Category: Bit rate

What does the quality of the audio or video depend on?

What factors are crucial for a higher or lower quality in digital files?

Files like WAV are not compressed, but they take up a lot of space and contain a lot of inaudible and unnecessary information.

This forced them to look for ways to be able to compress this audio or video to save space and so that they were also lighter to watch or listen to live on sites like YouTube or Spotify, etc.

Let’s see what are the important parameters:

1.- Bit Rate

It is the bit transfer rate. Said in an easy to understand way, it is the amount of information that can be transmitted per second. It is obvious that the more information that can be transmitted, the greater the detail and therefore the greater the quality.

Sometimes the transfer rate is fixed (CBR) but it can also be variable. Where the bitrate chosen for each moment will depend on the amount of information needed.

An audio with a lot of silence and few sounds will need to transfer much less information per second than an audio full of sounds and nuances.

2.- Sampling rate

The amount of information per second that is sampled will mark the number of details that are captured and can be transmitted.

But obviously also the higher the sampling rate, the greater the information contained.

Therefore, we see as a very simplified summary that a higher quality requires greater detail and therefore better information stored and a higher speed of transmission of that information.

Therefore higher bitrate and higher samplerate will usually mean higher quality, and will also take up more space.

Which is better, MP3, FLAC or WAV? Part 2

The right audio file format can do more with less

M4A

M4A is a format compatible with Apple products such as iPhone and iPod, and corresponds to MPEG-4 video files. M4A files have lossless compression and can be edited multiple times without quality loss. Compared to other audio file formats, M4A has similar quality but smaller file size.

CCA

Like MP3, Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) files are also lossy formats. However, AAC files are of much higher quality in their original state than all other audio file formats, and AAC files are generally similar in size to MP3, but slightly higher in quality.

In addition, AAC also offers variable bitrate or constant bitrate encoding, and AAC files are also open source, which means you don’t have to pay royalties to create and share them (unlike MP3 files). .

AAC files are usually used in iTunes, but can also be used in other player devices and game consoles.

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OGA

Like AAC, OGA files are open source and use lossy compression. They use a variable bit rate to reduce file size without reducing the overall sound quality. In practice, OGA files tend to be of higher quality than MP3s, but many programs don’t support OGA.

FLAC

Like M4A, FLAC is a lossless format, but unlike M4A, FLAC is an open source encoding and has a more efficient compression algorithm that reduces the file to 50% to 70% of its original size. This format is popular with audiophiles as a way to collect music in its highest quality form. Because it is open source, it is compatible with many devices and programs.

PCM, WAV and AIFF

PCM (Pulse-Code Modulation) is an uncompressed audio file format commonly used on CDs and DVDs. This format uses a “sample rate” and a “bit depth”, where the sample rate represents the sample rate of the original audio file and the bit depth represents how many bits are used to define each sample.

WAV (Waveform Audio File Format) is generally used as a format for storing PCM audio files, which makes it more suitable for Windows computers.

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format, Audio Interchange File Format) like WAV is commonly used to store audio files in PCM format (except Mac).

How to choose the correct audio file format

Choosing the right format completely depends on the audio file you intend to use, you should choose a format that expresses the sound quality of the desired audio file, unnecessary high quality audio files can be difficult to move, share, convert and manage . Consider the following two cases:

If you plan to edit audio files (such as podcasts), use uncompressed formats (including PCM, WAV, and AIFF) so that the quality of the audio files is maintained each time you edit and save the file. Once completed, it can be generated in a compressed format that is easy to share.
If you are an audiophile and want to listen to your music in high fidelity, choose a lossless compressed file format, including FLAC, WMA, M4A. It uses less storage space than uncompressed formats, but still retains the original full file quality.
If you don’t care about the quality of audio files, want to share files on the Internet, or need to save hard disk space, choose a format that uses lossy audio file compression, including MP3, OGA, AAC. Fortunately, lossy compression has gotten so good in recent years that most people can’t tell the difference between lossy and lossless compression.
In conclusion

In summary, the most popular types of audio files are:

MP3
M4A
CAA
OGA
FLAC
WAV
PCM
AIFF
In some cases it is better to use one file format than the other, in which case you should convert between the two file formats. To programmatically convert between audio or video file types, you can use Filestack’s Audio Transcoding API or Video Transcoding API. The Filestack API also supports splitting audio files from video files, cropping or resizing video files, video file thumbnails, and more.

What is the difference between 128k and 320k music?

Some time ago, a colleague came across a very troubled client. The mess was said to have been caused by the client asking him to provide song files larger than 100MB-200MB in size.

And my colleagues don’t know much about audio formats, so they started endlessly fumbling about FLAC, WAV and audio size. In the end, the colleague did not clearly explain to the customer what was going on.

After that, other things happened that made me feel that in the music industry there are too many practitioners around me who have an extremely poor understanding of music and even lack some basic knowledge related to music. I don’t even have the idea to understand, which makes me very sad. It seems that music has only one merchandise attribute, and our practitioners only need to organize the shelves, encode various merchandise, and use the big data of users’ purchase records to recommend merchandise to users, no matter why to users. they like this. features that these products have, and provide users with various services with cold data.

Therefore, I think it is necessary to write something. I don’t expect practitioners to become people who really love music. I just hope that even if you still think of “her” as a commodity, you can first figure out what you’re selling. and what is..

PS: The content of the first lesson is about media files. Since the relevant content involves a lot of technical issues, it seems a bit boring, but if you read it carefully, you will find that it is actually very easy to understand, but this basic knowledge can be very helpful.Improve your skill well. Also expect more interesting content about records, musical styles, etc. which I will post soon.

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Bit Rate, Sample Rate, Lossless, MP3, FLAC, APE, 320kb, 192kb, 128kb, 44.1khz, CBR, VBR. Does this bunch of various names make you both familiar and unknown?

The higher the bitrate, the better the sound quality. Lossless music is the highest sound quality, right? So, let’s start with the sound collection.

【Audio composition】

Nowadays, when we talk about audio, everything is digital audio. Digital audio consists of three parts: sample rate, sample precision, and number of sound channels.

Sample Rate: Both the sample rate, which refers to the number of samples per second when recording the sound, expressed in Hertz (Hz).

Sampling Precision: Refers to the dynamic range of the recorded sound, measured in bits (Bit).

What is the recording bitrate (the appropriate mp3 bitrate range)

All music on the web is digital, so what does the “bitrate” or “kbps” you see when previewing or downloading mean? What is bit rate?

In its simplest terms, bitrate represents the amount of data a file produces per second.

For example, you might see something like “320 kbps.” Literally, that means 320 kilobits per second, or the amount of data that is produced.

How does bitrate affect music?
Common audio file formats are MP3, OGG Vorbis, or AAC, which can be called lossy compression, while others are lossless compression, such as FLAC or WAV, which basically retain all the audio information.

320k is the highest bitrate encoding of mp3, and the sound quality is generally considered to be the closest to CD format. If you listen to popular music, you can see that there is more music encoded in 196k. From the point of view of listening, the difference between 320k encoding and uncompressed encoding is negligible, but in theory, the bit rate of a common CD is 1411k, which is 4.5 times the bit rate highest of MP3.

There is a direct relationship between bit rate and sound quality, but reasonable compression does not degrade listening.

Since MP3s are lossy files, meaning some of the audio is lost due to compression, why don’t the ears seem to change the sound? This involves psychoacoustics, a fringe discipline that studies the relationship between sound and the hearing it provokes. Psychoacoustics refers to “the way the human brain interprets sound.” Compressed audio is the use of powerful algorithms to convert audio messages that we cannot hear. remote.

So even though the bitrate of a lossy file like MP3 is much lower than that of a lossless file, it doesn’t sound like that. Even with just 320kbps MP3, the listening experience is not 4.5 times worse than music on CD.

Of course, the compression is not unlimited, when the bit rate drops below 128kbps, the sound quality will be degraded, and the lower it is, the more obvious it will be. On the contrary, the higher the bitrate, the higher the quality of the music.