About audio formats
Installations
Installation first. There is no perfect format. Different types of audio require different approaches.
Second installation. It is impossible to do something good with poor quality.
Third installation. There are three approaches to comparing quality: the discriminating edge (heavyweights), the comforting edge (consumer audio), and the intelligibility edge.
Fourth installation. Disputes in a weight category are useless and are called “holivars”. The arguments in different weight classes are meaningless: “heavy is heavier than light” and “light is lighter than heavy.” Disputes (especially between heavyweights) can only take place with the support of the “blind method”.
A brief introduction
Bit rate is one of the most important metrics for measuring digital audio recordings. It is measured in kilobits per second (for short: kbps, just kilobits, kbps, kbps, kbps, etc.).
On the fingers: answer the question “how much memory occupies a second of audio”.
All kinds of transformations are already underway: there are eight bits in a byte, 1024 bits in a kilobit, 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and we arrive at the following empirical data:
bit rate 1400 = 1 hour takes 615 megabytes on disk
320 bitrate = 1 hour takes 141 megabytes on disk
bit rate 192 = 1 hour takes 84 megabytes on disk
bit rate 24 = 1 hour takes 11 megabytes on disk
Naturally, we all want to use disk space sparingly. This is where the format war begins. 11 MB is sixty times cheaper than 615 MB. Megabytes is the cost of storing audio recordings.
The price of storage can also be expressed in bills, dividing the cost of the disk by its capacity. For an archive of audio recordings, the storage price is far from being as critical as for an archive of video recordings.
Furthermore, the storage price can be conditionally expressed in man-hours, if the playback device has a much smaller capacity than your general archive of audio recordings. It takes time to regularly download new tracks to the device.
The storage price can also be expressed in square meters of work area. 500 audio CDs will take up a lot of space and require furniture solutions, but a small external hard drive fits in your pocket.
If there is a different price, then the question of quality arises: then we assume that the lowest bitrate has the lowest quality. So we come to the main question: where is the limit of reason, where is the ideal “price / quality” ratio.
The most approximate division of audio formats in descending order of average bitrate:
uncompressed audio
lossless compression
lossy compression
Uncompressed audio is the pure signal without conversion, “as is”, the equivalent of WAV or audio CD. Classic parameters: 1411 kbps, 44100 kHz sample rate, 16-bit audio.
Codec is an abbreviation of the words (KO der and DEC oder). An encoder is a program that packages a pure audio signal in the desired special format. A decoder is a program that converts a special format into a pure audio signal. In modern English, the two terms were transformed a bit: below code and below code, which corresponds to the direct Russian counterparts for coding and racing coding. And do not confuse encryption and encryption: these are two very different processes, although externally there is a lot of similarity.
For an ordinary person, only a player that can work with this format is required (that is, it has a decoder). The “encoder” itself is only required to “create” such files.
Lossless compression – Typically used for collectible audio material. It is generally believed that this format can be converted exactly to Audio CD.
Better is this compression:
Save disk space by about half
The file format assumes the storage of additional information (artist, album, track number, track name, etc.)
The compression formats themselves differ:
format openness and compression algorithms
player support
overhead encoding, decoding costs
compression ratio
The overhead costs are negligible for the average person and the compression ratio of the codecs differs slightly. Main actors: FLAC, APE, WAVPACK, ALAC.
Lossy Compression – Provides a much higher compression ratio by discarding unimportant audio details. The smaller the size of the file we are trying to compress, the more details we will need to discard. In addition to the disappearing details, technical artifacts also appear.
