Digital audio formats
Today, most people listen to music completely digitally. The differences between digital audio formats like WAV, FLAC, MP3, and ALAC are not clear to everyone. We put the facts together.
While vinyl is booming and CD sales are slowly but surely falling, today’s music is often heard without any physical medium. Whether you use your smartphone or digital audio player, you can move forward with digital audio formats on the go. After all, no one today wants to carry a Discman and multiple CDs with them when they typically have a powerful pocket computer in the form of a smartphone that can play digital music files. But what are the differences between the individual file formats and what are their advantages and disadvantages?
WAV and AIFF: the uncompressed ones
The Wave container format (.wav) was developed by Microsoft. Saves uncompressed audio content, so files require a lot of storage space (2 minutes can take 20MB of space. WAV is especially important when recording and editing audio content. The downside of .wav files is that they don’t metadata is required (about, Title Artist) can be stored,
the equivalent developed by Apple AIFF (.aif) Due to the fact that Apple computers are very common in music production, this audio format is very common there.
MP3, AAC, WMA, Ogg-Vorbis – compressed to save space, but not lossless
The MP3 file format (.mp3, named for the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 compression codec) developed by the Fraunhofer Institute in the 1980s is probably the best-known digital audio format. It gave the MP3 player its name, and for a long time music was digitized almost exclusively as MP3, for example, on the extremely popular and now illegal file-sharing networks around the turn of the millennium. The advantage of MP3 is the small amount of storage space required: on average, it takes up one-tenth the size of the original file. However, one disadvantage that should not be neglected is that it is lossy – frequencies that are inaudible to humans are removed to drastically reduce the memory required. To what extent this affects the sound, you can compare Flac with MP3 Read.
AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is a successor to the MP3 format, offering slightly better sound quality. Apple continues to mainly offer songs in this audio format on the iTunes store.
WMA stands for Windows Media Audio (.wma), as the name suggests, a development by Microsoft. .Wma is also a lossy compression file format.
A somewhat rarer audio format is Ogg-Vorbis (.ogg), where Vorbis is the music compression technology and .ogg is the container format. Like MP3, .ogg is also lossy, but requires less storage space and better quality.
FLAC / ALAC / WMA lossless – the lossless
Lossless formats were developed to preserve all sound information while keeping the amount of memory required small. With all file formats, the required memory is reduced to about half the original file. With audio conversion software, the file can be converted to other lossless formats, something unthinkable with lossy formats. This is why lossless file formats are popular for archiving music collections in a space-saving way.
FLAC – Free Lossless Audio Code (.flac) is a free audio format, so it is not owned by any major corporation. ALAC: Apple Lossless Audio Codec (.alac) is Apple’s lossless file format, while Microsoft also has its own development on the market with WMA Lossless.
