Introduction to various conventional audio encodings (or formats)
1.PCM encoding
PCM Pulse Code Modulation is short for Pulse Code Modulation. In the text above, we mentioned the general PCM workflow. We don’t need to care which calculation method is used in the final PCM encoding. We just need to know the advantages and disadvantages of the PCM encoded audio stream. The biggest advantage of PCM encoding is good sound quality and the biggest disadvantage is its large size. Our common audio CD uses PCM encoding, and the capacity of one CD can only hold 72 minutes of music information.
2. WAVE
This is an old audio file format, developed by Microsoft. WAV is a file format that complies with the PIFF Resource Interchange File Format specification. All WAVs have a file header, the encoding parameters of this file header audio stream. WAV does not have strict rules for encoding audio streams. In addition to PCM, almost all encodings that support the ACM specification can encode WAV audio streams. Many friends do not have this concept. Let’s take AVI as an example, because AVI and WAV are very similar in file structure, but AVI has one more video stream. There are many types of AVIs we have come into contact with, so we often need to install some decoders to watch some AVIs. DivX, which we have come into contact with a lot, is a type of video encoding. AVI can use DivX encoding to compress video streams, of course, we can also use other code compression. Similarly, WAV can also use a variety of audio codecs to compress its audio stream, but we commonly use WAV whose audio stream is processed by PCM encoding, but this does not mean that WAV can only use PCM codec, it is also you can use MP3 codec. in WAV Just like AVI, as long as the corresponding Decode is installed, you can enjoy these WAVs.
On the Windows platform, WAV based on PCM encoding is the best supported audio format. All audio software can support it perfectly. Because it can meet higher sound quality requirements, WAV is also the preferred format for music creation and editing. Suitable for storing musical material. Therefore, WAV based on PCM encoding is used as an intermediate format, and is often used in the mutual conversion of other encodings, such as MP3 to WMA.
