Best digital quality audio formats
It is often a measure of the quality of a track. There is a lot of debate about which is the best music format. So I recently witnessed a similar dispute. Not virtual, but real. In general, I decided to write an article on audio formats and try to explain in human language which is the best audio format. I’ll try to avoid abstruse terms and feature descriptions, so as not to hurt the brains of readers again.
I immediately admit that I am not going to sing praises in honor of any particular audio format, just as I am not going to “disappoint” anyone. Let everyone decide for themselves. I will not go into the “jungle” and review the most famous formats of high quality music.
I believe that these disputes are conducted by people, to put it mildly, not well versed in this matter. Because professionals (that is, people who know what they are doing and why they are doing it) will not do it. With today’s abundance of audio formats, anyone who needs it will find what they need. Agree, a dispute between a tractor driver and a driver about which is better – a tractor or a car will look silly. For some purposes a tractor, for others a machine. Here it is the same.
WAV is rightly considered the highest quality music format. This audio format is not compressed or lossy. Used for recording and processing sound, this is the highest quality sound, as the WAV recording is not compressed. Encoded to any other audio format. Well, as a result, it “weighs” a lot, so it is mainly used for sound recording.
Lossy audio compression
I’ll start with the well-known and widely used (though not always loved) MP3 format. This audio format is actively used everywhere and everywhere, where it is needed and where it is not needed. But this does not mean that it is not worthy of the place it occupies in its niche. Very worthy. Although he has been “sitting” in his niche for about two decades, no one has “kicked” him out of there yet. And there were many who wanted to say it. And the main favorite of them is WMA (Windows Media), which was conceived by Microsoft as an alternative to MP3. As a result, it is an alternative and it is, despite the best efforts of the developers. The next character is OGG. Despite the broader possibilities than MP3, for example, it never received widespread acceptance. Although it is compatible with many operating systems. Perhaps the AAC audio format is worth mentioning, which was supposed to change on the relay. Encoding quality has been improved and compression loss reduced. But Ay.
The main advantage of these formats is their small size. The downside is the loss of quality.
Lossless audio compression
FLAC is perhaps the most popular lossless audio format and encoding codec. Music lovers are gradually switching to this format. WavPack competes with it, but it is not that popular. It’s the same story with Apple Lossless, which reduces the size to 60%.
Here the story is exactly the opposite: the quality is better and the size is greater.
Skeptics say that it is almost impossible to distinguish MP3 (320 kbps) from Losless by ear. “And if there is no difference, why pay more?” In fact, on ordinary equipment, it is quite difficult to feel the difference in audio formats, even for music lovers. But there are those who immediately feel this difference (they personally attended the experiment). But when listening to a good device, the difference is huge. The problem is that not everyone can afford a good device.
Compressed using special lossless audio codecs, it can be restored with absolute precision if desired.
If you take a normal audio CD with analog sound, record it in WAV format for uncompressed sound, then compress WAV using lossless codec, then decompress the resulting sound file into WAV and burn the result to a blank CD, you can get two completely identical audio files COMPACT DISCS.
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?
