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What is the difference between MP3 and lossless sound quality?

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What is the difference between MP3 and lossless sound quality?

Is it possible to distinguish Mp3 quality from CD Quality?

Although the sound quality of a CD does not reach the true hearing limit of the human ear, it is impossible for most people to tell the difference between a CD and a higher sampling rate, so everyone assumes that the CD sound quality is 44.1 kHz can be converted to lossless sound quality.

In the past, the capacity of storage media was not large. To store more music and make it easier to stream, we used to compress large CD audio files. High frequency and low volume sounds are removed to achieve the purpose of reducing file size. Similar formats include 3GP, M4A, AA3, WMA, etc.

With the development of the Internet and storage media, the size of audio files is no longer important, so lossless compression has gradually become popular. Common formats are APE, FLAC, etc., which are similar to the beginning of ZIP compressed files, compress audio files AND packed, the final file size is basically only half of the original CD file. Here it is emphasized that the WAV format we often say is a waveform record file, which uses uncompressed PCM encoding, which is also a relatively large WAV file. 44.1 kHz 16-bit WAV audio can also be considered uncompressed. Lossless sound quality.

Since different devices support different audio compression formats, we often need to transcode, and each transcode will cause some loss in audio. For example: If you convert MP3 to lossless format, you can only achieve the sound quality of the original MP3 file. This lossless can also be called false lossless. This is the case for most lossless music provided by music portals.

I have been recording for many years and have used speakers ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. Why do I rarely use speakers under 10,000 yuan? Because speakers under 10,000 yuan cannot be used as monitors. I advise everyone not to charge money for listening to music on music portals for lossless sound quality. Untrained ears will not be able to hear the difference between true and false without loss. For normal ears, MP3 with a bit rate of 320 kbps is already the best.

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What is the difference between MP3 and lossless sound quality?

Now, many people think that it is impossible to listen to MP3, so they search for lossless music everywhere on the Internet.

So what is the difference between lossless music and MP3? What about the various lossless music formats?

A few days ago, a friend of mine bought a Porsche sports car and then came to ask me for lossless sound quality music. I told him there was no need to play MP3s, but people weren’t happy. The sound in the car was fine. Playing MP3 is a loss of audio.

Now there are many music websites that give lossless to the myth, but do you know what lossless is? What is the difference between lossless music and ordinary MP3? Today I come to talk to you about those things that have no losses.

I remember when Apple held the Iphone4 conference, it came up with a definition: retina display. In short, it has been replaced by a high resolution screen with pixels that exceed the recognition limit of the human eye since the Iphone4. I must say that Mr. Qiao’s trick is very good, he defines a word that everyone can accept and makes Apple mobile phones sell all over the world.

However, the same concept is much older in the world of acoustics. Sound is a type of energy wave. After the experimental research of countless generations of ancestors, it is believed that 40 kHz is a value that can well restore the sound heard by the human ear. Later, for various commercial reasons, some record companies defined the sample rate of CDs at 44.1 kHz, which they considered to be the “retina display” that the ears could hear. Later, 44.1 kHz brought innumerable problems to subsequent generations, because it is not an integer and cannot be divided and multiplied simply by performing SRC sampling, so early Inter defined the output sample rate of the sound card as 48 kHz to save problem. , which creates a sample rate conversion problem that all sound engineers hate

lossless music

Lossless music is a kind of music file playback format, which is divided into two types: lossy compression and lossless compression.

However, due to data loss in the audio digitizing process, it is actually impossible to achieve true lossless.
chinese nameintact musicexplainMusic file playback formatApplication fieldmusicClassificationLossy and lossless compressionaudio compression codeFLAC
content

type of sound
Commonly seen MP3, WMA, and OGG are called lossy compression. As the name implies, lossy compression reduces the audio sample rate and bitrate, and the output audio file will be smaller than the original file. . Another audio compression is called lossless compression, which can compress the volume of the audio file to a smaller size on the premise of saving 100% of all the data in the original file. Same size, same bitrate. Lossless compression formats include APE, FLAC, WavPack, LPAC, WMALossless, AppleLossless, TTA, Tak, TAC, La, OptimFROG, Shorten, and common and conventional lossless compression formats include APE, FLAC, TTA, TAK.
General WAV CD can capture this music format. However, due to the high volume and uncompressed original audio, it can usually be compressed and converted to FLAC or APE at a lower volume. Note: wav is still a lossless format, and the last two are lossless compression formats
encoding format
BOW
APE is one of the popular digital music file formats. APE is a lossless audio compression technology, that is, after compressing the audio data file read from the audio CD in APE format, you can restore the file in APE format, and the restored audio file is the same as the original. compressed audio file. Exactly the same as before, nothing to lose. [one]
FLAC
FLAC is short for Free Lossless Audio Codec [2] , which can be interpreted as Chinese lossless audio compression coding. FLAC is a well-known free audio compression codec, which is characterized by lossless compression. Unlike other lossy compression codes such as MP3 and AAC, it does not destroy any original audio information, so it can restore the sound quality of music discs. It has been supported by many software and hardware audio products since 2012.
FLAC is similar to MP3, but it has lossless compression, which means that the audio is compressed in FLAC without losing any information. This compression is similar to Zip, but FLAC will give you a higher compression ratio, because FLAC is a compression method specially designed for the characteristics of audio, and you can use the player to play FLAC compressed files like you normally play MP3 files (many Car players and home audio devices already support FLAC, and you can find links to the manufacturers of these devices on the FLAC website).
FLAC is free and is supported by most operating systems, including Windows, “unix” (Linux, BSD, Solaris, OSX, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. And FLAC provides a build system in autotools, MSVC, Watcom C and ProjectBuilder development tools.
WAV

The WAV format is a sound file format developed by Microsoft, also known as a wave sound file. It is the first digital audio format and is widely supported by the Windows platform and its applications. The WAV format supports many compression algorithms, supports a variety of audio bits, sample rates, and channels. It adopts a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz and a quantization number of 16 bits. Therefore, the sound quality of WAV is almost the same as that of CD, but WAV format requires too much storage space, it is very inconvenient to communicate and broadcast.
WAV’s full name is Wave Audio Files, and WAV is derived from sampling analog waveforms of sound. Sampling the analog waveform of sound with different sampling rates can obtain a series of discrete sample points, convert the values of these sample points into binary numbers with different quantization bits (8 bits or 16 bits), and then store them in the disc, this produces a WAV file of the sound, a wave file . Microsoft Sound System Sound Finder software can convert AIF , SND and VOD files to WAV format.
This format records the waveform of the sound, so as long as the sample rate sample rate

MP3 audio files and lossless files, which is the best?

For your music collection, better an mp3 audio file or a lossless file? Let’s see the differences together and what format to choose
In the transition from analog music (vinyl records, cassettes, and other similar media) to digital music (audio CDs, mp3 audio files, etc.) experienced a few decades ago, compression algorithms have played a critical role. To avoid taking up too much space on the data storage media (when the transition hit the core, each byte of available space was worth so much gold) it was necessary to develop algorithms that would help compress the file size without overly affecting the audio quality. .

Lossless Audio

It was during these years that names such as mp3 audio files, WMA files, WaV files, and OGG files began to circulate with some frequency in musical environments (and not) around the world.

Lossless vs. at a loss

Over the years, the panorama of audio formats expanded dramatically and there was the curious formation of two opposite blocks. On the one hand, in fact, the so-called lossless files (literally lossless) were to be ‘concentrated’, while on the other side of the musical ‘Iron Curtain’ were the lossy files (literally lossy). As the names suggest, the difference between one format and another is due to the possible loss of musical information.

comparision mp3 vs lossless

Phonometric comparison between lossless files and mp3 audio files

Lossless files guarantee (and guarantee) the same sound depth and quality as an audio CD, while lossy files (such as mp3 audio files) reduce the size of a music track in the order 10 times at a partial cost sound quality. For example, if a lossless file takes up 40 megabytes, an mp3 audio file of the same song will be just over 4 megabytes.

Bitrate issue

What makes the difference between the two audio file formats is the bit rate used in the analog to digital conversion process. When we talk about bit rate (sometimes also written bit rate) we mean the number of bits that can process in the unit of time. In music, the bit rate measures the amount of data contained in each second of the audio track: the higher the value of the bit rate, the better the quality of the music.

In an mp3 audio file, this value can range from 32 kbps (kilobits per second) to 320 kbps. However, in a lossless file, there is no compression, and with a bit rate of around 1,411 kbps, the audio quality is comparable to that of an audio CD. According to the numbers, therefore, lossless files are better than mp3 audio files, ensuring deeper, true-to-original sound. However, as experience teaches us, numbers are not always everything.

Slimming differences

The reality of events appears to be quite different. The human ear, in fact, would not be so sensitive as to notice differences between an excellent quality mp3 audio file (with 320kbps bit rates) of a lossless file.

To understand this, just run one or more ABX tests. Such a test consists of cross-comparing two known files (called A and B) and two unknown files (X and Y, which are the same as A and B but with a different bit rate). At the end of the test, two pairs of files must be formed, matching the originals with the relative modified files. If you are using an mp3 audio file with a high bit rate (320 kbps or slightly lower), even the ear with the most musical training will not be able to distinguish the differences.

Despite this, a music file made up of lossless files still guarantees a substantial advantage over a file made up of mp3 audio files. The first, in fact, can be converted to other audio formats without this leading to a loss of quality; Conversions of a lossy file, on the other hand, will cause further loss of music information and deterioration of audio quality.