Digital audio format guide.
Since digital music has become popular, its fans have gradually developed the desire to hear it in the best possible quality.
For a time, the technical limits and the costs prevented us from achieving this goal, which is no longer an illusion.
The music streaming services market has never been so successful and we talk a lot about it in this article, but there are so many digital music formats … we’ve made this guide for clarity.
The teacher recorded in the studio is recorded at the resolution that defines the artist, but then the album we hear can be converted into a large number of more or less compressed formats, which, as shown in this infographic, into two large families are divided. . ::
Lossy audio formats: If the quality and the data contained are inferior to the original file, which leads to loss of detail, but to the benefit of the lightness of the file. These formats are widely used by streaming services like Spotify and take up less space.
Lossless: If the quality of the generated file matches that of the original master, without loss of quality, however, they require storage systems such as NAS and are not ideal for streaming via a mobile device connection.
Let’s start with the first Lossy family (AAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and WMA)
AAC
Advanced Audio Coding (MPEG-4) is the standard standard used by Apple for iTunes. Nostalgic people who had an iPod will remember that when CDs were imported into their MAC, the files were converted to this format. At the same bit rate, it takes up the same space as an MP3, but the conversion can be of higher quality.
MP3
An acronym for Moving Picture Expert Group-1/2 Audio Layer 3 is the world’s most widely used compressed audio format and was first introduced in 1998. The compression algorithm removes some details from the audio track that you can hardly hear The human ear By compressing a WAV file, you get an MP3 file that is up to 90 times lighter than the original. This depends on the bit rates or the amount of digital information (bits) that are transmitted or recorded in a unit of time. They can vary between 32 (poor quality) and 320 KB (excellent quality) per second.
OGG Vorbis
It’s an open source format with a quality comparable to MP3 that was unknown until recently, but is now used by services like Spotify. OGG is the file extension, while Vorbis is the compression algorithm.
WMA
Windows Media Player is the format invented by Microsoft in response to the MP3 standard. The quality is the same, but has the disadvantage that it is only compatible with devices of this brand.
Now let’s discover the features of the lossless family (FLAC, ALAC, AIFF, WAV and DSD).
FLAC
Free lossless audio codec. It is the most widely used open source format for downloading music without loss of quality compared to the original source. A fairly attentive ear can easily tell the difference from a smaller format, lower quality file.
iTunes does not support playback of this format because it uses its (ALAC).
A THE C.
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec or FLAC for the Apple world is only ideal if you use Apple branded devices, even if it does not correspond to the FLAC in terms of weight.
AIFF
This audio swap file format is also owned by Apple, which was developed based on the Electronic Arts swap file format and is particularly suitable for audiophiles and music producers. It has essentially the same properties as the WAV format, but without compression, and is used by artists because it can also be used to embed metadata such as text, notes or other information in the file.
WAV
The WAVE audio file format, introduced by Microsoft and IBM in 1991, continues to be used and represents what you get when you import a music CD to your Microsoft computer. When playing back a file of this format that can also be read by a MAC, a special function is used in the Intel CPU. These are very heavy files that reach a maximum of 2 GB and reproduce the sounds in a very faithful manner.
DSD
Direct Stream Digital is a registered trademark of Philips and Sony, developed for the Super Audio CD. An encoding method is used that uses a single bit instead of predicting a higher bit depth, but at a much higher sampling rate to record, store, and reproduce extremely high sound quality. The original sampling rate was 2,822 MHz and its format is known as DSD64
