devices because they undergo very minimal processing from the original
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audio signal but they also contain all
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of the information that was originally converted from analog to digital they're
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easier for audio editors and creators to fine-tune as much as they'd like all of
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that being said at the end of the day if you just like listening to music pick a
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format that you think sounds good or whatever the format the music already
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comes in and be sure not to judge other people too harshly because their library
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is full of 128 kilobyte rips from
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