Lossless formats: flac, ape, wv, dts, and other digital audio formats
Recently, in the open spaces of the Russian Internet, music in Lossless formats has been found more and more often, which can not fail to delight connoisseurs of free real quality. But sadly, files with the flac, ape, wv, dts permission cause a “RAM” stupor for a common user and he walks in search of his usual mp3. Well what can I say, Epic Fail, comrades?
This guide provides a detailed description of lossless formats and describes in detail how to read and write such files …
Theory: lossless formats
Lossless data compression is an information compression method, whereby encoded information can be retrieved with bit precision. This fully recovers the original data from the compressed state. This type of compression is diametrically different from lossy data compression. As a general rule, each type of digital information has its own lossless compression algorithms.
FLAC and APE codecs are the main Lossless formats today
FLAC (English Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a popular free codec for audio compression. Unlike the lossy Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and AAC codecs, it does not remove any information from the audio stream and is suitable for both daily listening and archiving an audio collection. Today, the FLAC format is compatible with many audio applications.
Monkey’s Audio (APE) is a popular lossless digital audio encoding format. It is distributed free of charge along with open source code and a suite of encoding and playback software, as well as plugins for popular players. Monkey’s audio files use the following extensions: .ape to store audio and .apl to store metadata. Despite being open source, Monkey’s Audio is not free, as its license imposes significant restrictions on its use.
After downloading music on Lossless, you can burn it to CD in the future and listen to it with Hi-Fi (or other) class acoustics, while normal CD quality will be.
For comparison, bitrate:
-mp3 ~ 320 kb / s
-FLAC and APE ~ 1000 kb / s
Theory:
SACD, DVD-Audio, DTS-CD and others multi-channel music formats.
SACD stands for Super Audio Compact Disc, an optical disc format for storing music. It looks like a normal CD, some discs can be seen with the naked eye: their working side is yellow. The sound in SACD is recorded in a completely different format: DSD (Direct Stream Digital) and they are reproduced only in special players.
features:
– Multichannel: 6 channels of audio can be recorded
– A completely different type of recording (DSD), which provides better sound quality compared to a CD.
– Conditional compatibility with older players: there can be two layers to a disc: normal CD (stereo) and one or two SACD variants (stereo / multichannel).
That is, if the disk:
Single Layer (“Single Layer”) – Read-only on SACD players.
Double Layer or “Hybrid” (“Double Layer” or “Hybrid”): Read on both conventional CD players and SACD players.
All SACDs have CD text – text information about album, artist, and track.
