Variety of digital formats.
Surely many users prefer to use their home computer not only as a workhorse, but also as a multimedia center, where they can watch movies or family photos, as well as listen to their favorite music. Although compact digital players or mobile phones are certainly more suitable for listening to musical compositions, but unlike them, a computer can not only play music.
No matter how big the built-in memory of your music player is, it will most likely be difficult to store your entire music library on it. Plus, you can create, edit, organize, and search for music with your PC. Also, don’t forget that there are around three dozen common digital audio formats today, and most players are far from omnivorous and can only play a few of them.
So why do you need to create so many music formats to store one type of content? The fact is that, in the vast majority of cases, the sound is stored in “compressed” form, since one minute of uncompressed composition occupies about 10 MB on the hard disk. On the one hand, this seems not to be much, but on the other, if you are a music lover and your collection consists of several hundred or even thousands of songs, then it is clear that the sound must be compressed to reduce the space it occupies in electronic media.
Various special algorithms are used to compress music files, which subsequently determine the structure and presentation of the audio data, or so-called digital audio file formats. All audio formats can be divided into three groups: uncompressed audio formats, lossless compression, and lossy compression.
No compression
One of the most widespread formats related to this type is the well-known WAV. The sound of files with this extension is stored without compression or changes. It is true that much more space is required to store uncompressed files and therefore WAV is more widely used only in professional audio and video applications, where the sound should not have a loss of quality before processing. Keeping ordinary musical compositions in this form is unwarranted waste.
To play WAV files, you do not need any special software, as all media players understand this format, including the standard Windows Media audio player built into the Windows system.
Another format used to store uncompressed audio that is worth mentioning is Apple’s development called AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format). As you may have guessed, it is most commonly used on Macintosh computers running Mac OS X.
Lossless compression (lossless)
Lossless compression algorithms for audio files work on the principle of conventional file cabinets. They do not provide the highest level of compression (40 to 60%), while they have virtually no effect on sound quality. It is also worth noting that in this case, the encrypted data can be fully restored to its original form. Therefore, the use of lossless compression is most often used in cases where it is important to preserve the identity of the compressed data with respect to the original.
The most popular audio formats in this group are FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), APE (Monkey’s Audio), WMA (Windows Media Lossless), and ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). Each has its own pros and cons. For example, the APE codec offers slightly better compression gains, while FLAC is more common. In general, all true music lovers store their music collections in lossless formats, since they do not remove any data from the audio stream and files created with these codecs can be listened to even on high-quality stereos.
To play lossless compressed formats, as a rule, third-party players (except WMA) are used, such as MPlayer, foobar, AIMP, Winamp, VLC and others, since all the necessary codecs are already built into them. Another option is to separately install an additional codec pack (for example, K-Lite), after which you can listen to files in lossless format from almost any audio player.
Lossy compression
This is the most popular group of algorithms that provides the maximum audio compression ratio (up to 10 times or more). However, unlike previous formats, the audio file loses quality here, and how much depends directly on the degree of compression.
To determine the quality of digitized sound, the most commonly used indicator is the bit rate, the speed of the audio stream obtained after compression and measured in kilobits per second (kbps).
