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Lossless audio formats

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Lossless audio formats

Lossless audio

Audio files can be converted in a more or less space saving way using lossless or lossy codecs. While the data reduction is absolutely true to the original with lossless codecs, a difference can be heard from the original material, especially with heavy compression with lossy codecs.

Lossless compressed audio files lose approximately 25% to 50% of their original file size. Typical representatives are Monkey’s Audio, FLAC, or WavPack. Modern lossy codecs like AAC, Ogg Vorbis, or MP3, on the other hand, reduce source material by 90% without sounding noticeably worse.

Lossless audio compression

Unlike documents or images, for example, audio files are very difficult to compress, since identical repetitions are very rare in music. But it is precisely on such occurrences that the Huffmann or Lempel-Ziv algorithms depend, which are used in ZIP or RAR, for example. Therefore, most non-clustered compressors employ predictive coding. The signal is divided into a music component and a noise component. Depending on how well this prediction has been made, the noise component should ideally be Gaussian white noise that can be easily compressed using conventional methods.
In the ideal case, the result is 50% compression, which is highly dependent on the piece of music.

Monkey’s Audio, FLAC and WavPack are popular formats for lossless compression of WAV (PCM) files, for example digitized original recordings from the recording studio (for archiving or later processing) or archiving copies of music CDs. The sound quality is always the same as the original and the checksums reveal corrupted files. Increasing hard drive capacity at affordable prices makes “Lossless Codecs” interesting for everyday use.

Uncompressed: WAV (PCM)

WAV is the largest common denominator of Windows audio formats. The Macintosh equivalent is called AIFF. WAV is actually the collective term for various subformats, of which PCM is the most common and is generally equated with WAV.

WAV (PCM) is an uncompressed recording of sound samples: the time signal of a noise is sampled, quantized, digitized, and saved at discrete points in time. The more often and finer you record these values, the better the sound. With CD quality music, this instantaneous value is recorded 44,100 times per second and recorded with 16-bit “precision”, that is, 2 ^ 16 = 65536 possible values.

With the help of special programs (eg CDex, EAC, Audiograbber), Audio CDs can be transferred to the hard disk as WAV (PCM) files. Viewed in this way, WAV (PCM) files are copies of the original, provided the CD-ROM drive is not read incorrectly or the CD is damaged. One minute at CD quality requires roughly 10MB of storage space, which is not as happy to give away even in the age of ever-larger hard drives.

On the PC, WAV (PCM) and CD-quality (44.1 kHz, 16-bit, stereo) audio files are often the starting material for creating space-saving audio files in formats such as MP3. However, for sound processing on the home PC, WAV (PCM) is the first choice.

Monkey’s Audio

Monkey’s Audio is a lossless audio codec for PCM wave files. Monkey’s Audio comes with a convenient program interface (in English), over which files can be compressed, decompressed, verified or tagged. PCM wave files (any sample rate, 8/16/24 bit, mono or stereo) or corresponding Shorten or WavPack files are accepted as source files. Monkey’s Audio does not support multiple channels.

The APE tags that are used to store the title information can be supplemented with their own fields and are therefore very flexible. They are now used in conjunction with other audio formats as well.

The included command line encoder allows integration into other programs. Various audio players support the format through plugins. A plug-in for Winamp can be installed at the same time as installation. Monkey’s Audio is a Windows program by default. However, there is a platform independent version of Java.

FLAC

FLAC stands for “Free Lossless Audio Codec”. There are several lossless audio codecs available. FLAC is suitable here for several reasons: FLAC follows the open source philosophy (free open source code, available for many operating systems), works very fast, has a good and secure framework structure.

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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.