Nowadays, thanks to the digitization of music, it is possible to store and reproduce a large number of music goats that are saved on a hard drive or on a player or even that you listen to through streaming.
As we said, this is thanks to what has been possible to digitize the audio.
Of course cal captures the original audio in its analog version. That is, as we hear it.
A large amount of information is captured, some of which is not even perceptible to our ears and This makes the files that store all the information very heavy.
That is why different formats have had to be created that can have a much smaller size without sacrificing audio quality.
Let’s see the list of some of the most used audio files:
MP3.
This format is created in Germany in 1995.
And its ability to compress sometimes at a rate of 11 times less than the original genre, a true Boom What changed the way we listen to music forever.
From there they began to create a series of devices such as MP3 players or portable phones that were capable of playing MP3 files and I am sure that MP3 became the most popular format in the world.
Some audio purists have questioned that MP3 uses so-called masking in its algorithm for compressing audio. That is simply part of a principle of the human ear. What says that if at the same time two sounds are produced at close frequencies, the ear will only perceive that which sounded louder. For this reason, the MP3 discards those sounds that occur at similar frequencies but at a lower volume and also discards the sounds that are outside the range that the human ear can perceive. After all this the MP3 performs a compression to make it even smaller. That is, it first discards information and then compresses it. This type of format such as MP3 that discards information and then compresses it are known as lossy formats.
WAV.
You could say that this is the format that saves the audio as it arrives without making any adjustments or any kind of compression or discarding it eliminates any information.
The problem with the WAV format is that it takes up a lot of disk space and this has made it unpopular because it is not really manageable to use in phones or MP3 players and even to send it over the internet.
FLAC.
Unlike MP3, El Flaco only compresses the audio without doing any kind of discarding. It needs to eliminate any information. Even when it is redundant or is outside the auditory range of the human ear, that is why it is called a lossless format. Which means that it is much lighter than the WAV format because it has been compressed. But on the other hand, no information was taken away with which it did not lose any acoustic quality.
AAC.
In an attempt to compete with MP3, this format is created which manages to compress the audio enormously but without modifying the original frequencies. For this reason, it is assumed that although it is very similar to MP3 in its reduced size it has better audio quality.
AIFF.
This format is basically the same as WAV but WAV is for windows and AIFF is for Mac.
Bitrate
It is important to understand that bitrate is what the information rate is. What can pass per minute is decisive for the quality of, for example, an mp3.
An mp3 encoded with a 90 bits per minute bitrate will have a sound quality quite different from the original, whereas an mp3 encoded with a 320 bits per minute ticket will have audio of such high quality that 99% of people will not be able to distinguish what an original WAV file and some say that 100% of people will not be able to distinguish it.
All this of course has generated controversy from audio purists but for the average user who is already going to listen to their music, the sound equipment that is not absolutely professional is the same as an mp3 with a bitrate higher than 160 than a WAV
