What audio format should I choose?
Everybody loves music. Some listen to it on the way to work, and others can’t go a minute without their favorite songs. Listening to music comfortably depends not only on the mood, the time, the moon phase and good headphones, but also on the audio format in which it is stored on our devices.
In the 21st century, streaming services are becoming popular, but most people still store music offline and listen to it from their phones, players, audio systems, etc. But this post is not a discussion “Which headphones are better?”, “Why listen to music?” or “Why vinyl, not CD?”, but a brief summary of today’s most popular digital audio formats, their pros and cons. I will not analyze them all, and I will not compare different encodings, the differences “this AAC from this AAC”, but I will try to count in an accessible way the differences of some popular audio formats from each other.
So what is the best way to store your music collection? Today, there are many digital audio formats, and if you want, you can see a list of them on Wikipedia. But we will focus only on MP3, AAC, WMA and FLAC.
MP3
The most popular audio format and nobody can argue with that. Why is it so popular? It’s simple, because Mp3 was the first audio format with the best ratio (at the time) of file size and quality when compressed. Therefore, most of the songs were translated into MP3, which served as the undisputed primacy of the audio format on the market.
The advantages are clear from the previous paragraph: small size, tolerable compression loss, ubiquity, compatibility with all devices, and also, due to the small size, you can store a large collection of songs on a medium with little memory capacity, which it is also an advantage for some.
But Mp3 also has some disadvantages. Even though compression losses are not visible to ordinary people, knowledgeable people will notice them immediately. This is a low sound quality compared to other audio formats, as well as a “cut” of frequencies above 17 kHz, which is felt by ear with good headphones.
AAC
The young audio format AAC, mainly promoted by Apple, can be considered the successor to Mp3. AAC seems much more advantageous because Compared to MP3, AAC file compression is more efficient. At a bit rate of 128 kbps, an AAC composition is comparable in sound quality to the same MP3 composition at a 192 kbps bit rate.
Better compression quality is a major advantage of AAC. The disadvantage is not the same prevalence as in the same mp3. Some devices do not yet support this format. And also the compositions in AAC take up more space than in MP3. Not as much as FLAC, but still, for some it is a critical factor.
WMA
The WMA format was created by Microsoft as an alternative to Mp3 for Windows users. It was believed that with half the bit rate of MP3, WMA produces similar quality. But, in fact, the composition in WMA at 128 kbps is noticeably lower than that of Mp3. The advantages include full Windows support, but the disadvantage is extremely low quality at a low bit rate. By personal observation, I will say that I have not seen people storing their music in this audio format for a long time.
FLAC
One of the most common audio formats for music lovers in good quality. FLAC compresses the data, leaving it in the output identical to the original, without losing any data, which is the main lossless compression algorithm. Furthermore, decoding the FLAC format does not require as much processor resources, allowing you to listen to music on portable devices.
The advantages of music in FLAC are excellent quality and fast decoding, but a disadvantage, as a result, is the large file size.
So in what audio format should you keep your music collection? If you are not so critical of losses after compression, if you want to make a mistake with the support, so that your collection does not become a bunch of useless files in 5 years, you have a limited amount of memory for your music, then choose Mp3. If free space allows you to store larger files, switch to AAC. I personally don’t recommend WMA. I think this audio format is dead, although most people will not agree with me. And if quality is important to you, you have a good audio system or headphones, and even minimal compression loss is inexcusable for you, then FLAC definitely is. But be prepared for the fact that you must have plenty of room for music.
