Difference between audio formats
The sound quality of music that you must know when you enjoy music.
If you listen with all your strength, save the music with higher sound quality and
I want to play music with high sound quality.
The invisible thing called sound
What is the standard for judging good sound?
This time, we will deepen our understanding of “sound quality”.
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Different from the type of music file format
Music moves from analog to digital music data.
If you compress the sound source when you capture it, deterioration in sound quality is inevitable.
First of all, because of the difference in the music file format (audio format).
Uncompressed (linear PCM): WAV, AIFF
Uncompressed WAV / AIFF
By ripping a CD as-is without compressing it, it becomes an uncompressed sound source.
WAV (WAVE) was developed by Microsoft (Windows) and IBM.
AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) was developed by Apple (Mac).
WAV is a common uncompressed codec for PC,
In Apple iTunes, WAV cannot handle metadata (tag information).
If you add song information (song title, album art, etc.) with iTunes, it will be AIFF.
If you want to save the amount of data, I think you can use ALAC with lossless compression.
Lossy compression (lossy): MP3, AAC, WMA
MP3 / ACC / WMA lossy compression
The most important lossy compression is “MP3 = MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3”.
It has a long history and a high penetration rate.
There is also the term “MP3 player” as a general term for digital music players.
“AAC = Advanced Audio Cording” has appeared as an improved version of MP3.
If the compression rate (bit rate) is the same as MP3,
AAC (m4a) has superior sound quality.
“WMA = Windows Media Audio” has a compression rate comparable to AAC.
Developed by Microsoft and adopted by Windows,
It is a codec that was not popular because it is not supported by Apple.
For video, Blu-ray AC3, DVD MP2,
There is also a Youtube Vorbis audio codec, but …
The main music is MP3 and AAC.
For lossy compression, you can also select the compression rate when compressing,
For music data, 128 kbps, 160 kbps, 192 kbps, 256 kbps, 320 kbps are common.
Bit rate (bps) is the amount of data per second, so
The higher the number, the better the sound quality.
* Uncompressed CD equals 1411 kbps
There are almost no devices that cannot play MP3,
Currently, AAC is as popular as MP3, so I choose AAC.
If you want to import CD sound source with iTunes, iTunes Plus from AAC encoder.
The stereo bit rate is 256 kbps and the sampling rate is 44,100 kHz.
