Files without compression, with compression but without loss and with compression and with loss … what does that mean?
There is currently a huge confusion in most people about audio formats and that is why we are going to give an explanation that is as simple and clear as possible so that most of the people who read can understand enough to be able to make decisions about it. .
We will not try to get into technicalities or knowledge What are for specialists or connoisseurs or programmers, such as those who developed the mp4gain, but rather we will talk about general concepts at the beginner level but that can allow a correct understanding of the matter.
So the first thing we must understand is that the quality of an audio file depends on the amount of details it contains and for it to contain many details, it takes up a lot of space on the hard disk.
We could say that there are three groups of audio file formats:
– audio formats that do not have compression such as WAV, AIFF, etc.
– formats that compress audio but do not have a loss of information. FLAC, MPEG-4 SSL, WAV PACK, etc.
– There are also the formats that the audio compresses but that do have a loss of information, for example MP3, Ogg, HERE, ETCÉTERA
Now let’s clarify what it means that some formats do have compression but do not have loss of information while others also have compression but do have loss of information.
The formats that are compressed but have no loss of information what they do is something very similar to zip the file. In other words, they simply compress.
The original information but they do not discard anything, therefore when unzipping the file the original file is obtained again that had all the details and therefore is of very high quality.
On the other hand there are files such as MP3 that are compressed but also to achieve greater compression what they do is that they get rid of some part of the information. For example, those frequencies that are not audible to the human ear also get rid of that information that is redundant and they also use the method called masking which part of the idea that a sound that is very loud and is very forward It will be able to mask other sounds and the human brain will not perceive those other sounds. Therefore, according to this theory, they can get rid of these sounds that have been masked and the file will sound more or less the same to the human ear.
This concept of sound masking was one of the great milestones that made MP3 become so popular because it could compress files a lot, at a time when disk space was not superfluous, and yet they sounded pretty good to that ear. era and those people.
Also the programs that made the normalization of the audio volume, achieved results that at that time sounded good, but at this time the listening ear as a has become much more demanding and sophisticated. And so we need much more modern normalizers with much more algorithms. more powerful like mp4gain.
