It’s heavily supported because of its compatibility with DRM (e.g. AAC: Advanced Audio Coding, a standardized format now used with MPEG4 video.FOSS fans, such as many Linux users, are bound to see plenty of this format. Vorbis: A free and open-source lossy format used more often in PC games such as Unreal Tournament 3.Despite a heap of patent issues, it’s still incredibly popular. MP3: MPEG 1 Audio Layer 3, the most common lossy audio codec today.Here are some details for the more popular formats. Lossy formats also use bitrate to refer to audio quality, which usually looks like “192 kbit/s” or “192 kbps.” Higher numbers means that more data is being pumped out, so there’s more preservation of detail. Different lossy formats use different algorithms to store data, and so they typically vary in file size for comparable quality. Big difference compared to PCM, no? This is called compression, but unlike with lossless formats, you can’t really get that quality back once you strip it in lossy formats. An average “CD quality” MP3 runs about 1 MB per minute. Most of the formats you see in day-to-day use are “lossy” some degree of audio quality is sacrificed in exchange for a significant gain in file size. If you’ve got a great set of speakers, cans, or earbuds, these formats will bring out the tones to showcase them. If you’re an audiophile and listen to a lot of music with dynamic ranges, these formats are for you. The up-side is that if you want to do audio manipulation, you can convert back to a WAV without any loss of quality. That is, a FLAC file for stereo audio at “CD quality” runs roughly 5 MB per minute. Typically, you’re seeing about half the size of WAVs. The difference between zipped files and FLAC files is that FLAC is designed specifically for audio, and so has better compression rates without any loss of data. The Free Lossless Audio Codec, Apple Lossless Audio Codec, and Monkey’s Audio are all formats which compress audio, much in the same fashion that anything is compressed in digital world: using algorithms. Image by CyboRoZ Lossless Formats: FLAC, ALAC, APE If you’re recording at home for the purposes of mixing, this is what you want to use because it’s full quality. They are both also considered “lossless,” are uncompressed, and a stereo (2-channel) PCM audio file, sampled at 44.1 kHz (or 44100 times per second) at 16 bits (“CD quality”) amounts to roughly 10 MB per minute. PCM audio, for most people, comes in these formats, depending on whether you use Windows or OS X, and they can be converted to and from each other without degradation of quality. Both WAV and AIFF are lossless audio container formats based on PCM, with some minor changes in data storage.
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