What are Lossless, Lossyless, cue and WAV music formats?
To make it easier to handle bitrates, I’ll give a somewhat simplified understanding of Lossy and Lossless bitrates.
If we imagine the sound in the form of a broken diagram, then in MP3 and OGG formats (these are currently the main Lossy formats, we will not consider the rest here as they are quite rare) from 128 to 256 kbps the ends of the sound are cut off (from this diagram). As for the 320kbps bit rate, the sound is not cut off.
What are bit rates?
Bit rate is an indicator of how much information a second of sound encodes. The higher it is, the less distortion and the closer the encoded composition is to the original.
Lossless – Lossless, which means that lossless (lossless) audio formats such as FLAC, APE, and WAV, as well as lesser-known ones, convert CDs to digital without loss of quality, that is, you can take a disc from your collection, save it to WAV, re-encode WAV, say to FLAC (or APE), then from FLAC (or APE) to WAV and burn it to disc and you get a disc absolutely identical to your CD. This begs the question: why not just use the WAV format? It’s very simple: lossless formats have the same quality as WAV, but take up less space, this is their advantage. There is a myth that an analog of a CD is an MP3 with a 320 kbps bit rate, but this is not the case, only a lossless image of this CD is an analog of a CD, by the way, and vinyl does not it has analogs at all. The bitrate of the vinyl analog must be equal to infinity, since vinyl records are made from so-called master tapes. A master tape is an analog copy of a piece mixed in a studio.
What are WAV and APE?
It is a lossless compression algorithm for WAV audio files, commonly used to store music extracted from compact discs (CD-DA). First, the original WAV file is removed from the CD-Audio (if a standard disc is fully recorded with music for 80 minutes, then the file will be 700Mb), and then it is archived in APE (standard extension for files compressed by Monkey’s Audio) . Yes, this is comparable to archiving, since APE can later be decompressed and the original WAV obtained, as if it were archived with ZIP or RAR. Compress the APE of the original WAV normally 1.5-2 times.
APE is a format for music connoisseurs, who are often interested in entire albums, not individual compositions. Music databases like freedb also work with albums. Also, a compressed album with one file takes up slightly less space than if each song were separated. But in fact, nobody forbids storing music in APE per track.
Many people don’t like APE because they need to spend more time on it to load it to the site (or from the site) or to the disk grabber. They argue that the size is large and it only causes a lot of problems with APE. The size of APE can be 2 or 4 times larger (depending on the type of music) than MP3. But, for the sound quality you have to pay (and not very, in my opinion, a great price). The extra half hour of horse racing or graberra is well worth it.
The APE bit rate ranges from 700 kb / ps to 1000 and more.
What is FLAC?
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec (free lossless audio codec). FLAC is free, open source, and cross-platform. The compression ratios of FLAC are slightly lower than those of Monkey’s Audio, while the encoding (compression) time in FLAC format is approximately the same as that of Monkey’s Audio, however, the decoding (decompression) is much faster. FLAC is very popular on the Oslo network due to its cross-platform nature: it can be used on Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS X. There are also portable media players that support playing FLAC files. The Windows version of the codec contains plugins for Winamp (version 2.x / 5.x),
MP3
MP3 is a lossy compression format, that is, lossy. It is based on the assumption that the human ear simply does not perceive some frequencies and consequently they are removed during the compression process, which can significantly reduce the volume occupied by the composition.
The only advantage of MP3 is the size and nothing else. The fact is that when digitizing (encoding, compressing) a musical composition in MP3, frequencies that, according to some experts, cannot be heard by the human ear are discarded, so we obtain a small size (around 70% less than the source, depending on the quality of the bitrate and the codec).
