Tag: when does lossless audio come out

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Lossless Audio vs. Hi-Res Audio: What’s the Difference? Part 4

Difference Between Lossless and Hi-Res Audio
As we explained earlier, lossless audio is an audio sample without any downstream compression on top of it. Such samples are in raw form.

So lossless audio does not mean higher quality audio. Any audio, hi-res or not, can be lossless.

Hi-Res Audio, on the other hand, is better quality audio with higher bit depth and high sample rate. High-Resolution Audio can be lossless or lossy.

Hi-Res Audio Format

With the rise of Hi-Res Audio, streaming services have started to introduce some proprietary audio formats. Some of the more popular formats include FLAC, AIFF, WAV, and ALAC. All of these formats support High-Resolution Audio with lossy or lossless compression.

For example, Apple uses ALAC for high resolution streaming on Apple Music. ALAC is a lossless format, which means that its compression does not degrade sound quality. It is also very space efficient. Compared to WAV without applying compression, ALAC takes up half the storage space.

Related: The Most Common Audio Formats: Which One Should You Use?

Like Apple, Tidal uses its own audio format, MQA. MQA has lossless compression and offers almost the same sound quality and storage space advantages as ALAC.

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Audio without loss against high resolution audio: What is the difference? Part 3

What is the sampling frequency and the depth of bits?

Computers are digital machines that handle 1 and 0. Therefore, any information that a computer needs to store, including audio, should be stored as a chain of some and zeros.

On the other hand, the sound is not digital. It is analog and continuous nature. Then, if we want to store the sound in the computer storage unit, we must convert it to 1 and 0.

There are many ways to make this conversion. The simplest is the pulse code modulation (PCM).

The representation of the pulse code modulation is shown below.

In PCM, we take analog audio, reproduce it and sample it at a predetermined speed in the form of some and zeros. This data is then stored in audio format.

To better understand the process, imagine a photo of you playing baseball with the children. If you take 30 photos per second in an hour, you will have enough data to make an hour of video clips of 30 fps.

The same happens when you show an audio signal. It is taking a pictorial snapshot of the audio signal at an established speed. Codify all those snapshots and you will have an audio file.

To play an audio file, your computer only needs to play the snapshot at the same speed that was captured. This frequency is called sampling frequency.

We measure the sampling frequency in KHz. The standard sampling frequency for audio CDs is 44.1 kHz.

Now, since any audio consists of multiple sounds of different frequencies, we need to store multiple 1 or 0 to store all the necessary information. Therefore, we must strive to obtain the largest possible sample size, because the greater the sample, the better the sound quality will be.

The sample size, which is the number of bits in each sample, is called depth of bits. The depth of standard bits on the audio CDs is 16 bits.

High resolution audio

In spite of all the uproar over high resolution audio music transmission services, surprisingly there is no standard definition. There is no consensus on what is high resolution audio.

That said, the consensus is that the audio samples with high sampling and high-depth bits are called high resolution.

As you can see, the previous definitions change constantly. For example, when the 8-bit audio is the standard, 16 bits / 44.1 kHz is high resolution. Nowadays, when 16 bits / 44.1 kHz is the standard, 24 bits / 96 kHz is located in the field of high resolution.

In theory, high resolution audio sounds clearer and better. It has a greater dynamic range, better separation of instruments and low noise level.

Audio without loss against high resolution audio: What is the difference? Part 2

While files with loss save storage space, they sacrifice the quality of the audio to be highly compressed. However, the industry adopts audio files with loss such as the de facto standard to deliver music to listeners.

Related: How does file compression work?

The loss audio files are everywhere these days. All transmission sites, from YouTube to Spotify, reproduce compressed music. Fortunately, with the use of modernized coders and audio formats, these files sound good. Then, most people will not complain.

That is, the music we play is different from the study version. It is of less quality. Part of the reason are the compression techniques that use musical production in addition to the original recording.

The loss audio files are completely decompressed or use compression techniques that do not cause any data loss. Then, if it is transmitting audio without losses, it is transmitting music without compression artifacts. This can improve audio quality.

However, lossless files do not always produce a better quality sound. If the compressed file itself is of poor quality, decompress it will not help. Therefore, try to see if lossless audio makes a significant difference.

Audio without loss against high resolution audio: What is the difference?

If the transmission of music is your favorite, you have probably heard that Apple is entering its Alac format without losses in Apple Music for all users.

Like other important music transmission services, Apple is promoting the advantages of lossless audio and high resolution on traditional audio reproduction.

The change throughout the industry to offer high resolution audio options and without losses poses each of the following questions:

What is lossless audio? Is it the same as high resolution? If not, what is the difference and why should you care?

Let’s examine the terms to see if there is something that supports the exaggeration.

Audio without losses

In the first days of music transmission, transferring music files through the Internet was cumbersome. The Internet is still in diapers, so the speeds are low and questionable reliability.

In the past, the storage space was also quite expensive. Therefore, music publishers must find ways to launch music using the least amount of resources possible. This is where the audio is entered with loss.

When it comes to music, study recordings are quite large. They can occupy dozens of storage space megabytes. In an era in which most people do not have storage gigabytes, it is not practical to offer uncompressed study recordings.

Therefore, musical production creates highly compressed audio files to significantly reduce the size of the file. These compressed files are what we know today as audio files with loss.

Lossless Audio Part 3

Resilient metadata: New types of metadata blocks can be defined and implemented without affecting the use of old decoders and data streams.

Existing metadata types include tags, reference tables, and ranking tables. Registered applications can define their own dedicated metadata types (Note: this is similar to the MIDI standard).
Great for archiving applications: FLAC is an open and lossless encoding format, you can convert it to any other format you need. In addition to CRC and MD5 marking of each data frame to ensure data integrity, FLAC also offers a verification (verification) option; when using this option to encode
Easy CD Backup: FLAC has a “reference table” metadata block that contains the list of CD contents and index points for all tracks. You can save a CD into a single file and import the CD reference table, so that one FLAC file can record all the information of the entire CD completely. When your original CD is damaged, you can use this file to restore an exact copy of the original CD.
Damage Resistance: Due to the frame structure of FLAC, once the data stream is damaged, the loss will be limited to the damaged data frame. Usually only a short segment is lost. When many other lossless audio compression formats suffer corruption, one corruption will cause all subsequent data to be lost.
Features that FLAC does not have:
The data is reduced. FLAC is designed specifically for lossless compression only, you can choose from many other great lossy compression methods like Vorbis, MPC and MP3 (LAME provides an excellent open source implementation).
SDMI compliant (eg cetera). FLAC will not support any copy protection method, which actually ends up wasting data. (Looking at it another way, since all of these means ultimately proved to be ineffective, one could also say that FLAC compresses this useless data to zero!) Of course, we can’t prevent someone from using a dedicated metablock for copy protection, but They Protection will only work on their own decryption products, other decoders will bypass these specialized metablocks.
. How to play FLAC files?
1. FLAC is a lossless audio compression format. It can be played by foobar2000 and winamp…because they all have FLAC decompression plugins. If your player cannot play it, it is recommended that you go to the following address to download the plug-in and install (this is the winamp flac the plugin and install (this is the player plugin
2. With JetAudio, the interface is simple and convenient, and it directly supports playing FLAC files, that is also worth mentioning.
WV formatedit broadcast
Characteristics
WavPack is a free, open source, lossless audio compression format developed by David Bryant.
Open source, the license is also free, the compression ratio is between ape and flac , and there is also fault tolerance
WavPack allows users to compress and restore 8-, 16-, 24-, and 32-bit floating-point representations of WAV-format audio files, and also supports multi-channel data streams and very high sample rates. Like other lossless compression mechanisms, the compression ratio of this algorithm varies with the source data, but is typically between 30% and 70% for normal pop music, and between 30% and 70% for normal pop music. for classical music and other sound ranges. gives better results.
Additionally, WavPack features a unique “mixed” mode, which uses an additional file that also has the benefit of lossy compression. Unlike other methods that output only one file, this mode outputs two files, one is a relatively small high-quality lossy compressed file that can be used alone, and the other is used together with the lossy file for data recovery. lossless data “Correction” file. For some users, this means they don’t have to worry about using lossy or lossless compression.

Lossless Audio Part 2

FLAC Overview

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec – Free lossless audio compression. That is, 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 the compressed FLAC file like you normally play MP3 files like

FLAC system support
FLAC is free and is supported by most operating systems, including Windows, “unix” (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. And FLAC provides a build system in autotools, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder development tools.

FLAC project content
The format of the data stream is provided in the form of a FLAC Reference Encoder and Decoder Library, a command line program that can encode and decode FLAC files Metadata editor for Input plugins for different audio players

FLAC Features:
Lossless Compression: The encoded (PCM) audio data is lossless and the decoded output audio is the same in every byte of the encoder input. Each data frame has a 16-bit CRC check code of the current frame, which is used to check for data transmission errors. For all audio data, an MD5 tag for the original uncompressed audio data is also stored in the file header
Fast: FLAC places more value on decoding speed. Decoding requires only integer operations and has low computational speed requirements relative to most encoding methods. Real-time decoding can be easily achieved on very common hardware.
Hardware support: Since FLAC provides a free decoding paradigm and decoding complexity is low, FLAC is currently the only hardware supported lossless compression. which has hardware support.
Streamable: Each FLAC data frame contains all the information needed for decoding. The current frame is decoded without reference to the data frame that precedes or follows it. FLAC uses sync and CRC codes (similar to encoding formats like MPEG) so that the decoder can have minimal time delays when locating jumps in the data stream.
Positionable: FLAC supports fast sampling and precise positioning. This is not only beneficial for playback, but also makes FLAC files easier to edit.

lossless audio

As a standard for digital music file formats, the WAV format is too large to use easily.

Therefore, generally, we compress it to MP3 or WMA format. Compression methods include lossless compression, lossy compression, and hybrid compression. MPEG and JPEG belong to hybrid compression. If the compressed data is restored, the data is actually different. Of course, the human ear cannot tell. Therefore, if the MP3 and OGG formats are restored from the compressed state, there will be losses. However, APE and FLAC formats retain their original lossless sound quality even when restored. Therefore, APE and FLAC can be compressed and restored with high sound quality without loss. Under the premise of fully maintaining sound quality, the compression capability of APE has been properly reduced.
However, it is an idea that many people have had long ago to apply APE’s form of lossless audio compression to MP3 players. Compared with CD, MP3 is more convenient and practical. The earlier statement that MP3 replaced CD and MD was the biggest hurdle due to sound quality.
broadcast monoedit format
Obtaining APE source files
A few years ago, everyone had a tape recorder and thought it was good to listen to the music on tape, now there are a lot of CDs and DVDs, and the sound effect is better than that of tape. However, the music on the CD cannot be recognized directly in Windows, and cannot be directly copied to the hard drive (Windows can recognize other formats, such as data files, VCD, DVD, etc., only CDs cannot be recognized directly). . outside). Therefore, in order to copy the songs from the CD to the hard drive, special software is needed to do this. This is called ripping. There are many softwares that can perform this function. The most common and the best is EAC (EAC .exe) This software, the music captured by the track is saved to the hard drive in the form of wav .
Compression in APE format:
When the songs on the CD are copied to the hard drive (i.e. ripped), the original file ( WAV ) is usually very large. For example, the music on a CD is about 700M. If it is separated into each song, the size of each song file is 20-60M. These large files take up hard drive space and are not suitable for sending over the Internet. Therefore, this large original file is usually compressed. There are many types of compression methods, which can be divided into two categories: One is lossless compression, which can be achieved with monkey software (monkey.exe), which can compress the original music file (WAV file) into 50-60%. of the original size, the file format is APE .
Another type of compression method is called lossy compression. The advantage is that the file can be compressed to a smaller size, for example it is more than 1 times smaller than the ape file. The common lossy compression format for music is MP3. But the downside is loss of sound quality, generally the smaller the file is compressed, the worse the sound quality.
Online delivery:
At present, more and more people choose the APE format, and network communication is inexorable. Many music enthusiasts trade music in APE format online. The search for “APE music download” on Baidu has more than 1.5 million links, and the number is increasing daily. . APE’s music has also been featured on the popular BT. All major BT downloads have opened a place for APE music download and communication, so users don’t have to worry about APE audio resources at all.

Apple Music lossless sound quality is not important?

Apple VP admits he “can’t hear the difference”

In an interview with Billboard, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president, admitted that he couldn’t actually hear the “fidelity compression” that Apple Music recently added, that is, the difference between lossless sound quality and the original AAC file. . But Cue thinks Apple Music’s lossless sound quality should still satisfy “a small group of users.”

Cue also believes that if he finds 100 people to test blindly, there may be 99 or 98 people, and it’s impossible to distinguish the quality of the Apple Music sound being played, whether it’s lossless or compressed. Cue noted that this has something to do with the fact that most people’s ears are “not that good” after all, after all, only a few people are gifted with hearing performance; In addition, to truly experience good lossless sound quality, additional devices such as an expensive stereo are usually required.

However, compared to the lossless performance and user experience, Eddy Cue highly praised the “spatial audio” that is upgraded with lossless sound quality. The musicians join in, even when the recording requires attention. Cue also announced that going forward, every new song added to Apple Music is expected to support spatial audio.

Eddy Cue’s statement may also explain that when Apple talks about this update to Apple Music, it’s actually talking about “spatial audio” in a larger space, rather than lossless sound quality. Apple officials also said “spatial audio” will permanently change the experience of streaming music.

Can a human tell the difference between lossless and lossless music? Part 2

Answer 2:

First, let’s talk about point of view. There is definitely a difference between lossless music and lossy music. There are many factors that affect whether you can hear it. The audio source format, decoding, amplification, line and playback equipment. all can affect the playback effect, generally speaking.

Personally, if you give me a random set of listening gear and let me listen to some songs I’m not familiar with, in this case I really can’t hear the difference between 320K and lossless. But if you let me use my own listening device to listen to the evaluation tracks that I’m normally familiar with, I can basically make a good guess. Physiologically, this shouldn’t be scientific, but actually I did. That’s why I said that there are many factors that can influence people to distinguish between lossless and lossy.

To give another example, many well-known tuners are over 50 years old and their hearing range is much less than some young tuners, but these older tuners have very good tri-frequency handling and can tune very well. sound equipment So, in a way, whether you can hear the difference between lossless and lossy has a lot to do with personal experience and competition.

Answer Summary:

Lossless audio refers to “lossless sound format data”, which only compresses the amount of data, but not the quality of the sound. Compared to lossless audio, lossy audio loses some information. It is mainly compressed by reducing the audio sample rate and bit rate, and the output audio file will be smaller than the original file.

Can a human tell the difference between lossless and lossless music?

I think to answer this question, we first need to figure out what is lossy and lossless music.

First of all, it should be noted that the lossless music we talk about is often lossy in theory. Because the music recording is converted into an audio file, it must be converted, and there must be data loss in the process of digitizing audio, so in fact, the lossless we usually say is actually lossy.

So what do we generally mean by lossless and lossy?

Lossless refers to “lossless sound format data”, which compresses only the amount of data, but not the quality of the sound. Compared to lossless audio, lossy audio loses some information. It is mainly compressed by reducing the audio sample rate and bit rate, and the output audio file will be smaller than the original file.

So what does lossy audio lose? Lossy audio mainly loses the high-frequency part of the audio. Theoretically, the hearing range of the human ear is 20~20000HZ, but in fact, each person’s hearing range is different. Some people may have a hearing range of 20~19000HZ, which is sensitive to high frequencies. Others may have a hearing range of 20~16000HZ. It is not sensitive to high frequency sounds and is completely inaudible after a certain frequency.