Tag: what are common audio formats

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Audio Formats

Main formats

AAC
Advanced audio coding
The format is a further development of the MP3 format.
A THE C
Apple lossless audio codec
Apple Lossless (also known as Apple Lossless Encoder, ALE or Apple Lossless Audio Codec, ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple Inc for lossless compression of digital music.
ALS
MPEG-4 audio lossless encoding
MPEG-4 ALS is an efficient and fast codec for a variety of applications.
AMR
Adaptive multiple rate
The AMR compression format was developed specifically for use in cellular systems. Its field of application is voice audio content compression.
BOW
Monkey Audio
Monkey’s Audio (Windows only) is considered one of the best lossless audio codecs for storing music due to its effective ratio of output file size to speed.
ATTRAC
Adaptive Transformation Acoustic Coding
ATRAC is a lossy compression system based on psychoacoustic principles. Compresses an audio CD to approximately 1/5 of the original with a slight loss in sound quality.
Asao
Nellymoser audio codec
Nellymoser Asao is a proprietary codec that was designed for low bit rates.
CELTIC
Overlapping Energy Constrained Transformation
The CELT codec is an algorithm for compressing audio data. Like MP3, Vorbis, and AAC, it is suitable for high-quality music streaming. Unlike these formats, CELT also has a very low latency, lower even than Speex, GSM or G.729.
Dolby
Dolby has developed many audio sound formats. Among them there are also compression formats.
FLAC
Free Lossless Audio Codec
FLAC is possibly the most popular lossless audio compression format.
LossyWAV
LossyWAV is a free lossy compression format. But, in essence, it is a preprocessor for PCM audio stored in WAV containers.
MP1
MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer I
MPEG-1 Audio Layer I (abbreviated as MP1) is one of the three formats included in the MPEG-1 standard. Even though it is compatible with many media players, the codec is already very outdated and has been superseded by the MP2 and MP3 codecs.
MP2
MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer II
MP2 is still used in the broadcasting industry for satellite transmission of digital video transmission and digital audio transmission.
MP3
Audio Layer III MPEG-1/2
The format is sometimes confused with MPEG-3, but MP3 is designed to compress only audio information and the full name sounds like MPEG Audio Layer-3.
MP3 surround sound
In 2004, Fraunhofer IIS released a backward compatible extension for MP3. MP3 Surround files provide high quality 5.1 sound with new decoders.
MP4
MPEG-4 Part 14
These are file extensions for the MPEG-4 container format, which can include all types of multimedia (video, natural and synthetic audio, 2D and 3D graphics, animated avatars, etc.).
MPC
Musepack
Musepack is a lossy compression scheme invented by the German programmer Andree Buschmann.
MT9
A new multitrack waveform data storage format that claims to be MP3.
Ogg Vorbis Audio
The Ogg vorbis format was developed by Xiphophorus. On the same site you can find the source codes of the project. It is part of the Ogg project to create a completely open multimedia system.
OptimFROG
OptimFROG is a lossless compression algorithm whose main goal is to reduce the size of audio files as much as possible. This is somewhat similar to ZIP compression, but is highly specialized for audio data.
Opus
Opus is a highly versatile, royalty-free, open source audio codec.
RealMedia
RealMedia is a proprietary streaming and multimedia file format owned by RealNetworks products and services.
SND
Sound
SND (SouND) is a digital audio file format created by Apple.
Speex
Speex is a patent-free audio compression format developed for voice transmission, as well as for use in open source software (eg VoIP).
TAK
Tom’s lossless Audio Kompressor
TAK is lossless audio compression that provides APE efficiency and FLAC decoding speed.
VQF
TwinVQ
A proprietary format that was created to replace MP3, but was never fully developed due to its proprietary nature.
Wav
Wave audio file format
The WAV format is perhaps the most common audio storage format. It is the easiest to use to process and is compatible with almost all audio players.
WMA
Windows Media Audio
WMA is a compression format developed by Microsoft.
WavPack
WavPack is a completely open, lossless, high quality, lossy audio compression format with a unique hybrid mode.

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What audio formats do you need? Part 3

 

.flac

Advantage:
– The best sound quality
– lossless compression
– additional features (built-in markup for tracks, any resolution, stream, etc.)
– free license, open source

Disadvantages:
– average file size (more than “lost”, but less than “uncompressed” formats)
– On older operating systems, you may need to download and install the player program beforehand.

To know what to use:
to listen to high-quality music, create a music library, phono archive

ogg Vorbis

A lossy compression format with slightly better sound quality than mp3, free license and additional features. The gg format was created for sound and video, in addition, it is possible to use different sound coding systems (the so-called container format). Usually ogg is used with the Vorbis encoder, which provides better sound quality than mp3 at the same bit rate. All audio examples on Wikipedia are presented in this format, as it takes up little space and follows the ideology of free software. Compatible with most Internet browsers and many players. It has proven itself at both high and low bit rates, which is important for voice transmission.

Recently, the manufacturer, the Xiph.org foundation, suggested using the new free Opus encoder instead of Vorbis, which is already supported in many browsers. If you generalize further, common users will not notice the “substitution” as the file will likely have the same extension. ogg (although there is a separate .opus extension). However, while this is a matter for the future.

ogg (Vorbis)

Advantage:
– Better quality / size ratio
– Small file size
– Free license
– Additional functions (built-in markup for tracks, any sample rate, stream, etc.)

Disadvantages:
– Average sound quality (better than mp3, but worse than “lossless” formats)
– not all players are supported yet (but almost all browsers)

What to use for:
Internet: audio samples on free sites, podcasts, broadcasts, networking projects; computer games, voice recording

wav (and aiff)

The oldest audio format that contains uncompressed audio, similar to an audio campaign disc. wav was developed by Microsoft in the early 90’s (and the aiff format was Apple in 1988). The wavyaiff formats are identical to each other, except for some technical details that are only of interest to specialists. Both formats are now compatible with Windows and Mac OS, so in general, there is absolutely no difference in their use. The only difference is that aiff allows you to store additional information. Of course, WAV and AIFF files take up a lot of disk space, so it’s not worth storing your music library in these formats or using them to send them over the Internet.

However, wav (and aiff) have an advantage over compression formats. The fact is that when compressed formats are played, the player decompresses them on the fly, which requires additional processor resources. While listening to music, it does not matter, the processor load is still very low. But when working with sound in real time (complex sound processing, creating sound collages, improvisation, sampling, etc.), this can be significant. Therefore, it makes sense to store short sounds in uncompressed formats, intended to continue working with them, for example, sound effects.

.wav (and .aiff)

Advantage:
– The best sound quality
– the most economical use of the processor during playback
– compatible with most programs and devices

Disadvantages:
– large file size

What to use for:
processing, real-time sound manipulation, storing short sounds

How to play all these files and how to convert music to them?

play

As mentioned above, now there is no problem to play any of these formats on a computer and phone. Windows Media Player and iTunes play flac, wav, mp3; Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera (including their mobile versions) and many other browsers support all four formats in some way.

However, for convenience, versatility, and to avoid any pitfalls, we recommend installing a proven (and, of course, free) player that plays all formats correctly.

What audio formats do you need? Part 2

Hence, mankind started looking for a way to reduce file size without reducing sample rate and bit depth.

Compression with loss of sound quality

As a result of the research, it was found that human perception “skips” some sounds and their individual components, and if they are removed from the sound stream, the listener will not notice anything. Thanks to an algorithm that discards the “unnecessary”, it was possible to achieve impressive file size compression rates: 10 times and more! However, it turned out that the human brain “is not dumb” and understands that something is wrong with sound. Lossy compression gives a flatter, “cardboard” sound, lost transparency, sound details, a sense of space.

The bit rate, which is set by the creator of the sound file, plays an important role. For lossy compression, the higher the bit rate, the better the sound quality, but also the larger the file size. About 15 years ago, most music listeners were satisfied with the bit rate of MP3 files – 128-192 kbps (ten times) compression. Recently, there has been a tendency to prefer higher bit rates (256-320 kbps) or other formats (.ogg, .opus). Advanced compression algorithms use a variable bit rate: more bits are allocated for more complex musical pieces and less for lighter pieces, maintaining more or less the same quality at different moments of the sound.

Lossless compression

To avoid quality degradation, lossless audio compression methods have been developed as an alternative to lossy compression. Such compression is similar to archiving: when the data is packed into an archive, a file in zip, rar, etc. format, the size of which is smaller than the original data. It can then be unpacked and the original data will be accurately restored to the last bit. But conventional archiving methods produce very little compression of the audio data. Therefore, special algorithms for sound began to be developed, based on the idea of ​​predictability, self-similarity of sound waves. These algorithms usually compress a file 2 to 3 times. The resulting file size is larger than lossy compression, but still fully retains the original quality.

Lossless audio files (such as .flac) can be played without first unpacking – the audio player unzips the file during playback (the same is true for lossy files, however).
Unlike “lossy” formats, the bit rate isn’t that important here: it changes all the time depending on how much you’ve managed to compress a particular piece of sound, and of course it doesn’t affect the quality.

Audio file formats

To reiterate our original thesis, you only need four audio formats for all possible purposes. Consider them!

mp3

The most popular audio format with the worst sound quality. Lossy compression format.

As a step?

mp3 is historically the first audio compression format. It appeared and spread in those distant times, when the memory of computers was scarce and the Internet was accessed by telephone calls. Digital sound as such was still a novelty and existed alongside analog cassettes. The alternative to mp3 was just uncompressed sound (wav …), which takes up large amounts of data. Users were inspired by the very ability to burn all of their favorite artist’s albums to CD-ROM or send a song via email. At the time, undemanding consumers paid no heed to the voices of skeptics. So mp3 soon became the most widely used audio storage format.

[“I don’t hear the difference between mp3 and non-mp3 quality.” ]

.mp3

Advantage:
– Support for the maximum number of programs and devices
– Small file size

Disadvantages:
– Poor sound quality
– Limited technical capabilities

What to use for:
to listen to “drafts”, for preliminary screenings, “fast” delivery of demos over the Internet, rehearsals, official purposes, for voice recording

flac

flac is a lossless audio compression format, the most popular among its “siblings”. Compresses the file size, depending on the complexity of the audio information, between 1.4 and 4 times (the bit rate varies from 350 to 1010 kbps). Its prevalence was facilitated by open source code, which made it possible to create a large number of programs that work with it on all operating systems. Flac spread it so widely that even “brontosaurs” like Apple and Microsoft resigned themselves to its existence.

What audio formats do you need?

You are a music lover or a professional musician, or you simply use music for some of your own purposes (performances, dances, videos …), but you are not well versed in all these “computer” things: formats, files, bitrates, extensions … This article is for you …

The content is brief: of all the variety of audio formats, you need four:
1) for high-quality listening, a music library;
2) for “fuzzy” listening service purposes;
3) “for Wikipedia”;
4) for real-time audio processing.

Which ones, why and what to do about it – read below!

Digital sound
Audio Pixels Audio
compressed and uncompressed

To understand how one format differs from another, let’s briefly understand what
it is digital sound.

Sound “pixels”

You have surely seen an image of a sound wave (for example, in a sound editing program). Like any image, a sound graphic can be recorded digitally by dividing it into many small “pixel” parts. The smaller the pixels, the more horizontally and vertically, the better the image.

Only in the case of sound, horizontally, we plot the time axis and vertically, the value of the signal (in real sound propagating through the air, the value of the signal is the change in air pressure). Each second of sound is divided into many smaller identical time intervals, in each of which a signal value is recorded. The number of these segments per second is called the sampling frequency …. And the number of possible gradations of the signal value is determined by the bit depth; This parameter indicates how many bits are used to record a signal value: the more bits that are used, the more gradations of the value can be recorded. For example, our figure shows a bit width of 4 bits, which gives 2 4 = 16 value gradations.

Digital recording of a sound wave. The green curve is the original sound, the purple bars are its digital recording as separate signal values.

As a result of digital rendering, the sound wave looks like this:

Digital-sound-image__presentation_2.png

Digital representation of a sound wave.

This is of course a very rough “drawing”, but if you use a higher sample rate and bit depth you can make the “pitch” invisible to our ears (just like very small pixels are invisible for the eye).

The sample rate of an audio CD is 44,100 hertz (signal values ​​per second) = 44.1 kHz (kilohertz). This is sufficient to encode all frequencies audible to the human ear. And its capacity is 16 bits, which allows to transmit 2 16 = 65,536 gradations of signal values.

Experts discuss whether you need a higher resolution for high-quality sound. Indirect evidence suggests yes. Hence, there is digital sound with higher sample rates (48, 96, 192, 384 kHz) and bit depths (24, 32 bits). This high resolution supports DVD Audio, many types of files (flac, wav, aiff …), some cinema sound formats (Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio …).

Uncompressed and compressed audio bit rate

However, even an audio CD takes up a lot of space. This is shown by the bit rate parameter (bit rate, data rate, kbit / s): it indicates how many bits (kilobits) are required to record 1 second of sound. For uncompressed “normal” sound, it is very easy to find out the bit rate: you need to multiply the bit depth (number of bits times 1 signal value) by the sample rate (number of values ​​per second) and by the number of sound channels (let’s not forget that stereo sound has two sound channels, left and right, in each of which the sound wave is recorded separately).

Using our figure, the bitrate can be represented symbolically as follows:

Digital-sound-image__presentation_3.png

Uncompressed audio bit rate (blue area)

It is easy to calculate that the bit rate of an audio CD is

16 bits × 44 100 Hz × 2 channels = 1,411,200 bps = 1,411.2 kbps.

This is usually true for uncompressed audio file formats (wav, aiff).
So one second of uncompressed sound takes approx. 172 KB, one minute – 10 MB, one hour of music occupies 606 MB, the total sound volume of an audio CD is 74 minutes, ie approx. 750 MB.

[How do we calculate this? ]

Hence, mankind started looking for a way to reduce file size without reducing sample rate and bit depth.

Audio Formats for High Quality Sound – Part 2

Audio formats

FLAC
Free lossless audio codec. Its advantage is its great popularity, almost like MP3.

The compression ratio is up to 60% of the original file.
Compatible with most software platforms and devices.
It can be a profitable alternative when it comes to burning CDs. Almost indistinguishable in sound, but the advantage of saving almost half the disk space.

A THE C
Format for owners of Apple-branded devices, as others may not be supported.

Slightly less good than FLAC in terms of compression ratio.

But Apple owners simply have no other choice: the free FLAC format does not work in principle on iOS and iTunes.

Lossless WMA
An improved version of the aforementioned WMA. Slightly lower than FLAC and ALAC. It has a significant advantage over ALAC, as WMA is compatible with Windows and Mac.

However, it is not very widespread, so if you have many different devices in use, there is likely an incompatibility.

Verdict
Well, we have considered all the most famous, widespread and having the best audio formats and briefly talked about the characteristics of their use.

So now you can confidently decide in which case and in what format it is best to convert your sound recordings, music and audiobooks.

Audio formats for high quality sound

This includes uncompressed formats.

PCM – Pulse Code Modulation. The original analog audio is sampled as is, without any modification.
PCM is the most common audio recording format used on CDs and DVDs. Dolby multi-channel, surround, subject to high-quality speakers, sounding almost one-to-one with a live performance.

If you like to sit in front of a home theater and immerse yourself in empathy for the main and supporting characters in the movie, this is it.

Wav
A fairly old format, developed as early as 1991. Well, that’s how the old masters always thought of high quality.

Many people consider WAV to be an uncompressed format. But in fact it is a container and it can also contain compressed files.

In most cases, WAV contains uncompressed PCM audio. Therefore, the quality is high. But even for one minute of recording, approximately 32MB of memory is wasted.

Fairly good compatibility with Windows and Mac.

AIFF
An analog of WAV from Apple developers. This is also a container and usually contains sound in PCM format as well. Good compatibility with Windows.

Lossy compressed audio formats
Truly popular formats for everyone.

MP3
In accordance with the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 standard. It appeared in 1993 and instantly won universal love precisely because of its economy in memory consumption.

A CD can store the complete discography of your favorite band.
Throw some records in the glove compartment and you can enjoy music from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.
During this time, you can listen to all the books by all the writers worth listening to.
The MP3 format is such a solid eunuch, from which all the most reluctant cut, but began to show the ability to accumulate and save. Also, MP3 is a very inexpensive format.

The main advantage is that he leans on everything that he just plays and sings.

CAA
An advanced form of audio encoding. The younger but advanced brother of MP3. It has slightly improved sound characteristics and a higher compression ratio.

Applies to Android, iOS, iTunes, YouTube, Nintendo, and the latest PlayStation.

It is also a folk format, but for a little more advanced people. Which is reflected in the title.

OGG
In general, this is not a format, but a container, and in fact the name OGG says nothing about the sound it contains.

However, most of the time it contains the Vorbis codec.

Significantly improved sound quality relative to other lossy compression formats.
Smaller files can be recorded with the same sound quality.
An even cheaper format than MP3.

The problem is that the OGG format is free, so nobody invests in its promotion. Therefore, it may not be compatible everywhere and incompatibilities may arise.

Then you have to convert to MP3.

WMA
Microsoft’s proprietary format, therefore, although it is an improved version of MP3 and OGG, has not received widespread use and is not compatible with most devices and platforms.

Advice. If it is possible to use WMA instead of MP3, use the former. Cheaper and more pleasant to the ear.

Lossless compressed audio formats
Lossless compressed audio formats
For owners of advanced and expensive devices, branded desktops and mobiles, with high-quality headphones and speakers.

The downside to these formats is that file sizes of the same recording length will be roughly two to three times larger.

However, although lossless compression is stated, it should not be confused with high-fidelity audio recordings. There are minimal losses, although notable only for musicians.

Audio formats, advantages

As actual field studies have shown, a good idea to rank the top ten audio formats turned out to be an impossible task at first.

Competition conditions too different for unequal participants. Also, some corruption schemes or lobbyists of transnational corporations in the field of audio recording interfere in our good cause of helping people to choose the best sound product.

The most popular MP3 format in the world reached the leaders of popular love solely because of the multi-million dollar investment in promotion. And if you take the sound quality, then regular. And even in terms of compression and disk space savings, it’s not the highest compression either.

Therefore, a compromise decision was made: divide the test subjects into three groups and compare and identify the leaders by groups.

Three types of audio formats
No compression.
Lossless compression.
Lossy compression.
Uncompressed audio recording formats show their best performance only on high-quality professional audio equipment.

If you have an inexpensive tablet or smartphone in your hands, then wonderful music will play on your device, but you will not listen to it simply because the hardware and software resource and the speakers or headphones are not capable of reproducing such high sound quality. .

On the other hand, if you start MP3 sound recording through professional stereos and amplifiers, you will hear such noise and rattle from the speakers that, again, this type of use is completely pointless.

Audio Classification by Type of Sound Reproduction Equipment
For professional equipment, uncompressed audio formats.
For semi-professional teams, compressed audio formats. But without loss.
For inexpensive equipment: lossy and compressed audio formats.
In the first case, the hardware is so expensive that it is ridiculous to worry about saving money on media.

In the second case, the owner of an Apple device for a thousand dollars will obviously also be able to call himself to spend a couple of hundred dollars on a bulky memory.

In the third case, since it has hardly been possible to raise money for a cheap smartphone, saving on the size of the stored music is very important. Well, no one is going to listen to a symphony orchestra in Hi-Fi on the phone anyway. Unless you can download a ringtone from the classics to make a joke look like a fresh bell pepper in the eyes of tomatoes.

Highest quality music format. – part 6

Audio CD file: FLAC has a CUESHEET metadata block in which the audio CD markup table is stored.

For example, you can burn an audio CD to a single file and then import its markup table when encoding, so that the resulting file has the same layout as the disc. If the original audio CD is damaged, you can restore the partition table to write an exact copy of the disc.
Error resistance: Due to the division into frames, errors in the sequence are located at the level of the frame where the error occurred (usually a few hundredths of a second). In some codecs, a single error can cause the entire rest of the stream to be lost.

But this is all prose. The trick is this. As you know, the original CDs are divided into only 2 channels, that is, the usual STEREO. The Flac has the multi-channel playback capability, up to 8 channels BUT if you remove a copy of the Flac from the original compact, the multi-channel capability remains unused and as a result we have the same 2 channels and stereo. The size of flac differs from mp3 by about 6 times.

Monkey Audio (* .ape)

The * .ape format in which Monkey’s Audio encodes, the most popular among lossless codecs. Even those who don’t know what “lossless compression” have heard of it. The reason for its popularity is the free and very high quality codec. stream compression, which even exceeds traditional WinRAR archiver compression at maximum settings. Support for the format is implemented in various players (eg Foobar2000), a plugin for Winamp comes with Monkey’s own audio, and for all remaining players you can install one of the DirectShow filters (eg Radlight). The only downside to this format is the presence of the Windows platform only. The Playback plugin supports all popular features like gapless and replaygain and ID3 tags like MP3. When encoding the stream, there are five different compression rates available, from Fast to Insane. The latter option provides an unprecedented compression rate that no one else can match. A lossless codec, but the processor load when playing the resulting file is also quite large. Having installed the Monkey Audio Distribution Kit, you will be able to encode a few other formats as well, including OGG, WavPack, Shorten, Lame. All of them are also compatible with the graphical shell.

AAC (* .aac, * .mp4, * .m4a)
The main advantage of AAC is its support for multichannel audio, thanks to which it got a “permanent job” in DVD video production. At the moment, there are already quite a few AAC codecs, among which the most famous is AAC LC, used in Apple QuickTime technology. The use of Nero AAC in the Nero Burning Rom package is also common. The number of hardware players that support AAC is growing, the most popular now being the Apple iPod, which works with * .m4a files that are created with iTunes or downloaded from the Apple online store. In a sense, the AAC format can be called very viable, as it is already used in the industry and obviously it will not be allowed to “wear out” so easily. Hence the solid confidence of ordinary users, who may well rely on it, choosing a replacement for the old MP3.

DVD-Audio is a digital DVD format specially created for high-quality audio playback. A DVD-Audio disc allows you to record soundtracks with a different number of audio channels (from mono to 5.1).
Multi-channel audio support is a major advantage DVD-Audio has over previous formats. The presence of 5 loudspeakers allows the positioning of the sounds in a three-dimensional space, which offers two new possibilities: the precise transmission of the acoustics of the room and the creation of new sound images intertwining special effects with the musical content itself. The human hearing aid distinguishes the direction of sounds not only from left to right, but also from back to front (and, to a lesser extent, from top to bottom), so two channels of audio are not enough to simulate volume. .
The sound of the record can be quantized to 16, 20 or 24 bits, as well as sample rates of 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4 or 192 kHz. (A maximum of two channels of audio can be recorded at a sampling frequency of 176.4 or 192 kHz.)
There are two versions of the DVD-Audio format: simply DVD-Audio only for audio content and DVD-AudioV for audio with additional information.

SACD – Acronym for Super Audio Compact Disc – an optical disc format for storing music. Double Layer or Hybrid – readable on both regular CD players and SACD players.

Highest quality music format. – part 5

There are many music formats now. Not so long ago, the popular mp3 standard is outdated due to frequency cuts, and even a high bit rate doesn’t save it.

It is not a bad option to replace the Ogg format, BUT it also has losses, although they are smaller.

OGG Vorbis
The youngest format developed from scratch relatively recently is OGG Vorbis. Some predict a good future for it, others an imminent sunset, but most of those who have tried it in action agree that this is a very promising and very high-quality project. Let me remind you that both mp3PRO and WMA are commercial formats and consequently closed, unlike what OGG is an open project, with source codes available to anyone, making OGG Vorbis the fastest growing compression format , something like a project. LAME for MP3. Despite its young age, OGG has recently undergone a complete optimization of its algorithm to work with low bit rates. And now a new version format received the RC2 prefix to the name. At the moment, according to the available information, the OGG Vorbis encoder compresses the stream only with variable bit rate (VBR), performing compression with a bit rate of 32 to 350 kbps.

Due to the increasing volumes of the hard disk, the requirements for the quality of digitized music began to increase and lossless digitization began to gain more and more popularity.

A surprising example is the Flac format.
FLAC only supports fixed point samples, not floating point. It can handle any PCM bit resolution from 4 to 32 bits per sample, any sample rate from 1 Hz to 1,048,570 Hz in 1 Hz increments, and any number of channels from 1 to 8. Channels can be grouped in cases such as stereo and 5.1 channel surround to take advantage of inter-channel correlations to increase compression. FLAC uses CRC checksums to identify corrupted frames when used in a streaming protocol, and it also has a full MD5 hash of the raw PCM audio stored in its STREAMINFO metadata header.
FLAC (English Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a popular free codec for audio compression. Unlike the lossy Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and AAC codecs, it does not remove any information from the audio stream and is suitable for both daily listening and archiving an audio collection. Today, the FLAC format is compatible with many audio applications.
FLAC Features:
Lossless compression: PCM data encoding does not lead to information loss, therefore the decoded audio file is absolutely identical to the one entered into the encoder. To determine possible errors during file transfer, a 16-bit checksum is calculated for each frame. The integrity at a later stage is confirmed by the MD5 signature of the decompressed data, which is in the header and can be verified during replay, decoding or testing.
Speed: The encoding and decoding speed is asymmetric. For decoding, only whole number arithmetic is used, which requires much less computation than in perceptual codecs. Real-time decoding can be easily accomplished even on older computers.
Hardware Support: With a free base implementation and easy decoding, FLAC is the only lossless audio codec that has hardware support.
Streaming: each FLAC frame contains enough information to decode itself. The current FLAC framework is independent of the ones before and after. FLAC uses timing codes and checksums, allowing the decoder to quickly select a position in the current sequence.
Search: FLAC supports fast and accurate search, which is useful not only for playback, but also allows FLAC to be used in sound editors.
Metadata: FLAC has an extensible metadata system. New metadata blocks can be defined and implemented in future versions without losing backward compatibility. Metadata types are now defined for Audio CD lookup tables, labels, and markup lists. An application can use the APPLICATION metadata block after registering an ID for it.

Highest quality music format. – Part 4

 

AAC

An advanced form of audio encoding. The younger but advanced brother of MP3. It has slightly improved sound characteristics and a higher compression ratio.

 

Applies to Android, iOS, iTunes, YouTube, Nintendo, and the latest PlayStation.

It is also a folk format, but for a little more advanced people. Which is reflected in the title.

OGG

In general, this is not a format, but a container, and in fact the name OGG says nothing about the sound it contains.

However, most of the time it contains the Vorbis codec.

Significantly improved sound quality relative to other lossy compression formats.
Smaller files can be recorded with the same sound quality.
An even cheaper format than MP3.

The problem is that the OGG format is free, so nobody invests money in its promotion. Therefore, it may not be supported everywhere and incompatibilities may arise.

Then you have to convert to MP3.

WMA
Microsoft’s proprietary format, therefore, although it is an improved version of MP3 and OGG, has not received widespread use and is not compatible with most devices and platforms.

Advice. If it is possible to use WMA instead of MP3, use the former. Cheaper and more pleasant to the ear.

For owners of advanced and expensive devices, branded desktops and mobiles, with high-quality headphones and speakers.

The downside to these formats is that file sizes of the same recording length will be roughly two to three times larger.

However, although lossless compression is stated, it should not be confused with high-fidelity audio recordings. There are minimal losses, although notable only for musicians.

FLAC
Free lossless audio codec. Its advantage is its great popularity, almost like MP3.

The compression ratio is up to 60% of the original file.
Compatible with most software platforms and devices.
It can be a profitable alternative when it comes to burning CDs. Almost indistinguishable in sound, but the advantage of saving almost half the disk space.

A THE C
Format for owners of Apple-branded devices, as others may not be supported.

Slightly less good than FLAC in terms of compression ratio.

But Apple owners simply have no choice: the free FLAC format does not work in principle on iOS and iTunes.

Lossless WMA
An improved version of the aforementioned WMA. Slightly lower than FLAC and ALAC. It has a significant advantage over ALAC, as WMA is compatible with Windows and Mac.

However, it is not very widespread, so if you have many different devices in use, there is likely an incompatibility.