Lossy vs Lossless, understanding Audio Quality.
Why the mp3 arises and becomes a success?
We talked in a previous article about why it was urgently needed when the internet started to find a way to compress the audio, since even thinking about transferring from one computer to another and storing an entire CD of music there was a feat that almost nobody could do. , much less online.
Fraunhoffer, who developed the mp3, mixed both theories:
1.- Compress using classic compression techniques, zip type.
2.- Use the extensive knowledge about human hearing to be able to rule out everything that the ear does not perceive.
Just as we have read that some animals see colors differently from human beings or even can see better in the dark… In the same way, the special and particular hearing of human beings has developed not in function of listening to music. .. or at least not in listening to it in high fidelity, but rather it is related more to our survival, to language, etc.
We know what the limits of human hearing are, we do not hear sounds lower or higher than certain perfectly known points.
There are whistles that dogs hear and humans don’t.
Would it make any sense to occupy more space on the hard drive to save, for example, frequencies that humans cannot hear?
The extreme purists may be exaggerating if they dream that the audio file does not drop any frequencies, but tests and trials have shown that an mp3 with a bitrate of 196 khz and a samplerate of 44100 or higher are practically indistinguishable from the uncompressed original for 99,999 people. of every 100 thousand.
Put another way, only one in a hundred thousand people can tell any small difference between a slightly above-average quality mp3 and the uncompressed original.
Mp4Gain is, without a doubt, the best option when looking to normalize the volume to make an mp3 or any other audio or video file achieve the most suitable loudness (see the list of files that Mp4Gain supports)
