different audio formats

Many times people ask themselves what makes one format different from another and the answer is quite simple because the difference is how the data is stored and how this data is reproduced.

What does an audio file contain? You could say what it contains is an encoding that shows the voltage of the audio which makes it play shows the level of signal a channel has.

Types of audio formats

You could say that in general terms there are three types of audio formats. First of all we have uncompressed formats such as WAV For example.

Secondly, we could talk about formats without loss of quality such as flac and other well-known ones.

Thirdly we will find the formats that have loss of quality. That is to say that to compress they use some method where they discard information for being redundant or for being outside the Auditory Range of the human being among these formats the best known and important is the MP3

Then once understanding what there are three different types of audio formats. The first one, as we mentioned, is about pcm formats such as the WAV type where there is no compression and for example recording a minute of silence occupies more or less the same space as recording a minute of music.

A second type as we have already said is one that uses a compression algorithm that among other things discards silence and redundancy to compress and save space. But without losing information, we know that quality is not lost. The latter is very easy to understand, if the information contained in the file is the same Then there is no loss and therefore the quality is the same as the files without compression with the advantage that here you save at least half of the space.

And as we noted earlier, the third type of audio formats is one in which information is discarded which may be, for example, redundant information or that which is considered to be outside the auditory field of the human ear and therefore it is assumed that It would mean a noticeable loss of quality. However, there are frequencies that we do not hear but if we feel them especially the serious frequencies and this can be understood by anyone who goes to a danceable place. And it will make us that the dance floor not only listens to the bass and the percussions but also feels and that if we remove this information we feel we would be losing quality. There is a lot of information that is lost in the MP3s, for example, which manage to have a very good sound but if we get very demanding without attacking that there is a loss of quality that can become noticeable for people who have a hearing training or a very good ear.

As a summary we will say that today we have a large number of available formats according to our needs and preferences. There is a program called mp4gain which manages to normalize the most popular files of the three types and can also do other things How to modify the Pitch without affecting the speed or on the contrary modify the speed without affecting the Pitch. Which is very interesting. It also offers the possibility of equalizing, which still achieves a greater resemblance between all the files so that the difference is less noticeable when finishing a song and starting the next one.