Highest quality music format. – part 5
There are many music formats now. Not so long ago, the popular mp3 standard is outdated due to frequency cuts, and even a high bit rate doesn’t save it.
It is not a bad option to replace the Ogg format, BUT it also has losses, although they are smaller.
OGG Vorbis
The youngest format developed from scratch relatively recently is OGG Vorbis. Some predict a good future for it, others an imminent sunset, but most of those who have tried it in action agree that this is a very promising and very high-quality project. Let me remind you that both mp3PRO and WMA are commercial formats and consequently closed, unlike what OGG is an open project, with source codes available to anyone, making OGG Vorbis the fastest growing compression format , something like a project. LAME for MP3. Despite its young age, OGG has recently undergone a complete optimization of its algorithm to work with low bit rates. And now a new version format received the RC2 prefix to the name. At the moment, according to the available information, the OGG Vorbis encoder compresses the stream only with variable bit rate (VBR), performing compression with a bit rate of 32 to 350 kbps.
Due to the increasing volumes of the hard disk, the requirements for the quality of digitized music began to increase and lossless digitization began to gain more and more popularity.
A surprising example is the Flac format.
FLAC only supports fixed point samples, not floating point. It can handle any PCM bit resolution from 4 to 32 bits per sample, any sample rate from 1 Hz to 1,048,570 Hz in 1 Hz increments, and any number of channels from 1 to 8. Channels can be grouped in cases such as stereo and 5.1 channel surround to take advantage of inter-channel correlations to increase compression. FLAC uses CRC checksums to identify corrupted frames when used in a streaming protocol, and it also has a full MD5 hash of the raw PCM audio stored in its STREAMINFO metadata header.
FLAC (English Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a popular free codec for audio compression. Unlike the lossy Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and AAC codecs, it does not remove any information from the audio stream and is suitable for both daily listening and archiving an audio collection. Today, the FLAC format is compatible with many audio applications.
FLAC Features:
Lossless compression: PCM data encoding does not lead to information loss, therefore the decoded audio file is absolutely identical to the one entered into the encoder. To determine possible errors during file transfer, a 16-bit checksum is calculated for each frame. The integrity at a later stage is confirmed by the MD5 signature of the decompressed data, which is in the header and can be verified during replay, decoding or testing.
Speed: The encoding and decoding speed is asymmetric. For decoding, only whole number arithmetic is used, which requires much less computation than in perceptual codecs. Real-time decoding can be easily accomplished even on older computers.
Hardware Support: With a free base implementation and easy decoding, FLAC is the only lossless audio codec that has hardware support.
Streaming: each FLAC frame contains enough information to decode itself. The current FLAC framework is independent of the ones before and after. FLAC uses timing codes and checksums, allowing the decoder to quickly select a position in the current sequence.
Search: FLAC supports fast and accurate search, which is useful not only for playback, but also allows FLAC to be used in sound editors.
Metadata: FLAC has an extensible metadata system. New metadata blocks can be defined and implemented in future versions without losing backward compatibility. Metadata types are now defined for Audio CD lookup tables, labels, and markup lists. An application can use the APPLICATION metadata block after registering an ID for it.
