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Lossless Compression – How It Works

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Lossless Compression – How It Works
When the copy is not different from the original.

Lossless compression

Lossless Compression – How It Works
We have already discovered how sound is digitized. One of the problems: if we digitize it with high quality, then we need a large amount of data, which means large files, a large consumption of disk space, expensive flash drives, a lot of Internet traffic. I would like the files to be smaller.

Lossy Compression and Lossless Compression

For this, compression is used – various algorithms that do their magic with the data and the output is data from a smaller volume.

Lossy and lossless compression
There are two main types of compression: lossy and lossless.

Lossy compression means that we lost some information in the process. Lossy compression algorithms try to make sure that we only lose data that is not too important to us.

Imagine that lossy compression is a short retelling of a school curriculum work: the student is not so important about the description of the author’s nature and style, the main thing is the plot. The short count kept only what was important, but conveyed it much faster.

Lossless compression is when we reduce the size of the file, without losing quality. Interesting mathematical and coding techniques are used for this. The main idea is that during decoding all the data remains in place.

Lossless compression algorithms
There are two main options: the Huffman algorithm or the LZW. LZW is used everywhere, but it is quite difficult to explain, not intuitive, and requires a full lecture. It is much better to explain the Huffman algorithm.

Huffman’s algorithm takes the file, breaks it into pieces, making it convenient to operate, and then looks at how common each fragment is. The algorithm designates the most frequent words with a short code and the rarest with a longer code. Since the most frequent words now take up much less space, the finished file becomes smaller.

But there is also a downside: sometimes you need to store this word and code mapping table directly in the same file, but it can turn out large on its own. Most often, the Huffman algorithm is used for lossless compression of text and video files.

Here’s an example: Take the song Beyonce – All The Single Ladies. There are two such passages there:

All the single women

Now put your hands up

…

If you like it then you should put a ring on it

Don’t be mad once you see that he wants it

If you like it then you should put a ring on it

Here are 281 signs. We see that some lines are repeated. Let’s code them:

COMPRESSION TABLE

\ a \ All single women

\ b \ Now put your hands up

\ c \ If you like it then you should have put a ring on it

\ d \ Don’t be mad once you see that he wants it

SONG TEXT

\ a \ \ a \ \ a \ \ b \

…

\ c \ \ c \ \ d \ \ c \

Along with the compression table, this text now occupies 187 characters; we have compressed the text by almost a third due to the fact that it is quite monotonous.

Lossless compression using audio as an example
On average, one minute of uncompressed audio takes up 10 megabytes. This is quite a lot: if, for example, you have a one-hour recording of a concert, it will be half a gigabyte. On the other hand, this recording captures all the nuances of the sound, there are many high frequencies and beauty in general.

For such situations, lossless compression is used: it shrinks the file by 2 to 3 times without distorting the sound. The algorithms that compress the audio are called codecs. FLAC and Apple Lossless are two popular lossless audio compression codecs.

Compare the size and quality of the two-minute audio yourself:

Original: uncompressed WAV format, 23 megabytes

Lossless compression: FLAC format with the same parameters as WAV, 10 megabytes

Where else is lossless compression used?
In filing cabinets. The job of archiving programs is to package selected files so that the file takes up as little space as possible, without damaging what’s inside. For example, the text version of “War and Peace” might be 4 megabytes and the archived version 100 kilobytes 40 times less.

In programming. There are special wrappers that take a ready-to-use program and optimize the code so that it takes up less space, but retains its functionality. For example:

Delete comments
Minimize function and variable names
Remove characters required for human readability

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What are the advantages of the lossless audio format?

What are the advantages of the lossless audio format?

Lossless and Lossy Audio Files

The advantage of lossless for storing an audio collection is that the quality of the recordings is much higher than that of lossy codecs and they take up less space than uncompressed audio. It is true that lossy files are smaller than lossless music files. Most modern playback programs understand the lossless format. Programs that cannot play it can easily learn it using the lossless plugin. What are lossless audio formats?

Lossless audio

Lossless audio formats
A true music lover is unlikely to be satisfied with the sound of music recorded in Ogg Vorbis or MP3 compression formats. Of course, if you listen to audio recordings on home audio equipment, sound defects cannot be heard with your ear, but if you try to play a compressed file on high-quality Hi-Fi equipment, you will immediately find the sound defects. . Of course, creating a collection of quality music on CD or vinyl is not easy. There is a reasonable alternative to this path for lovers of high-quality sound – lossless music. It can be stored on a PC in a way that allows you to keep your music’s original settings unchanged, even if compression is applied. In this way it simultaneously solves the problems of high-quality music and its compact storage, since audio equipment for listening (headphones, speakers, amplifiers) is quite affordable.

Uncompressed lossless audio formats:

CDDA is an audio CD standard;
WAV: Microsoft Wave;
IFF-8SVX;
IFF-16SV;
AIFF;
Compressed formats:

FLAC;
APE – Monkey’s Audio;
M4A – Apple Lossless – Apple’s high-quality music format;
WV – WavPack;
WMA: Windows Media Audio 9;
TTA – True Audio.

FLAC format
The most common format is the. It differs from lossy audio codecs in that no data is removed from the audio stream when it is used. This makes it possible to use it successfully to play music on Hi-Fi and Hi-End equipment, as well as to create an archive from a collection of audio recordings.

The great advantage of the format is its free distribution. This is important for musicians who record music on their own. The format has gained a lot of popularity recently, thanks to which its support is included in the vast majority of multimedia players.

APE format
Unlike FLAC, for the APE format there are only codecs and plugins for the Windows platform. For other platforms, there are expensive third-party software solutions. The algorithm is capable of achieving lossless compression of audio information between 1.5 and 2 times. It includes three main stages of encoding, of which only one is based on the use of inherent properties of sound for compression. The rest are similar to conventional filing cabinets. Even though the compression algorithm is distributed free of charge, the licensing restrictions are such that it is practically inaccessible to amateur musicians.

Apple Lossless Format
You can listen to high-quality lossless music using the audio compression codec without sacrificing Apple quality. This format was developed by Apple for use on its own devices. The format is compatible with iPods with special dock connectors and the latest firmware. The format does not use specific rights management (DRM) tools, but the container format contains such capabilities. It also supports QuickTime and is included as a feature in iTunes.

The format is part of the free access libraries, which allows you to organize listening to files in Windows applications. In 2011, Apple released the source codes for the format, opening up broad prospects for the codec. In the future, it can seriously compete with other formats. The tests yielded good results. Compressed files vary in size between 40-60% of the originals. The decoding speed is also impressive, which justifies its use for mobile devices, whose performance is not high.

One of the disadvantages of the codec is that the extension of the audio files matches the audio codec, leading to confusion because AAC is not a high-quality music format. Therefore, it was decided to store the data in an MP4 container with the extension .m4a.

Lossless audio formats

WAV (.wav) The WAV format is nothing more than a digital recording of real sounds, sounds that come from a source outside the PC. With WAV music, drums, piano, guitar, bass or vocals are heard the same, no matter what computer the file is played on (with the same acoustic quality of hardware components, of course).

DSD (DFF, .Dsf) are used in digital media such as Super Audio CDs. Sampling quality is very high (variable sampling rate is approximately 64 times higher than for audio CDs), although according to several operators in this sector, it must be absolutely determined whether the final quality is higher than the sampling quality. PCM (used in high quality Blu-Ray and DVD Audio). I can reproduce free readers like Foobar 2000 or AIMP on our computer.

AIFF (.aif). It’s the Apple audio format used by Apple for Mac. It’s basically the WAV equivalent used by Windows.

APE (Mono Audio; .ape): Ordinary with a loss that allows us to reduce by about 50% the space occupied by our music (in some cases even more), without losing quality. In this way, an album that takes up about 600 MB in wav format averages 300 MB (much more than about 100 MB of high-speed mpc and 60 mp3 mp3, but the quality is the same as the original); On average, I speak because there are certain types of music where the level of compression is even higher. You can use WinAmp plug-ins to listen to songs in this format, or better yet, a player that uses it natively as Foobar 2000. Right now, it’s probably the best lossless codec, considering the balance between speed and compression (Click here for a lossless comparison table) format.)

Apple Lossless Audio Codec – ALAC (.m4a) This is a lossless audio codec created by Apple a few years ago and available as an open source from Apple since October 2011. Some programs support it in Windows (encoded). , including DbPowerAmp.

FLAC (.flac): a very popular open source format. It used to be very popular (among music purists), but some space has been lost with the MonkeyAudio bee format, which allows for better compression in the same quality. Compared to others, it always came in .ape format (but also after WavPack).

LA (Lossless Audio: .la): The lossless format that compresses the most. Conversion to this format is very slow, but achieves the best compression in history (for example, MonkeyAudio, this album would take up about 290 MB compared to 300 MB in APE). This is not widespread, as some MB obtained on a bee is not worth the long wait (and less support from third-party programs), but it is the winner of my lossless format comparison.

OPTIM FROG (.ofr) – Excellent lossless codec, best after LA as compressibility. Compression, when set to slightly high levels, is about 3 times slower than Monkey Audio and the gain in MB is about 2%. Like all other formats on this site, you can listen without the addition of Foobar 2000.

WAVPACK (.wv, wvc) – is a valid open source compression format that allows lossless, lossy and hybrid results. The compression rate is high and the compression is good. Another interesting hybrid format is that the lossy file is merged with another file, which allows you to completely restore the original file without loss in case we want to restore it.

What are the most popular audio formats?

There are dozens of audio files that we can use to convert a song, but the really useful ones can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

When we think of an audio file, most of us immediately think of MP3. Without a doubt, it’s one of the most popular audio formats, but it’s not the only one. Let’s see what are the most popular audio formats and what are the differences in use. And we have to choose that according to our needs.

There are different categories of audio files. First we defined the formats as uncompressed. The word itself defines this section of the file. In this case, the recorded sound waves are actually converted into a digital format without further processing. What does it all mean? In files that are very difficult to save and take up a lot of space. In order to simplify the storage of audio files and to reduce the load, formats with lossy data compression were created. These sacrifice some quality in favor of the small storage space required.

To fix this error, which represents the loss of quality in favor of file size, compressed audio formats were created without loss of data. Obviously, they’re not small files like lossy compression, but they’re still smaller than uncompressed. However, it must be said that these types of formats are only widespread in certain cases.

PCM

PCM is the most common and widely used audio format on CDs and DVDs that we have at home. It is the faithful conversion of analog audio into a digital file. It is no coincidence that it is an uncompressed audio format. Remember that analog sounds exist as waveforms. In order to convert a sound wave into digital bits, the sound must be sampled and recorded at certain intervals.

WAV

WAV stands for Waveform Audio File Format (previously it was also called Audio for Windows, now it is no longer). It is a standard developed by Microsoft and IBM in 1991. WAV files can contain compressed and uncompressed audio formats. In most cases, however, they are used for uncompressed people. Although it was developed for Windows, it can also be safely opened on a Mac.

MP3

This is without a doubt the most popular audio format. It was released in 1993 and over the years its success has increased thanks to the combination with the pieces of music. Why are they used so often? Quite simply, these are lossy compressed files, and the generated files are so small that users can create a music library without taking up too much space. And the quality? It is much lower than other formats, but the human ear doesn’t always manage to notice the difference significantly. MP3 is also a universal file. It can be found on smartphones, computers, smart TVs, tablets and many other electronic devices.

WMA

WMA stands for Windows Media Audio. It was first published in 1999 and has gone through several developments since then, always keeping the same name. As you can easily guess, it is an audio format created by Microsoft. It was developed to replace MP3s. Unfortunately, there are very few platforms that support this, so the MP3 mastery has never been compromised.

OGG

OGG is not a real compression audio format. We can define it as a multi-purpose multimedia container. It can contain all types of audio formats, but is often used to contain Vorbis files. It is one of the best performing files to reduce size without losing quality.

FLAC

FLAC stands for Free Codec Lossless Audio. It is a lossless, compressed format that was created in 2001. A FLAC file can be compressed to 60% of its original size without minimal loss of sound quality. It is also an open source format. Because of this, it is compatible with most programs and devices. It is the best quality alternative to MP3.

Encoding digital audio with a loseless format?

Compressing a digital audio with loss is to reduce the size of an audio file.

Codecs are used to reduce the size of the files. Some of the operations that codecs can perform to reduce file sizes are as follows:

Reduce the bit rate of the original sound so that the audio takes up less space.
Remove sounds at frequencies that are not noticeable by the human ear.
Elimination of redundancies of the audio signal.
They can reduce the number of existing channels by transforming a surround sound to Stereo.
Reduce the number of bits per sample.
Etc.
Note: The compression process of an audio is extremely complex. In addition, each codec applies different methodologies to compress the size of an audio.

Obviously during the compression process there will be a loss in audio quality. The higher the weight reduction of the compressed file, the higher the loss of quality.

UTILITIES THAT YOU HAVE TO COMPRESS AN AUDIO

Obviously compressing an audio has certain utilities. Some of them are as detailed below:

The space needed to store the songs on our hard drive will be much smaller. Although hard drives are cheap and their storage capacity is large, it is not feasible and / or practical to store all of our songs without loss.
We can pass the audio files to third parties in a much more convenient and fast way. After compressing a music song we can pass it by email or other means without any problem.
It seems that the trend in the very near future will be to consume video and audio via streaming. Therefore the compression of video and audio is very important. If we offer a web service in which we provide streaming audio, it is essential to compress the audio to save bandwidth and so that customers can play it at home without problems.

Select the compressed audio file format

There are numerous types of compressed file format with loss. Some of the most popular are the following:

.mp3
.ogg
.wma
.m4a
.aac
Depending on the needs, it may be useful to select one format or another.

However in my case I recommend using the mp3 or ogg file format. The reasons are as follows:

The .mp3 files do not stand out for providing the best audio quality. However, the .mp3 format is the most universally extended.
Any music player is capable of playing the .mp3 file format. You cannot say the same of the other file formats.
Everyone is able to play audio in .mp3 format. Even people with little knowledge technologically speaking.
If someone does not want to use the .mp3 format because they think the quality is not enough, or because it is a proprietary format, I recommend using .ogg. In the following link you can find the advantages and disadvantages of the .ogg files with respect to the .mp3 files.
Select the audio compression codec (encoder)

Once the file format is selected we must be aware of the codec that we will use to perform the audio compression.

In the case that we want to compress in the .mp3 file format there are the following codecs:

FHC: It’s the first codec that existed. At present this codec has become obsolete. Its compression time is very high and does not support variable bit rate.

Xing: It is the fastest encoder and allows you to obtain files with a variable bit rate (VBR). However, the quality level offered by this type of encoder is lower than Blade and Lame.

Blade: Until Lame’s appearance was the best option. It is slightly slower than Xing, but the quality levels obtained are much better. Currently this host has a problem and it does not support variable bit rates.

Lame: It is available under the GNU license and is also the best host available today. It supports variable bit rates, is fast and the quality obtained is better than in the rest of the encoders.