Digital audio formats


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Digital audio formats

Digital Audio

The digital audio format is a format for presenting audio data used in digital audio recording, as well as for additional storage of recorded material on a computer and other electronic media, so-called audio media.

digital audio

The audio file (a file containing a sound recording) is a computer file consisting of information about the amplitude and frequency of sound, saved for later playback on a computer or player.

Varieties of digital audio formats.

There are several concepts of audio format.

The digital representation of the audio data depends on how the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) quantizes. In sound engineering, two types of quantization are currently the most common:

pulse code modulation

sigma delta modulation

Quantization bit depth and sample rate are often specified for various audio recording and playback devices as a digital audio rendering format (24-bit / 192 kHz; 16-bit / 48 kHz).

The file format determines the structure and presentation characteristics of the audio data when stored on a PC storage device. To eliminate the redundancy of the audio data, audio codecs are used, with the help of which the audio data is compressed. There are three groups of audio file formats:

uncompressed audio formats like WAV, AIFF

lossless compressed audio formats (APE, FLAC)

lossy compressed audio formats (mp3, ogg)

Modular music file formats are highlighted. Created synthetically or from prerecorded live instrument samples, they are primarily used to create modern electronic music (MOD). Also, this can be attributed to the MIDI format, which is not a sound recording, but at the same time, using a sequencer, it allows you to record and play music using a certain set of commands in the form of text.

Digital audio media formats are used for both mass distribution of sound recordings (CD, SACD) and professional sound recording (DAT, minidisc).

For surround sound systems, sound formats can also be distinguished, which are mainly multichannel sound accompaniments for movies. These systems have complete format families from two major competitors, Digital Theater Systems Inc. – DTS and Dolby Laboratories Inc. – Dolby Digital.

The format is also called the number of channels in multichannel sound systems (5.1; 7.1). This system was originally developed for movie theaters, but has since been expanded for home theater systems.


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Digital audio formats on the network

Digital audio formats on the network:

WAV: Waveform files (or simply wave) are the most common sound formats on Windows platforms. WAV files can also be played on Mac and other systems with player software.

MPEG (MP3): The Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) format is a standard format with significant compression capability. MPEG level 3 or MP3 files are frequently used for web music distribution. However, due to their size, MPEG files must be downloaded completely before playing them.

RealAudio (.rm): Real Audio is the technology that currently predominates on the Web. You need a proprietary player, but the basic versions of the player are available for free.
MIDI: The Musical Instrument Digital Interface format is not a digital audio format. It represents notes and other information so that music can be synthesized. MIDI has good support and its files are very small, but it is only useful for certain applications because of the quality of its sound when played on PC hardware.

AU: The u-law format is one of the oldest sound formats on the Internet. Players are available for almost all platforms.

RMF: The Rich Music Format supported by Beatnik (www.beatnik.com) is a high quality audio format, primarily for “download-and-play”, which is becoming increasingly popular.

AIFF: The Audio Interchange File Format is very common on Macs. It is widely used in multimedia applications, but it is not very common on the Web.

Flac: Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) (Lossless audio compression codec) Ogg project format without loss. The initial file can be completely recomposed with the disadvantage that the file occupies much more space than would be obtained when applying lossy compression or Lossy.

Digital audio on the network:

The digital sound is measured by the sampling frequency, or how many times the sound is digitized over a certain period of time. The sampling frequencies are indicated in kilohertz (kHz), which indicate the number of times the sound is sampled per second. The CD sound quality is obtained with 44.1 kHz, or 44,100 samples per second. For stereo sound, two channels are required, each 8 bits; At 16 bits per sample, this results in 705,600 bits of data on a CD, producing high quality sound, at the request of the end user. In reality, the transmission of this amount of data would occupy almost half the bandwidth of the T1 network. As the average user of the Web does not have this bandwidth, another solution is necessary. One possible solution is to decrease the sampling rate when digital sound is created for sending through the Web. A sampling frequency of 8 kHz, in mono, would produce acceptable results for simple applications, such as language, especially if we consider that the playback hardware generally consists of a combination of a simple sound card and a small speaker. Low quality audio does not require more than 64,000 bits of data per second, but the end user still has to wait to download the sound. Modern users need several seconds to receive, even in the best conditions, a single second of low quality sound, making continuous sound impossible.