Audio Formats: Know all that exist
There are several kinds or types of audio formats, you probably know the most common ones such as mp3, mp4, wav, etc. In this article you will know which are the most important apart from those mentioned above and how they differ from each other.
What is an audio format?
An audio format is a multimedia container where data is stored in an audio file. Each of these has its own characteristics and capabilities in terms of reproduction, they also have a sample rate (bit rate) and a specific bit depth (bit depth) that are closely related to the quality of each format.
Let’s talk about the sample rate and the bit depth
These two terms refer to the way it is stored and how an audio file is played. For this, what is sought is to digitally re-interpret the analog signal of a recording. As they have a type of continuous analog wave signal and instead the digital language used by computers is given by shorter and more concrete actions (1 and 0) executed at high speed, that continuous analog wave must be described in more values Small and concrete.
To achieve this conversion, small fragments of a specific size of the analog signal are taken, each sample (sample) contains the necessary information so that by putting all the “pieces” together and reproducing them in the same order and at the same speed in which they were captured, as a result a reliable digital interpretation of analog recording.
The frequency at which each of these samples is reproduced is what is called “sampling rate” or “sample rate” and the digital data in bits contained in each sample is called “bit depth” or “bit depth ”.
How is an audio format different from a codec?
The difference between these two is that while a codec as its name says is responsible for encoding and decoding all the information in an audio file, the format gives us the idea of how this audio information is stored, what is its bit depth, its sample rate, etc.
Types of audio formats
Among the types of audio formats there is a large amount and we will separate them into 4 groups or families to understand a little better the characteristics and potential they have:
1.Compressed audio format
The uncompressed formats allow several sample rate combinations in a flexible way and seek to preserve all the details of the analog recording even the details inaudible to our ears.
The main ones are:
WAV
Owned by IBM and Microsoft, the Wave Audio File Format was developed by these two previous ones to store sounds on the PC or computer. It is relatively similar to the Mac AIFF and a variant of the RIFF or Resource Interchange File Format which is a file format for the exchange of resources.
AIFF
The Audio Interchange File Format was co-developed by Apple Inc. to store sound data on personal computers. The AIFF is used professionally for audio applications along with SDII and WAV because it is a compression-free format and fast signal processing
AU
This format was formerly common on internet pages. At first it was encoded in 8-bit data with a sample rate of 8000 Hz, uploading in the newer files to a 32-bit encoding.
2. Compressed audio format without loss or lossless
Because the uncompressed formats encode both the sound of a recording and the silences, a few seconds of sound from an audio file will weigh the same as the same seconds of silence. The type of lossless format compresses the file so that silence does not take up almost anything in size.
Between them we have:
Shorten
The SHN format is used for lossless compression of CD quality audio files, it is similar to formats such as RAR or ZIP with the difference that it is optimized for compression of audio data.
WMA Lossless
The WMA or Windows Media Audio format is a compressed audio format which has 4 codecs of which the WMA Lossless codec allows the compression of an audio file without loss of definition.
Within the codecs for this type of audio we have:
TTA
The True Audio Codec Compresses audio in 8, 16, or 24 lossless bits that are stored in WAV format files, which is done while maintaining good operating speed.
ATRAC
Although the first version of the ATRAC codec (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) was developed as a lost audio encoder, currently the most recent version of this codec (ATRAC3) in addition to doubling the compression capacity of the first version is capable of encoding the An audio file with very few losses.
