Category: Audio and video

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What audio formats do you need? Part 3

 

.flac

Advantage:
– The best sound quality
– lossless compression
– additional features (built-in markup for tracks, any resolution, stream, etc.)
– free license, open source

Disadvantages:
– average file size (more than “lost”, but less than “uncompressed” formats)
– On older operating systems, you may need to download and install the player program beforehand.

To know what to use:
to listen to high-quality music, create a music library, phono archive

ogg Vorbis

A lossy compression format with slightly better sound quality than mp3, free license and additional features. The gg format was created for sound and video, in addition, it is possible to use different sound coding systems (the so-called container format). Usually ogg is used with the Vorbis encoder, which provides better sound quality than mp3 at the same bit rate. All audio examples on Wikipedia are presented in this format, as it takes up little space and follows the ideology of free software. Compatible with most Internet browsers and many players. It has proven itself at both high and low bit rates, which is important for voice transmission.

Recently, the manufacturer, the Xiph.org foundation, suggested using the new free Opus encoder instead of Vorbis, which is already supported in many browsers. If you generalize further, common users will not notice the “substitution” as the file will likely have the same extension. ogg (although there is a separate .opus extension). However, while this is a matter for the future.

ogg (Vorbis)

Advantage:
– Better quality / size ratio
– Small file size
– Free license
– Additional functions (built-in markup for tracks, any sample rate, stream, etc.)

Disadvantages:
– Average sound quality (better than mp3, but worse than “lossless” formats)
– not all players are supported yet (but almost all browsers)

What to use for:
Internet: audio samples on free sites, podcasts, broadcasts, networking projects; computer games, voice recording

wav (and aiff)

The oldest audio format that contains uncompressed audio, similar to an audio campaign disc. wav was developed by Microsoft in the early 90’s (and the aiff format was Apple in 1988). The wavyaiff formats are identical to each other, except for some technical details that are only of interest to specialists. Both formats are now compatible with Windows and Mac OS, so in general, there is absolutely no difference in their use. The only difference is that aiff allows you to store additional information. Of course, WAV and AIFF files take up a lot of disk space, so it’s not worth storing your music library in these formats or using them to send them over the Internet.

However, wav (and aiff) have an advantage over compression formats. The fact is that when compressed formats are played, the player decompresses them on the fly, which requires additional processor resources. While listening to music, it does not matter, the processor load is still very low. But when working with sound in real time (complex sound processing, creating sound collages, improvisation, sampling, etc.), this can be significant. Therefore, it makes sense to store short sounds in uncompressed formats, intended to continue working with them, for example, sound effects.

.wav (and .aiff)

Advantage:
– The best sound quality
– the most economical use of the processor during playback
– compatible with most programs and devices

Disadvantages:
– large file size

What to use for:
processing, real-time sound manipulation, storing short sounds

How to play all these files and how to convert music to them?

play

As mentioned above, now there is no problem to play any of these formats on a computer and phone. Windows Media Player and iTunes play flac, wav, mp3; Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera (including their mobile versions) and many other browsers support all four formats in some way.

However, for convenience, versatility, and to avoid any pitfalls, we recommend installing a proven (and, of course, free) player that plays all formats correctly.

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Mp4Gain Main Window


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What audio formats do you need? Part 2

Hence, mankind started looking for a way to reduce file size without reducing sample rate and bit depth.

Compression with loss of sound quality

As a result of the research, it was found that human perception “skips” some sounds and their individual components, and if they are removed from the sound stream, the listener will not notice anything. Thanks to an algorithm that discards the “unnecessary”, it was possible to achieve impressive file size compression rates: 10 times and more! However, it turned out that the human brain “is not dumb” and understands that something is wrong with sound. Lossy compression gives a flatter, “cardboard” sound, lost transparency, sound details, a sense of space.

The bit rate, which is set by the creator of the sound file, plays an important role. For lossy compression, the higher the bit rate, the better the sound quality, but also the larger the file size. About 15 years ago, most music listeners were satisfied with the bit rate of MP3 files – 128-192 kbps (ten times) compression. Recently, there has been a tendency to prefer higher bit rates (256-320 kbps) or other formats (.ogg, .opus). Advanced compression algorithms use a variable bit rate: more bits are allocated for more complex musical pieces and less for lighter pieces, maintaining more or less the same quality at different moments of the sound.

Lossless compression

To avoid quality degradation, lossless audio compression methods have been developed as an alternative to lossy compression. Such compression is similar to archiving: when the data is packed into an archive, a file in zip, rar, etc. format, the size of which is smaller than the original data. It can then be unpacked and the original data will be accurately restored to the last bit. But conventional archiving methods produce very little compression of the audio data. Therefore, special algorithms for sound began to be developed, based on the idea of ​​predictability, self-similarity of sound waves. These algorithms usually compress a file 2 to 3 times. The resulting file size is larger than lossy compression, but still fully retains the original quality.

Lossless audio files (such as .flac) can be played without first unpacking – the audio player unzips the file during playback (the same is true for lossy files, however).
Unlike “lossy” formats, the bit rate isn’t that important here: it changes all the time depending on how much you’ve managed to compress a particular piece of sound, and of course it doesn’t affect the quality.

Audio file formats

To reiterate our original thesis, you only need four audio formats for all possible purposes. Consider them!

mp3

The most popular audio format with the worst sound quality. Lossy compression format.

As a step?

mp3 is historically the first audio compression format. It appeared and spread in those distant times, when the memory of computers was scarce and the Internet was accessed by telephone calls. Digital sound as such was still a novelty and existed alongside analog cassettes. The alternative to mp3 was just uncompressed sound (wav …), which takes up large amounts of data. Users were inspired by the very ability to burn all of their favorite artist’s albums to CD-ROM or send a song via email. At the time, undemanding consumers paid no heed to the voices of skeptics. So mp3 soon became the most widely used audio storage format.

[“I don’t hear the difference between mp3 and non-mp3 quality.” ]

.mp3

Advantage:
– Support for the maximum number of programs and devices
– Small file size

Disadvantages:
– Poor sound quality
– Limited technical capabilities

What to use for:
to listen to “drafts”, for preliminary screenings, “fast” delivery of demos over the Internet, rehearsals, official purposes, for voice recording

flac

flac is a lossless audio compression format, the most popular among its “siblings”. Compresses the file size, depending on the complexity of the audio information, between 1.4 and 4 times (the bit rate varies from 350 to 1010 kbps). Its prevalence was facilitated by open source code, which made it possible to create a large number of programs that work with it on all operating systems. Flac spread it so widely that even “brontosaurs” like Apple and Microsoft resigned themselves to its existence.

What audio formats do you need?

You are a music lover or a professional musician, or you simply use music for some of your own purposes (performances, dances, videos …), but you are not well versed in all these “computer” things: formats, files, bitrates, extensions … This article is for you …

The content is brief: of all the variety of audio formats, you need four:
1) for high-quality listening, a music library;
2) for “fuzzy” listening service purposes;
3) “for Wikipedia”;
4) for real-time audio processing.

Which ones, why and what to do about it – read below!

Digital sound
Audio Pixels Audio
compressed and uncompressed

To understand how one format differs from another, let’s briefly understand what
it is digital sound.

Sound “pixels”

You have surely seen an image of a sound wave (for example, in a sound editing program). Like any image, a sound graphic can be recorded digitally by dividing it into many small “pixel” parts. The smaller the pixels, the more horizontally and vertically, the better the image.

Only in the case of sound, horizontally, we plot the time axis and vertically, the value of the signal (in real sound propagating through the air, the value of the signal is the change in air pressure). Each second of sound is divided into many smaller identical time intervals, in each of which a signal value is recorded. The number of these segments per second is called the sampling frequency …. And the number of possible gradations of the signal value is determined by the bit depth; This parameter indicates how many bits are used to record a signal value: the more bits that are used, the more gradations of the value can be recorded. For example, our figure shows a bit width of 4 bits, which gives 2 4 = 16 value gradations.

Digital recording of a sound wave. The green curve is the original sound, the purple bars are its digital recording as separate signal values.

As a result of digital rendering, the sound wave looks like this:

Digital-sound-image__presentation_2.png

Digital representation of a sound wave.

This is of course a very rough “drawing”, but if you use a higher sample rate and bit depth you can make the “pitch” invisible to our ears (just like very small pixels are invisible for the eye).

The sample rate of an audio CD is 44,100 hertz (signal values ​​per second) = 44.1 kHz (kilohertz). This is sufficient to encode all frequencies audible to the human ear. And its capacity is 16 bits, which allows to transmit 2 16 = 65,536 gradations of signal values.

Experts discuss whether you need a higher resolution for high-quality sound. Indirect evidence suggests yes. Hence, there is digital sound with higher sample rates (48, 96, 192, 384 kHz) and bit depths (24, 32 bits). This high resolution supports DVD Audio, many types of files (flac, wav, aiff …), some cinema sound formats (Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio …).

Uncompressed and compressed audio bit rate

However, even an audio CD takes up a lot of space. This is shown by the bit rate parameter (bit rate, data rate, kbit / s): it indicates how many bits (kilobits) are required to record 1 second of sound. For uncompressed “normal” sound, it is very easy to find out the bit rate: you need to multiply the bit depth (number of bits times 1 signal value) by the sample rate (number of values ​​per second) and by the number of sound channels (let’s not forget that stereo sound has two sound channels, left and right, in each of which the sound wave is recorded separately).

Using our figure, the bitrate can be represented symbolically as follows:

Digital-sound-image__presentation_3.png

Uncompressed audio bit rate (blue area)

It is easy to calculate that the bit rate of an audio CD is

16 bits × 44 100 Hz × 2 channels = 1,411,200 bps = 1,411.2 kbps.

This is usually true for uncompressed audio file formats (wav, aiff).
So one second of uncompressed sound takes approx. 172 KB, one minute – 10 MB, one hour of music occupies 606 MB, the total sound volume of an audio CD is 74 minutes, ie approx. 750 MB.

[How do we calculate this? ]

Hence, mankind started looking for a way to reduce file size without reducing sample rate and bit depth.

Audio Formats for High Quality Sound – Part 2

Audio formats

FLAC
Free lossless audio codec. Its advantage is its great popularity, almost like MP3.

The compression ratio is up to 60% of the original file.
Compatible with most software platforms and devices.
It can be a profitable alternative when it comes to burning CDs. Almost indistinguishable in sound, but the advantage of saving almost half the disk space.

A THE C
Format for owners of Apple-branded devices, as others may not be supported.

Slightly less good than FLAC in terms of compression ratio.

But Apple owners simply have no other choice: the free FLAC format does not work in principle on iOS and iTunes.

Lossless WMA
An improved version of the aforementioned WMA. Slightly lower than FLAC and ALAC. It has a significant advantage over ALAC, as WMA is compatible with Windows and Mac.

However, it is not very widespread, so if you have many different devices in use, there is likely an incompatibility.

Verdict
Well, we have considered all the most famous, widespread and having the best audio formats and briefly talked about the characteristics of their use.

So now you can confidently decide in which case and in what format it is best to convert your sound recordings, music and audiobooks.

Audio formats for high quality sound

This includes uncompressed formats.

PCM – Pulse Code Modulation. The original analog audio is sampled as is, without any modification.
PCM is the most common audio recording format used on CDs and DVDs. Dolby multi-channel, surround, subject to high-quality speakers, sounding almost one-to-one with a live performance.

If you like to sit in front of a home theater and immerse yourself in empathy for the main and supporting characters in the movie, this is it.

Wav
A fairly old format, developed as early as 1991. Well, that’s how the old masters always thought of high quality.

Many people consider WAV to be an uncompressed format. But in fact it is a container and it can also contain compressed files.

In most cases, WAV contains uncompressed PCM audio. Therefore, the quality is high. But even for one minute of recording, approximately 32MB of memory is wasted.

Fairly good compatibility with Windows and Mac.

AIFF
An analog of WAV from Apple developers. This is also a container and usually contains sound in PCM format as well. Good compatibility with Windows.

Lossy compressed audio formats
Truly popular formats for everyone.

MP3
In accordance with the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 standard. It appeared in 1993 and instantly won universal love precisely because of its economy in memory consumption.

A CD can store the complete discography of your favorite band.
Throw some records in the glove compartment and you can enjoy music from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.
During this time, you can listen to all the books by all the writers worth listening to.
The MP3 format is such a solid eunuch, from which all the most reluctant cut, but began to show the ability to accumulate and save. Also, MP3 is a very inexpensive format.

The main advantage is that he leans on everything that he just plays and sings.

CAA
An advanced form of audio encoding. The younger but advanced brother of MP3. It has slightly improved sound characteristics and a higher compression ratio.

Applies to Android, iOS, iTunes, YouTube, Nintendo, and the latest PlayStation.

It is also a folk format, but for a little more advanced people. Which is reflected in the title.

OGG
In general, this is not a format, but a container, and in fact the name OGG says nothing about the sound it contains.

However, most of the time it contains the Vorbis codec.

Significantly improved sound quality relative to other lossy compression formats.
Smaller files can be recorded with the same sound quality.
An even cheaper format than MP3.

The problem is that the OGG format is free, so nobody invests in its promotion. Therefore, it may not be compatible everywhere and incompatibilities may arise.

Then you have to convert to MP3.

WMA
Microsoft’s proprietary format, therefore, although it is an improved version of MP3 and OGG, has not received widespread use and is not compatible with most devices and platforms.

Advice. If it is possible to use WMA instead of MP3, use the former. Cheaper and more pleasant to the ear.

Lossless compressed audio formats
Lossless compressed audio formats
For owners of advanced and expensive devices, branded desktops and mobiles, with high-quality headphones and speakers.

The downside to these formats is that file sizes of the same recording length will be roughly two to three times larger.

However, although lossless compression is stated, it should not be confused with high-fidelity audio recordings. There are minimal losses, although notable only for musicians.

Audio formats, advantages

As actual field studies have shown, a good idea to rank the top ten audio formats turned out to be an impossible task at first.

Competition conditions too different for unequal participants. Also, some corruption schemes or lobbyists of transnational corporations in the field of audio recording interfere in our good cause of helping people to choose the best sound product.

The most popular MP3 format in the world reached the leaders of popular love solely because of the multi-million dollar investment in promotion. And if you take the sound quality, then regular. And even in terms of compression and disk space savings, it’s not the highest compression either.

Therefore, a compromise decision was made: divide the test subjects into three groups and compare and identify the leaders by groups.

Three types of audio formats
No compression.
Lossless compression.
Lossy compression.
Uncompressed audio recording formats show their best performance only on high-quality professional audio equipment.

If you have an inexpensive tablet or smartphone in your hands, then wonderful music will play on your device, but you will not listen to it simply because the hardware and software resource and the speakers or headphones are not capable of reproducing such high sound quality. .

On the other hand, if you start MP3 sound recording through professional stereos and amplifiers, you will hear such noise and rattle from the speakers that, again, this type of use is completely pointless.

Audio Classification by Type of Sound Reproduction Equipment
For professional equipment, uncompressed audio formats.
For semi-professional teams, compressed audio formats. But without loss.
For inexpensive equipment: lossy and compressed audio formats.
In the first case, the hardware is so expensive that it is ridiculous to worry about saving money on media.

In the second case, the owner of an Apple device for a thousand dollars will obviously also be able to call himself to spend a couple of hundred dollars on a bulky memory.

In the third case, since it has hardly been possible to raise money for a cheap smartphone, saving on the size of the stored music is very important. Well, no one is going to listen to a symphony orchestra in Hi-Fi on the phone anyway. Unless you can download a ringtone from the classics to make a joke look like a fresh bell pepper in the eyes of tomatoes.