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Choose the sound format well into 2020

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Although many dematerialized music rhymes with MP3, it is recommended to take a tour of the owner in existing dematerialized formats to choose the audio format well when digitizing their CD / Vinyl.

What is an audio format?

An audio format is to simplify a kind of container where dematerialized music is stored: it is important to choose it carefully when ripping a CD, because its properties will directly affect the quality of the file created.

Therefore, selecting audio format is a crucial step and it is advisable to guarantee three things with priority: the quality, functionality, and the fact that they are standard and legible on a maximum of devices, whether on a PC or MAC computer, but also on your smartphone / car radio …

It is also important to understand that in general, and although there are exceptions, the choice of audio format consists of placing the cursor in the middle between the quality on the one hand and the space occupied by the media on the other. storage.

Choose audio format: which challengers?

select aac-ogg-wma mp3 audio format
The 4 semi-amazing audio formats with destructive compression.

MP3:
Give glory where honor is due. MP3 is just as popular as it is underrated: it will have done a lot for dematerialized music by itself and has enabled millions of people around the world to discover a new way to listen to their music.

MP3 is a format of strong and destructive compression, in other words, a large part of the musical signal will be suppressed (priority, frequencies inaudible to the human ear … but not only!), And therefore offers a quality that only becomes good for from 256/320 kbps.

Is this a good opportunity today? Not being the best from a quality standpoint, choosing mp3 audio format today allows you to be sure that you can listen to it on all devices released for 10 years. MP3 is dematerialized music, what jeans should wear: versatility and the highest “acceptance rate” in the world.

Note that it is also advisable to choose mp3 audio format if you have limited storage space on a smartphone, for example because it is (in the company of AAC / WMA / OGG) the type of format that requires least space.

AAC:
This format is similar to “Apple MP3”. It has the same qualities and shortcomings as the previous one with some details: slightly better at the same speed, on the other hand it is far less standard: except for the fact that manufacturers have made explicit agreements (and pay because they require a license) , we find in Practice much fewer AAC compliant devices.

So it should be avoided unless you only have Apple products around you (even the car radio? I doubt it) and even in this case they are all perfectly mp3 compatible.

WMA
If AAC is Apple’s MP3, WMA Microsoft is MP3. Even less widespread because it doesn’t benefit from iTunes / Music Store / iPOD steamroller (who still remembers Zune’s iPod killer? Miscrosoft)

Again, forget the same qualities and shortcomings as MP3, but even less standard, therefore urgent. I even advise you to convert your existing WMA files to MP3 at a similar or slightly higher bit rate to ensure durability. Therefore, choosing WMA audio format today is not a good idea.

OGG:
We also find it under the name “vorbis”, we also have an mp3 clone here, except it is compatible with the free world (understand free) a bit in the same format as Linux.

Ogg is a completely free format unlike the previous ones, but despite this it is very confidential and is generally used only by those who take a pro-free dogmatic stance. While this position is quite respectable, selecting OGG audio format in 2014/2015 does not seem like a good idea because it is not widely distributed and above all it is like MP3, a destructive format.

WAV:
WAV is the first format on the list that does not deteriorate the quality extracted from the CD, and therefore offers an identical bit rate of 1411 kbps and therefore provides optimal quality.

However, the format shows its age and is limited in several ways: no space optimization (one second of silence = one second of noise) and no metadata or album cover management.

Therefore, choosing Wav audio format is similar to generating very heavy files and simply impossible to organize properly in a music database.

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An overview of the main audio formats that can be found on your computer

Codec for mp3, mpc, flac, mono, ogg vorbis and more.

For convenience, audio formats can be divided into unprofitable (unprofitable) and unprofitable (or unprofitable without losing quality).

The idea of loss formats (most common among ordinary users) stems from the idea that the human ear misunderstands all the sounds that are in a standard WAV file at 44,100 samples per second.

In this way (as in the JPG format of the images) we will drop the high frequencies, which are thought to be less different from our hearing. The more these frequencies are reduced, the more space is allocated to our track (for example, 3 MB instead of 6 MB for a few minutes of song or much more) … but it also degrades the quality of the result, as the cut frequencies are no longer so “inaudible”.

Converting to WAV from lossy formats does not provide any benefit (unless you have to process the track and save it several times, in which case the quality loss will be limited to the first step); There are also programs that are able to bring some of these high frequencies back into our tracks, such as Steinberg Clean Plus or others (such as the first versions of Easy CD Creator or other, even more professional ones), but by doing the job properly , more than No they can do a lot.

Unbearable (lossy) formats try to reduce the space occupied by the track without touching the sound; the degree of compression will be much less than the loss, but there will be no loss of quality. If it is converted back to WAV (possibly processed), the sound will be identical to the previous one.

To listen to audio tracks in various formats, we recommend using audio players that can support different formats, such as AIMP and Foobar2000.

Lost audio formats (lossy quality)

WMA (.wma): Windows Media audio format, compressed and very similar to mp3. Microsoft audio compression format. Files compressed in this format are approximately 20% smaller than MP3 files

MP3 (.mp3) is briefly suitable for the MPEG 1 III layer and identifies audio files that use this algorithm. This is a standard that removes inaudible sounds from the human ear. This way the 128 kbps mp3 track takes up 1/11 of its space in .wav or audio CD format.
Some rate 128-bit bits as “CD quality”; In fact, the frequencies that are reduced to save hard disk space are not so “inaudible”. 192 The results are starting to get good and at only 320 kbps we can talk about the quality of CDs … Until a few years ago the quality of mp3 was considered high, but now with the advent of more modern sound cards, 24 bits: we continue to use mp3 compared to other formats like like ogg or mpc, more for its diffusion and compatibility than the quality of the result. A 600 MB album in wav format will take up about 50 MB in 128 mp3 format.

To convert an audio track to mp3, it’s a good idea to use the Lame mp3 codec (free) in all the best conversion programs (download).

AAC (.aac and .mp4): A lossy format that delivers high quality (currently the highest among lossy formats), at least one step higher than mp3. A feature of this format is the ability to protect DRM from being freely copied from one platform to another (unless applications are used to protect it).

AC3 (ac3). This is the audio format used by DVDs. We usually find it at 384 kbps (and 6 channels), but it is also possible that you only have it at 2 channels and lower speeds. One of the free programs that supports it (and allows, for example, to reduce the bit rate) is BeLight (Besweet).

OGG VORBIS (.ogg) is a great open source codec. It is able to give better results than mp3, especially at low bit rates (higher quality, less space), which is less than 128 kbps (download). It is compatible with virtually all audio players (both software and audio).

MusePack (.mpc): Very large output format, especially at high bit rates (more than 192 kbps and above). The results are much better than mp3: just listen to one 192 kbps mp3 encoded track and one mpc track at the same bit rate to immediately feel the difference (in some cases without words …). Many people considered this to be the best lossy audio format, at least until mp4 was released. It is compatible with WinAmp through plug-ins and, on average, with more advanced players such as Foobar 2000.

Digital audio formats

Below is a non-exhaustive list of the most widely used digital audio formats.

AIFF – Audio Exchange File Format

Apple uses a standard audio format. This can be considered the wav equivalent of a mac environment. Audio data is organized according to PCM encoding and is not compressed. There is also a condensed option defined as AIFF-C or AIFC.

AAC – Advanced Audio Encoding

This format is based on MPEG2 and MPEG4 lossy compression standards. It was created as a successor to the mp3 format, which uses a slightly better algorithm. This allows you to get slightly better quality for the same speed.

ALAC – Apple Lossless Audio Codec

This is Apple’s lossless audio format. Also called ALE (Apple Lossless Encoder).

ATRAC (.mp3) – acoustic coding of adaptive transformation

Old Sony audio format with ATRAC compression. Files always have a .mp3 extension, but you need the ATRAC3 driver to open them. MiniDisc was a commercial advertising product that took advantage of this type of format. The codec was later improved by subsequent enhancements such as ATRAC3 (1999), ATRAC3plus (2002), and ATRAC Advanced Lossless (2006).

AS

This is the standard audio format used by Sun, Unix, and Java operating systems. Data encoding can be PCM (uncompressed) or compressed with μ-law, a-law G729 codecs. The Au audio format was introduced by Sun Microsystems. It was a format used on NeXT systems and early websites. Initially, the file did not have a header (the original data from the file) because the encoding was unique: 8 bits with µ-law compression and a sampling rate of 8000 Hz. The latest version of this format contains a header consisting of six blocks. 32 bits, an optional block of information, and finally audio data.

FLAC is a free lossless audio codec

It is an audio codec with lossy compression (without losing information). Data compression can reach 50-60% without losing quality.

M4P

It is a patented version of the MP4 AAC format with a DRM (Digital Rights Management) system developed by Apple to download music from the iTunes Music Store.

MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 (formerly ISO / IEC 14496-14: 2003) is a storage medium for multimedia data. It is mainly used to store audio / video data, but can also be used to store other types of data, such as still images and subtitles. Like all modern formats, this format allows data to be sent over the Internet in real time: this feature is implemented by adding a data path for transmission control. The only extension for files that use this codec is .mp4.

MP3 – MPEG layer III audio recording

It is currently the most widely used audio format. The MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 III audio layer, commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented lossy format. It is used for digital music use at the user (non-professional) level.

OGG

It is an open source container that supports a variety of formats, the best known being the Vorbis audio format. This format offers MP3-like audio compression, but is less common. The big difference with mp3 is the absolute free format. In terms of performance, with the same parameters, Vorbis is slightly more efficient than MP3.

The Ogg cache can handle multiple independent streams at the same time: audio, video, text (such as subtitles), and additional data (metadata).

RA and RM

This is a format developed by Real Audio to transmit audio over the Internet. The .Ra format allows you to store all the audio files you want to transfer in one file. The codec enables transmission from very low quality to high accuracy.

RAW

A RAW file can contain any type of data, but in reality it is mainly used for PCM-encoded (uncompressed) audio data. Thus, unlike the uncompressed audio format (wav, aiff), a flat file does not contain headers with information about the data itself (usually the header contains information about: sampling rate, quantitative bits, channels, type of markup used for the ideas). A typical file extension for this type is: .raw, .pcm, without the extension.

Vox

This audio format uses Dialogic ADPCM (Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation). This performs 4. compression. Vox files are similar to wave files, except that they do not have a header, so you need to specify frequency information.

Better audio formats

You have decided to digitize the music tracks in your audio CD collection by transferring everything to your computer. You started to examine the possibility of converting it into a format that is more convenient for you.

With a little experience in this area, however, you would like to get some advice on the subject so you can make the best decision. How do you say? Things are exactly the same and you want to know if I can help you by giving you the best audio formats? Of course yes, that’s exactly what he wanted to do.

If you allow me a few minutes of your free time, I can actually use threads and characters to tell you which audio formats are most popular, what strengths and weaknesses they have and what purposes they may be more or less convenient for. Contact. Condition to choose those who you think are actually right for you. To complete the information and give you an even more comprehensive overview of the topic, I will also indicate at the end of the article which tools you can use to carry out various conversion processes. You will find that once you have read this manual, there is no longer any doubt about what to do.

In order to? How about putting the conversation aside and finally getting to the point? Yes? Excellent! So I suggest that you don’t waste any more time and immediately focus on the topic. Make yourself comfortable in front of your trusted computer and read everything below. I am sure you can say that you are happy and satisfied with what you have learned. As always, I hope you enjoy reading.