Audio Codecs Explained
In the world of digital audio, an Audio Codec is a software or hardware program that can encode and decode an audio signal. These programs can reduce the size of an audio file for efficient storage and transmission while preserving its quality. They do this through the use of compression and encoding techniques that are based on psychoacoustic principles.
There are two primary types of audio codecs: lossy and lossless. Lossy codecs, like MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis, compress audio data by discarding some of it and using a number of other methods to shrink the size of the encoded file. While the decoded output is still audible to humans, it lacks some of the fidelity of the original uncompressed audio.
The Best Audio Codecs for High-Quality Sound: A Comparison
The other type of audio codec is a lossless codec, such as FLAC or ALAC, which retain all the original audio data and do not lose any information during compression or encoding. While lossless codecs do not offer the same space-saving benefits as lossy codecs, they are usually considered to be superior in terms of audio quality.
WAV (Waveform Audio File Format) is one of the most popular and oldest audio encoding formats, which stores uncompressed audio in LPCM (Linear Pulse Code Modulation). It was first introduced more than 25 years ago. It’s also possible to store uncompressed audio in other formats, such as AIFF (Mac) or Ogg Vorbis. The most common audio codec used for live streaming is AAC, which offers superior audio quality compared to MP3 at all bitrates and is royalty-free and open source.…