The sound coming from my PC speakers was exceptionally bad as I started watching this video and I thought "ah, he's comparing and contrasting lossy and lossless formats, very smart!" In the end it turned out to be a problem with my headphone jack. Great video!
Years ago I compressed my CD collection to 320 kbps mp3s using CDEX to fill micro SD memory cards with hundreds of songs each. I can rarely hear the difference except in the softest passages, though the bit rate was reduced by more than 2/3, and the file sizes shrank by as much as 10x. I thought I knew it all about audio codecs. I’m unceasingly amazed at what I continue to learn from watching EC videos. Thank you!
I think a lot of that is that the common players don't really produce a different output, so their incarnation of 320k and CD sound is functionally identical as it arrives at the audio jack. I can't listen to classical on CD, because it loses all the ambient sound that makes an orchestra "sound right" (this is preserved on tape or vinyl, but not on CD which is already a very lossy format). But most people don't notice this.
CDEX uses LAME as encoder, the best of the 3. I don't like Fraunhofer on 320 kbps. And Helix is the quicker variant. There is a lot more to explain about using MP3 the right way. (CBR, joint stereo etc) In the past i had a encoder that also makes 500 kbps MP3 that only plays on an few programs. Useless. Old players, car radio's gives hiccups when they play 320 MP3 SACD makes a lot of difference, it's a real problem to buy these. Audio BD is also a improvement to a CD when it's done properly.
@@dallesamllhals9161 I still have the CD collection. I also made digital clone images of every CD using CloneCd. Those copies are backed up across 11 different servers and NAS devices as well as several SLC USB memory devices.
Although there are a variety of formats, what's surprising is how many of them have lasted for decades, with no sign of disappearing. Thanks Chris, good one.
A neat thing with smartphones as mediaplayers is that format compatibility can remain pretty reliably wide. The .SID format is of course superior for having a lot of music on the go.
The interesting thing about 44.1kHz sample rate and 16 bit depth, which are still so often used today, is that they were set at the start of CD. In turn, they were chosen in part because of the bandwidth available on an old video cassette format called U-matic. The PCM digital audio data for early CD was delivered on U-matic video tapes recorded usually with the PCM1610/PCM1630 digital encoders. A long forgotten set of equipment whose specifications are still reflected in the data rates of today's digital audio formats. I have two PCM1630 and U-matic rigs set up here and use them to recover digital audio tapes which recording studios find in their archives, using a pure lossless digital route. Tapes which are 40 years old can still sound stunningly good today, though sometimes they do suffer from data errors.
That's Sony's side of the digital audio, and subsequently CD project, where they partnered with Philips, who where forerunning the optical disc side. U-matic was Sony format and they also produced 16-bit digital decoders. Meanwhile Philips had been working with 14-bit digital audio they were planning for the CD as well, but Sony vetoed it. That's why old Philips CD players proudly proclaim 4x oversampling, as they only had 14-bit DACs and had to accommodate them for 16-bit CD audio.
I've grown up listening to rather horrible audio quality, records and cassette tapes and I gotta tell you hearing digital music streaming in my car is a total joy. And I have no idea what the specs of the audio are on Spotify, it just sounds wonderful. I really enjoyed this lesson Chris. Fascinating, thank you.
Spotify is really low bitrate. CD (a FORTY year old technology at this point) blows it out of the water. Spotify has been saying for years now that they will let people use a reasonable modern bitrate but don't hold your breath. Tidal is identical to Spotify but with lossless audio, it's like digging mud out of your ears that you didn't know was there.
I Worked in an audio facility for film dubbing and knew pretty much everything here but I watched all the video no matter what. A little brush up can’t hurt especially coming from a very well respected source. Thanks!
While the content is obviously a grown up level of complexity, these videos give me a strong vibe of sitting cross legged on a primary school carpet watching a video tape on a crt tv on a trolley. It feels nostalgic and I love it
I like to advocate for a bigger use of Ogg Vorbis due to one curious fact: for some reason MP3 has a little gap of silence when looping, while Ogg Vorbis does not - this is why you see so many game devs use Ogg Vorbis for music instead of MP3 (and WAV for sound effects). Also because despite the fact MP3 patents have expired long ago, Ogg Vorbis remains a free and open standard. Might be a moot point for some, but I stand firmly with it.
Serious music players support the delay and padding metadata in the Xing frame, which describe the duration of extra silence and it is then discarded. All lossy codecs have this property. A game engine is a closed system and they could easily either follow the standard or save this data in another format to allow looping.
As a news publisher, I receive for publication audio, video and text on a daily basis. Very often I receive what are described as MP4 files, but are in reality M4A. This is due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the reporters who don't understand the difference, believing that an MP4 is a 'better' MP3.
@@martontichi8611 My point was, is that I get audio identified with an extension of mp4, but it should be m4a. The header data sez M4A bla blah. It affects so many sources that it's hard to believe industry wide stupidity. We *are* dealing with non-english speaking _news_ people.
Holy acronym Batman..... this was both enlightening and confusing.... thank you Chris! Stay well, see you next time....(you had to remind me of what over 50 feels like...cheers 😞 )
I only rip in FLAC these days. Then I take it to my Android phone and use PowerAmp's various features to get everything out. Great informative video; keep it up.
In the early days, I joined all my mp3s from each album in my collection into a non-compressed zip file, changed the ending to .mp3 and used that on my car's mp3 CD player so I didn't have to go through all the songs of each album to get to the album I wanted. Worked like a charm!
The fascinating part is, that is so wrong. It's the kind of wild swing that should never work like you thought it would. And I'm guessing you had no idea WHY that worked, or maybe even any reason to believe it would. But I would imagine it DOES work, and should be totally fine with most players. MP3 is not much of a container format. It's actually just a stream of mostly independent frames. The only thing at all special about it is that several prolific pieces of software added custom headers and trailers to it, in order to support things like titles, album art, sample-accurate lengths, and indexes for easier seeking. This is possible because an MPEG player is just searching for a frame header, which is a sequence called a sync pattern. If it reads a byte but doesn't see the sync pattern, it just moves on to the next byte and looks there, ad infinitum, until it finds one. Ergo, you can drop random data before, after, or between frames and it's still perfectly valid, as far as the MPEG reader is concerned. (At least until sync is lost to the point where the reader assumes the stream is hopelessly corrupted and gives up.) If the reader comes across metadata that it happens to know and understand, it can intelligently handle it -- parse it and benefit from it, or simply skip over it, if it can determine its length. That's why players that didn't support ID3 tags didn't mind them being there. They just ignored them, or supported them enough to know how long they were, and jump past them. When you add an album's worth of MP3s into a ZIP file with no compression, you're basically just prepending a ZIP header and some table of contents garbage in front of the first MP3 file, which might have its own ID3 tags or whatever, and then you roll right into the data that was in the next MP3 file, and the next one, and so on. As long as the ZIP file is _uncompressed,_ the end result is not much different than if you had just squished the files together. Maybe there's a marker or CRC in between them, I dunno, I'm not familiar with the on-disk layout of a ZIP file. But it wouldn't matter. The reader would just see that as "a bad frame" and run through it until it found the next sync pattern. Another way to accomplish the same thing is to use the command prompt with the copy command. E.g.: "copy /b track1.mp3+track2.mp3+track3.mp3 output.mp3" You would end up with the same result, minus the essentially useless, albeit benign, ZIP file overhead. Needless to say, this would NOT work with WAV or MP4 files. (But some other MPEG formats, like VOB, are also fine being split and concatenated on frame/packet boundaries.)
@@nickwallette6201 Exactly right! Only I was shocked and stunned that it actually worked, I never thought it would. Though I did make sure they all had the same bitrates as that would have led to interesting results otherwise, probably. Nowadays I'd use the command _cat ./*.mp3 > albumname.mp3._
@@TheDotBot Probably would've been fine with different bitrates too! Each frame has its format encoded in the header, and using different bitrates on a frame-by-frame basis is essentially how Variable Bit Rate (VBR) works. Not ALL players support VBR, so it's not a guarantee, but it's usually OK.
@@nickwallette6201 This was long before VBR was widely supported, early 2000s if I remember right. I did a weird transition from cassette tape to mp3-CD. Since all my "music" was recorded off the radio in mono, I also did the split-channel millisecond (nanosecond? I forget) shift thing to make it sound like stereo. So no, the quality wasn't exactly premium either. But I had my entire music collection on one CD, that was so wild.
Always go lossless if you're backing up/archiving your cd collection. That way if you ever want lossy versions to save on space/bandwidth you're basically future proofed to make lossy copies with whatever the best format is at the time.
I ripped all my CDs to flac for that very reason. A friend of mine spent ages using windows media player to rip his collection only to find when his Windows went tits up he was left with thousands of unplayable wma files that were drm protected.
Great advice, but I think most people don't really care about having a lossy format. I always rip and convert my music to MP3, even if I buy an album in FLAC, because I know it will play on every device. I've had too many experiences trying to play a FLAC file on a stereo that doesn't support lossless files. I eventually just gave up.
@@Reed-Publications My old car is so noisy the audio quality doesn't really matter when playing music while driving. So the file format I use is _loud!_
For long term storage lossless is the only way to go. Even if the lossless format becomes obsolete in the future you can always convert it to a newer lossless format preserving 100% of the audio quality, same can't be said of lossy files since each conversion from lossy to lossy degrades the audio quality. So always have a lossless backup of your music.
Sony did a similar thing with, I believe ATRAC (and not forgetting "memory sticks"), and that is why I will never purchase another Sony product or ever buy an Apple item. This despite both companies making some of the best hardware available
@@skf957 Circa 1998 I got an MiniDisc player for my car, and a Sony component MiniDisc recorder. I used the format for mix discs. Anyway, the issue I had.... ATRAC back then had - for me - a lack of lower frequency and noticeably less bass.
@@skf957 Apple, I can understand, but Sony? Even now? They aren't on a non-stop train to purposefully make things difficult like Apple. Every company tries something stupid then gets back on track. It all depends on if the customer allows it. Apple customers allow Apple to do whatever they want and that's why they are the way they are. They can do no wrong. But other company customers will actually speak up.
Thank you Chris this has been a real education for me . I’ve ripped many CD’s in my collection & saved most to .mp3 at 192khz or 320khz & to be honest I couldn’t really tell the difference even using decent quality headphones. Several years ago I started saving in flac format using Audacity I also tried VLC but it didn’t always place nice. I loved your parting shot when you mentioned upper frequency loss at 50 or over, my upper frequency loss started in my early 30’s working in close proximity to jet aircraft, I can still enjoy my music. Here's something for the tea & biccky fund. 🖖
Hello, Alan! For around three or four years now, I've been using Exact Audio Copy for CD ripping. Prior to that, I used Windows Media Player for ripping. The results I got from EAC were better than what I got from WMP.
@@Praxibetel-Ix Hi Ford thanks for this, I'd totally forgotten about 'Exact Audio Copy' (I'd searched for this before posting) I got on OK with it, I used it on Win 7 until that went EOL. Hope you're OK? Yes = 👍, No = 👎 in between meh ;)
@@alanthornton3530 Hello! I'm doing a lot better today than I was last weekend. I use EAC on Windows and, as you may remember, went on to install it on Linux Mint with some help from Wine. EAC and MP3Tag are the dynamic duo of CD ripping in my opinion. :)
Thanks for that very clear breakdown. One thing that podcasters (talking audio podcasts of course) had to balance was quality, bit-rate (and therefore) file size - especially going back 10+ years or so ago when they were just becoming popular. To keep our file sizes down for these almost exclusively 'spoken word' recordings many (of us) opted to drop the mp3 audio to 22050 kz MONO In fact after a few years we then decided to go better & moved up to 44100kz Stereo mp3 - only to get complains from some of our listeners! For health and safety reasons at work (although listening was allowed) they could only have an earbud in one ear to still be aware workplace dangers. Consequently they missed half of the two-person chat. Our solution - we switched to encoding in 'joint-stereo' mp3 :-)
something important about opus is that it can have the same quality of mp3 at half the bit rate. for example, i use 64kb opus files on my phone, and they have the same quality as 128kb mp3 files. This brought my music library from 18gb to 9.
I actually do the opposite, simply because so many devices and programs can't read, sort or display cover art for opus while storage is dirt cheap. But yeah, if you use a HQ converter the resulting mp3 has around double the bitrate.
Maybe under half. Opus > Vorbis > MP3. I would still - always - archive lossless. The days of me hand-wringing over storage and bandwidth are 20 years ago.
Thank you very much for this video on audio! I hope this develops into a miniseries about software to record, produce, and reproduce audio, about audio routing and mixing, as well as about computer audio peripherals.
Lovely video. Reminds me of the days 30 some years ago when I was taking computer science courses in college. Things certainly have progressed since then. Also you are a far better teacher than any I had in school. Thank you!!
This video is a great explanation of how all these file formats work and what they are. I've been working with many of them for years and still learned a couple of new things. Thanks, Chris!
Great video. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to explain that MP4 files are containers and not a specific codec. Would have been nice to mention that AAC can achieve the same quality at a lower bitrate than MP3.
Hi Chris. Would you ever consider doing a new Explaining the Future video ? It's just that your previous videos are scarily prophetic and to hear your views on the latest things like AI etc and the impact it could have (as an example) would be good. However time is precious so wouldn't blame you if you've finished with that side of things.
This is why you hit a million subscribers, Christopher - because you can take a complex topic and make it understandable and interesting. It's a great skill, keep up the great work :-)
well, you always post the most important subjects, explaining things that we deal with on a daily basis and that we probably didn't see in school. Nailed it, amazing job
Another really good video. My entire collection is a combination of primarily WAV and FLAC's. No lossy music for me. We have 20 TB HDD's, 6GHZ CPU's and dedicated hardware decoders or CPU's who can decode dozens of streams without breaking a sweat.
Even though we all like to pretend we are precious individuals who constantly rebel against 'the system'... we are a species of standardization and standards. We are for the most part much better off because of it. From standardized measures to audio file formats, we humans certainly like our agreed upon standards as well as constantly trying to improve upon them. Great video!
Back in the early 2000s I transcoded my Vinyl collection to high bit rate MP3. The best we had at the time was 192k which, as far as I could tell, decoded back to identical sound when compared to the originals. A couple of years later, I re-coded them to be 320kbps, which still sounds just like the originals. Since then I've stayed with MP3 format for one simple reason ... I can curate them with MP3-Gain to play at the same -16lufs level as streaming services use. So my entire collection now plays at practically the same loudness allowing me to start long playlists and enjoy them without constantly interacting with my music system. It's a great solution for me... Good sound quality and no huge racks of stored LPs or CDs, no wear and tear, easy local storage and all nicely at the same volume. It's pretty amazing what you can do with the right software.
@@jhutt8002 Yep. Wav files are pretty big, though. My current collection, which has grown rather a lot, occupies about 30gb on disk. The whole thing is now housed, along with 1,400 transcoded movies, in MP4 files, on a 4tb NAS drive in an external housing.
@@Douglas_Blake_579 500 mb... Yea, sorry bout that, I of course meant 500 gb! They are large indeed, but storage is cheap these days. I upgraded my computer with two 1 tb drives couple of years back, as I couldn't fit my digitized library on it anymore. Currently at 456 gb of WAV + 387 gb of ISO files containing virtual copies of my music CD's.
As someone who creates music my go to audio file format is .WAV, gotta keep it as high quality as possible for the streaming services just in case the quality degrades a little on their platform 😎
In my wheelhouse now, this is concise and complete and I even learned some interesting trivia. Since I work with thousands of hours of production audio, I switched to ALAC and FLAC since the computation for compressing and decompressing is not a time factor with current hardware. Conveniently, each 3-hour reel-to-reel tape I do is 1 GB in ALAC. 3,500 reels will fit on a 5 TB drive with room to spare.
Great summary of the different audio formats dancing around today; it's also worth noting that many "super high quality formats" (MQA, DSD or even FLAC at 24bits 192Khz) are nearly indistiguishable from a properly mastered, engineered and post-produces audio cd quality (16 bit 44Khz) file.This is easily confirmed with a double blind test; kind of an 80s Coke vs Pepsi challenge when you don't get a clue about brand, model or format of the subject being tested.It's made to avoid bias, which is a great problem in testing or "personal taste". That's why it's important to separate music from audio quality. And we don't even want to go into cable price snake-oil, which is a plague among audiophiles.
Thanks for the very well produce explaining video. I got into MP3 back in 94 when one of my cousins demoed how he was able to back up a CD audio that was about 600MB into a fraction of the size into his hard drive so he can listen it on his computer whenever. I did not get into the other newer formats except FLAC since I didn't need to keep up with audio formats. Thanks to this video I am all caught up. I deal a lot with videos and would like a similar video explaining the video codecs.
Mr. Barnatt, I've been an audio nerd / tech most of my adult life, and I still learn something new. Thanks for the refresher between codecs and containers. I'm in my late 50s, and for me, yep, it's harder to tell the difference between totally lossless and lossy formats. Currently I'm downloading ALAC songs on Apple Music, which sounds indistinguishable from CD to my current hearing ability.
I am obsessive with my music collection and years ago I moved to a home media server for better access to my collection. I decided to go with .mp3 for the file size and quality, but also the id3 tag structure that would allow me to make corrections to what many MP3 ripping softwares would make, such as selecting the wrong genre (in my opinion) or splitting an album between mutiple artists, because of one guest artist on the album. As always, a really great video that I look forward to every Sunday morning!
Personally, I buy CDs and rip them into Flac files. I love how your videos look and sound like the 90s. I was born in 2003, so its an experience I never had. Subscribed.
Thanks for this quick and very helpful overview! I have always been an audio guy at heart, working in radio broadcast engineering, as well as for companies who designed and manufactured audio equipment for broadcast and streaming.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us, I recently started my journey as an anime video encoder but wasn't really sure which audio codec to use, you helped me to clear my questions
Exactly the subject most relevant to my computer needs. This is my favorite computer channel on TH-cam. How about one on how to make a good amplifier from a Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi by itself doesn't have enough amplification to drive a set of speakers. I've seen Raspberry Pi "hats" (accessory boards) that are DAC's (Digital to Analog) converters but no audio amplifiers that would drive a speaker. "Toids DIY Audio" had a nice feature about an amplifier sold by "Parts Express" that included onboard programmable DSP (Digital Signal Processing) that could be done from a PC to achieve premium sound for whatever speaker drivers you were using in your build. Hope this helps!!!
Build a Pi4 into a boombox. Better than using a laptop for entertainment. Power tool batteries, 5A buck converter. You'll want to power using 2 separate batteries. Android 13 because of higher over_voltage allowed for overclock. Accessories would cut out. I use mine for music, movies and tv anywhere.
You've got to kidding me. I am learning audio processing, cutting etc. since a month or two and recently thought about the file formats ^^. Now there is the Video, what a world. Thanky
@@ExplainingComputers Another TH-camr was saying something about video codex es, and showed a list of videos on TH-cam. I recognized your thumbnail style in the list I went looking for that particular video. Turns out I had already watched it, (and give it a thumbs up), but I watched it again.... AV1 and AV512 we're not mentioned in the video, but I still got the idea....though I wonder where they fit in.
That was the early 2000s, not the 1990s. And they weren't "chasing" anyone as P2P sharing of music wasn't illegal until later. 16-year-olds* But you got Napster right in that comment.
this is for me going to be very beneficial i have played with a few formats and never checked each one thank you for covering this information in brief is helpful
Great presentation as usual. "Tagging" is an additional considerations if you have a music collection stored on (for instance) a home server - sourced from ripped CDs, and purchased digital downloads. For that use case you want file formats which support storing tags (eg metadata such as album name, artist name, genre, cover art picture). But in addition there need to be music players, music servers and tagging editors which support those formats. Most of my experience is with MP3 and FLAC files which have comprehensive cover. Some applications claim that they support tags in WAV files, tho I have never encountered tagged WAV files.
Pairing each audio format with their image format equivalent: WAV - Bitmap MP3 - JPEG FLAC - PNG AAC - HEIF Opus - WebP MIDI - SVG Reason for each comparison: WAV - Bitmap - Uncompressed - Old - Owned by Microsoft MP3 - JPEG - Lossy compression - Outdated, poor quality-size ratio compared to newer alternatives - Most ubiquitous format, supported by just about everything - Often the only audio/image format(s) supported by devices like older TVs, DVD players, stereos and digital photo frames FLAC - PNG - Lossless compression - Royalty-free AAC - HEIF - More advanced lossy compression with better quality-size ratio - Less supported than their predecessors - Royalty-burdened Opus - WebP - Modern highly-efficient formats used on the web - Poor support outside of the web MIDI - SVG - Don't contain the actual data, just information about how to generate the data
was going to do some research on audio file formats since most music players i use doesn't support opus and hey what do you know my favourite tech explaining youtube channel posted exactly that recently! wonderful stuff chris! keep up the great work :D
Now that I've watched the video, let me say that I have always ripped my CDs in the .mp3 format and have been doing so since I was still a teenager. In recent months though, I've started fiddling with the settings on my CD ripping software so the MP3 rips would come out sounding better. Also, wow, what a difference editing on Linux makes! The color grading in the host segments look more natural. I actually compared screenshots of you from this video and last week's and I can really see the difference. :)
Wow, such a great and accurate video about audio formats! I’m a music producer and I use WAV for production. Most of the time I record in either 24 or 32-bit at 44.1 and 48kHz (sometimes higher if needed). Printing a mix is done in WAV 32-bit (takes up a lot of storage, though), only most of the time, 16-bit is enough and yes, I use dithering when printing a 32-bit project to 16-bit. I’ve subscribed to your channel.
Nice explanation. One correction: 32-bit floating point does not allow 10^38 steps. It allows value up to that big, which small steps for small numbers and big steps for big numbers. 32 bits will always only allow 2^32 or ~4 billion unique values.
I amused myself once by taking a .wav file, taking its SHA-256 hash, compressing to FLAC and then uncompressing back to .wav The SHA-256 hash of the resulting file was identical so proving that it was bitwise identical to the original retaining all the information that was captured at the time of digital recording. Loss of information = loss of sound quality even if someone tells me my ears shouldn’t be capable of detecting the difference
So, you compressed and decompressed a file, and checked if any data was lost using a SHA-256 hash. Very nice, I never would have thought of taking the hash. My 7 year old brain would have just used dd to make a copy of the original, performed the experiment on the original, and used diff to check for equality. Question - what was the file size of the original WAV, and how much did it shrink when compressed to FLAC?
@@Tom-uy4io I didn't actually check the compression ratio when I did this test but when I routinely convert .wav to .flac files I usually find that the flacs are around half the size or maybe a bit less.
I onced got into an argument with an audiophool who claimed that FLAC sounded better than ALAC. I did exactly the same experiment -- or, mostly the same, anyway. I took a source file, compressed with ALAC and FLAC, then decoded back to WAV. Then, to avoid any arbitrary differences in the WAV format headers (note), I used an audio editor to save the resulting decodes as raw PCM data. Then I used "fc /b" to compare them. "No differences encountered." The guy's reply? "I don't care. I hear the difference, even if tools like that can't distinguish them." Sure ya do, bud. (Note: If you write the bare minimum WAV file, the headers will _probably_ be identical too. But there are lots and lots of ways they can be different, while describing exactly the same audio data. This would ruin a checksum, and produce benign differences with a comparison utility, but the audio samples would still be a 100% match, so I dropped the headers before comparing to avoid that.)
I've been waiting for your presentation for a long time, until now I was using MP3 and FLAC format to listen to my favorite songs, but now after watching your presentation I will also use WAV format. Thanks for the presentation, it was very well explained like your other presentations.
Why would you use WAV? He explained twice that WAV is only useful in audio production work and not as a listening format. FLAC or ALAC is what you use for lossless listening as that is generally about half the size of WAV with no lowering of bitrate or loss of quality. FLAC or ALAC can be converted back to WAV and the WAV file will be identical to the one originally used to make the FLAC or ALAC file. Consider FLAC or ALAC to be a zip version of your WAV file, identical when unpacked, but smaller in its packed state.
@@radman8321 Yes, that's right, I didn't think about it, I wanted to have the songs without loss, but you're really right, it's not worth the effort. Thanks for everything.
Also worth a mention is the fact that there is far wider support for meta-data (tags for album, artist, track number, track name, album art, etc) in FLAC or ALAC files and players than is the case with WAV. It can be done, but most utilities will do this stuff much better with FLAC or ALAC files.
I remember when you couldn't listen to music on Linux because most of it was stored in a proprietary format and Linux was all about "open software." I'm glad that nonsense is behind us. But it would be great if the industry would settle on a single format in each category. It would make things much easier for everyone.
Like the other guy said, MP3 is fine. Stick with 320k. It does support ALAC (at least mine did) if you want lossless, but it will affect battery life. Unless you have some high end headphones you probably wouldn't be able to notice the difference between lossy and lossless anyway.
My whole music collection has been digitized and compressed into Ogg Vorbis format and takes up a lot less space than the alternatives while sounding great.
Mine, too, with the exception of a small percentage of downloads that aren't available in lossless formats. ~26k tracks (just under 150GiB at 192k) and still growing. And while I am keeping an eye on its successor, Opus (very nice, both qualitatively and quantitatively), there's just no way I'm going to re-rip that many CDs. I prefer to keep things as uniform as possible. Plus there are a few idiosyncrasies in tagging that I don't like. I have switched to it as the go-to audio codec for my video encodings, though.
Opus, the successor of Vorbis is better than Vorbis in every way. • Quality better than Vorbis • Encoding speed faster than Vorbis (libopus 1.5) • Decoding speed faster than Opus (libopus 1.5)
On top of me being over 50 (64 yrs old) I also have Tinnitus so my higher frequency hearing is really bad! so for me it really won't matter about the higher quality or not as I won't hear it! but thanks for all the wonderful info on the different file formats and Codecs/containers.
32 bit floating point has a range in excess of 10^38, but really only provides about 4*10^9 different levels, because the levels are not equally spaced... they get coarser as the number gets higher.
Another informative video Chris. I pretty much stick with MP3 formats as that is the best of both worlds for me personally, and is very easy to transport or edit, using Audacity. My memory banks got a good dusting off as it has been a few years since I looked at these different audio formats. I was reminded years ago not all audio players or editors easily could support MP3, I believe due to licensing issues. Anyway, thanks for a well presented video on something we take for granted these days.
Excellent video as always. I would only add that contrary to what lossless streaming services wants you to belive, basically 320kbps MP3 is undistinguishable from FLAC in A/B blind testing on a hi-end audio equipment. If someone don't agree with me then by all means check it yourself - take your favorite song in FLAC format, compres it to 320kbps MP3 (fir example in free Audacity) and test yourself.
I would personally agree with this -- although it probably depends a bit on your age and hearing capabilities. Some younger people may be able to hear the difference -- but certainly not me! :)
@@ExplainingComputers I'm 39 years old. Few months ago I went and check my heating as there was free checkup program avaible in my town. Lady said that normal hearing is around +20 in all frequencies while I scored mostly +5 and two +10 so better then normal hearing :) She said I have better score then she has and she is 31.
With storage being relatively cheap, my entire music collection (25+TB) is archived in WAV format. I then just convert files using dBpoweramp into whatever format I need for the various hardware playback gadgets I have- FLAC for my car audio systems, MP3 for the MP3 player/speaker I use when I'm working in the yard or garage where sound quality isn't of utmost concern. In the house, I just play the WAV files. My actual CDs are in pristine shape, as they are only used to create the archive or repair an occasional corrupted archive (which isn't much of a problem anymore since I went RAID).
Disc rot is very rare, in my experience. (One disc out of 1500 over 40 years of CD ownership). But please don't rely on RAID as a backup. It isn't. It offers protection against some hardware failures, but there are many other ways to lose data. (Apologies if you are already well aware.)
@@GodmanchesterGoblin I'm not really worried about disc rot. I have a bunch of CDs that are pushing 50 years old with no problems so far. The discs are my main backup. RAID mirroring is just an extra layer of protection on the hardware side.
Did you know that "The Mother of MP3" is Suzanne Vega? Her acapella song "Tom's Diner" was used as the basis for the compression algorithm by Karl-Heinz Brandenburg. Suzanne is probably better know for tracks such as "Luka", "Marlena on the Wall" and "Blood Makes Noise".
I think the argument for lossy compression schemes like mp3's was more justified a few years ago when storage was more expensive. But nowadays, hard drives are incredibly cheap, so I see no reason to use lossy compression anymore. I can understand bandwidth costs, and therefore the need for internet-based radio stations to use lossy formats, but with paid-for music streaming services, [I use Qobuz] uncompressed is the way to go [though technically it is FLAC lossless]. Anyone with a decent internet connection is able to stream 16bit 44.1Khz content with ease, which is the minimum needed for high-quality audio.
Grateful for the video. I’ll have to remember to watch it again, when I have audio questions, since I’ll never remember it all. LOL. Looking forward to your next video!
@9:09 -- The flac format supports multiple (lossless) compression levels, including 0 compression. Presumably, you used your application's default compression value? My Honda Accord's factory stereo can play flac files, but has a problem advancing to the next song. It takes 3 seconds, which is an eternity -- especially when you are manually trying to jump a few songs forward or backward. It has no issue with wav files. So I converted all of my music files to the wav format, and my delay issue is gone. However, the wav format provides next to no metadata. So my car's display will not even show me the name of the artist (it gets listed as "Unknown". And that is all the more problematic, when wanting to search for an artist. Your video has renewed my interest and might have resulted in my finding a better solution (which I will have to test). I will convert all of my flac files to non-compressed flac files. My car's stereo might have an easier time with zero compression in the flac format. If that works, I will also have my metadata. ----- @12:44 -- MQA is technically lossy. But it deletes samples that contain frequencies above the capabilities of human hearing. Even if someone could hear such frequencies, there is basically no musical content at those frequencies. @14:06 -- Yes, we lose the ability to hear high frequencies, as we age. But lossy formats do other harm to the sound's fidelity -- such as soundstaging. However, in order to hear the harm, you need a revealing stereo, professionally set-up. Most people plop down their speakers where they look best. Most rooms have too many reflections / echoes. So for 99.999% of us, we will probably not hear the harm that lossy file formats deliver. But if you have a revealing stereo, with your speakers properly positioned (feet apart from each other, and from you, and from the back wall, and properly towed in, and properly tilted up or down), and at least some basic room treatments, then for such a stereo, you will hear the difference between a flac file, and an mp3 file that was derived from the flac file. Well, one more caveat. Most songs have sub-par or nothing special sound quality. So if the studio did an incompetent job, then the format will not matter. But if you have some properly mixed and mastered flac files, played on a revealing stereo, etc, then you will hear the difference between a flac file and an mp3 file, even if you are in your senior years.
My choices for files are ogg/vorbis and FLAC for current use, mp3 for legacy devices. Kia stuff can read ogg vorbis, maybe other cars can too. Opus is cool but good luck getting native car support for it, unless you know otherwise. It just doesn't offer much over vorbis to justify using it. Oh and for movies, 8 channel vorbis works great with Kodi.
Opus: => Much better quality than Vorbis => Higher encoding speed => Higher decoding speed => Low latency => Even more efficient for small files like sound effects => Surround optimizations (The LFE channel gets lower bitrates since it only needs a very low bitrate)
@@EmergedFromReddit It might have better quality than vorbis *for a given bitrate*, but this isn't 2004 where storage is tiny. And not sure why decoding speed means anything when vorbis has been hardware decoded for over 15 years on SoCs for android and other chips. Latency also means nothing when listening to music. LFE is a thing but again, means probably little when dealing with gigabyte size files. And again, opus means nothing to me unless my car supports it.
Audiophiles incoming in 3...2...1... They would argue which format is the best until the end of time. However, there was an experiment which proved that even the best music student with perfect pitch could not even differentiate between mp3s and lossless audio. Great video as always!
MP3 is still the king of audio file formats, because of its presence in the majority of audio players. My personal favourites are Opus and Flac. All my Beatles albums are in Flac 24/96 ripped from vinyls.🤣
Given that MP3 is over 30 years old, it's surprising how well it still holds up today. It can still keep up with modern codecs and is perfectly usable, although I'd say that AAC is probably more prevalent in newer media.
I'd be interrested in a algorithm comparison of a few of these, you could do that with explanations, compress-decompress and then compare the waveform or possibly even analysis of the raw data of the compressed files and seeing what edits do to a decompressed sound
The sound coming from my PC speakers was exceptionally bad as I started watching this video and I thought "ah, he's comparing and contrasting lossy and lossless formats, very smart!" In the end it turned out to be a problem with my headphone jack. Great video!
Years ago I compressed my CD collection to 320 kbps mp3s using CDEX to fill micro SD memory cards with hundreds of songs each. I can rarely hear the difference except in the softest passages, though the bit rate was reduced by more than 2/3, and the file sizes shrank by as much as 10x. I thought I knew it all about audio codecs. I’m unceasingly amazed at what I continue to learn from watching EC videos. Thank you!
I think a lot of that is that the common players don't really produce a different output, so their incarnation of 320k and CD sound is functionally identical as it arrives at the audio jack.
I can't listen to classical on CD, because it loses all the ambient sound that makes an orchestra "sound right" (this is preserved on tape or vinyl, but not on CD which is already a very lossy format). But most people don't notice this.
CDEX uses LAME as encoder, the best of the 3. I don't like Fraunhofer on 320 kbps. And Helix is the quicker variant.
There is a lot more to explain about using MP3 the right way. (CBR, joint stereo etc)
In the past i had a encoder that also makes 500 kbps MP3 that only plays on an few programs. Useless.
Old players, car radio's gives hiccups when they play 320 MP3
SACD makes a lot of difference, it's a real problem to buy these.
Audio BD is also a improvement to a CD when it's done properly.
..what happened to your CD collection? 😞
I hope you did not "throw away" the high quality cds!
@@dallesamllhals9161 I still have the CD collection. I also made digital clone images of every CD using CloneCd. Those copies are backed up across 11 different servers and NAS devices as well as several SLC USB memory devices.
Chris hitting us with another WAV of knowledge
:)
XD
Although there are a variety of formats, what's surprising is how many of them have lasted for decades, with no sign of disappearing. Thanks Chris, good one.
Indeed! Some older formats do tend to hang around!
I remember aiff from my Amiga.
A neat thing with smartphones as mediaplayers is that format compatibility can remain pretty reliably wide.
The .SID format is of course superior for having a lot of music on the go.
The interesting thing about 44.1kHz sample rate and 16 bit depth, which are still so often used today, is that they were set at the start of CD. In turn, they were chosen in part because of the bandwidth available on an old video cassette format called U-matic. The PCM digital audio data for early CD was delivered on U-matic video tapes recorded usually with the PCM1610/PCM1630 digital encoders. A long forgotten set of equipment whose specifications are still reflected in the data rates of today's digital audio formats. I have two PCM1630 and U-matic rigs set up here and use them to recover digital audio tapes which recording studios find in their archives, using a pure lossless digital route. Tapes which are 40 years old can still sound stunningly good today, though sometimes they do suffer from data errors.
That's Sony's side of the digital audio, and subsequently CD project, where they partnered with Philips, who where forerunning the optical disc side.
U-matic was Sony format and they also produced 16-bit digital decoders. Meanwhile Philips had been working with 14-bit digital audio they were planning for the CD as well, but Sony vetoed it.
That's why old Philips CD players proudly proclaim 4x oversampling, as they only had 14-bit DACs and had to accommodate them for 16-bit CD audio.
Well, important aspect: is a common user device really built from components that will deliver sound "above" CD standards?
I've grown up listening to rather horrible audio quality, records and cassette tapes and I gotta tell you hearing digital music streaming in my car is a total joy. And I have no idea what the specs of the audio are on Spotify, it just sounds wonderful. I really enjoyed this lesson Chris. Fascinating, thank you.
Spotify uses OGG vorbis AFAIK, and OGG eclipses MP3 when at the same bitrate.
If you're going to listen to compressed audio, you could do a lot worse
If you haven't heard the sound quality of CDs, you are missing out
Try tidal or apple hi-res, surely a difference but don’t play it over Bluetooth:(
Spotify is really low bitrate. CD (a FORTY year old technology at this point) blows it out of the water.
Spotify has been saying for years now that they will let people use a reasonable modern bitrate but don't hold your breath.
Tidal is identical to Spotify but with lossless audio, it's like digging mud out of your ears that you didn't know was there.
I Worked in an audio facility for film dubbing and knew pretty much everything here but I watched all the video no matter what. A little brush up can’t hurt especially coming from a very well respected source. Thanks!
Thanks for watching. :)
Being a DJ and tech enthusiast, this video is RIGHT UP my alley. Thanks for all the work chris. Its appreciated.
While the content is obviously a grown up level of complexity, these videos give me a strong vibe of sitting cross legged on a primary school carpet watching a video tape on a crt tv on a trolley. It feels nostalgic and I love it
I like to advocate for a bigger use of Ogg Vorbis due to one curious fact: for some reason MP3 has a little gap of silence when looping, while Ogg Vorbis does not - this is why you see so many game devs use Ogg Vorbis for music instead of MP3 (and WAV for sound effects).
Also because despite the fact MP3 patents have expired long ago, Ogg Vorbis remains a free and open standard. Might be a moot point for some, but I stand firmly with it.
Serious music players support the delay and padding metadata in the Xing frame, which describe the duration of extra silence and it is then discarded. All lossy codecs have this property. A game engine is a closed system and they could easily either follow the standard or save this data in another format to allow looping.
VLC is the most serious media player around, but still produce a silent gap between each track. I read it was about to be fixed. Il really hope so.
Afaik Spotify uses ogg
Ogg Vorbis produces better results than mp3 at same bitrate, or smaller files at same quality. Long live Ogg.
Today most OGGs (container) use Opus (codec) instead of Vorbis (codec). It is simply the best lossy codec as of today in any aspect.
Long live the FLAC
hear hear
..the skull n' bones "Flag"? 😛
Forever FLAC
TTA and TAK are fine as well!
WAV is better since its compatible with older computers and takes less processing power to play
As a news publisher, I receive for publication audio, video and text on a daily basis. Very often I receive what are described as MP4 files, but are in reality M4A. This is due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the reporters who don't understand the difference, believing that an MP4 is a 'better' MP3.
It is one more mp better, isn't it? Haha
@@bertblankenstein3738 Exactly what Nigel Tufnel would say. And he probably did at some time or another
but it is better. mp4/m4a implies the AAC codec which is lightyears better than crappy old MP3.
@@martontichi8611 My point was, is that I get audio identified with an extension of mp4, but it should be m4a. The header data sez M4A bla blah. It affects so many sources that it's hard to believe industry wide stupidity. We *are* dealing with non-english speaking _news_ people.
An M4A is MP4. Apple decided to create a new file extension to indicate that the file has no video in it. You can rename it as your software requires.
Holy acronym Batman..... this was both enlightening and confusing.... thank you Chris! Stay well, see you next time....(you had to remind me of what over 50 feels like...cheers 😞 )
Thanks for your support my friend. :)
As usual, a very clear and understandable discussion of technical specifications. Keep up the good work!
I only rip in FLAC these days. Then I take it to my Android phone and use PowerAmp's various features to get everything out.
Great informative video; keep it up.
In Poweramp we trust, probably the most worthwhile purchase I've made on the Google Play Store
In the early days, I joined all my mp3s from each album in my collection into a non-compressed zip file, changed the ending to .mp3 and used that on my car's mp3 CD player so I didn't have to go through all the songs of each album to get to the album I wanted. Worked like a charm!
The fascinating part is, that is so wrong. It's the kind of wild swing that should never work like you thought it would. And I'm guessing you had no idea WHY that worked, or maybe even any reason to believe it would. But I would imagine it DOES work, and should be totally fine with most players.
MP3 is not much of a container format. It's actually just a stream of mostly independent frames. The only thing at all special about it is that several prolific pieces of software added custom headers and trailers to it, in order to support things like titles, album art, sample-accurate lengths, and indexes for easier seeking.
This is possible because an MPEG player is just searching for a frame header, which is a sequence called a sync pattern. If it reads a byte but doesn't see the sync pattern, it just moves on to the next byte and looks there, ad infinitum, until it finds one. Ergo, you can drop random data before, after, or between frames and it's still perfectly valid, as far as the MPEG reader is concerned. (At least until sync is lost to the point where the reader assumes the stream is hopelessly corrupted and gives up.) If the reader comes across metadata that it happens to know and understand, it can intelligently handle it -- parse it and benefit from it, or simply skip over it, if it can determine its length. That's why players that didn't support ID3 tags didn't mind them being there. They just ignored them, or supported them enough to know how long they were, and jump past them.
When you add an album's worth of MP3s into a ZIP file with no compression, you're basically just prepending a ZIP header and some table of contents garbage in front of the first MP3 file, which might have its own ID3 tags or whatever, and then you roll right into the data that was in the next MP3 file, and the next one, and so on. As long as the ZIP file is _uncompressed,_ the end result is not much different than if you had just squished the files together. Maybe there's a marker or CRC in between them, I dunno, I'm not familiar with the on-disk layout of a ZIP file. But it wouldn't matter. The reader would just see that as "a bad frame" and run through it until it found the next sync pattern.
Another way to accomplish the same thing is to use the command prompt with the copy command. E.g.: "copy /b track1.mp3+track2.mp3+track3.mp3 output.mp3" You would end up with the same result, minus the essentially useless, albeit benign, ZIP file overhead.
Needless to say, this would NOT work with WAV or MP4 files. (But some other MPEG formats, like VOB, are also fine being split and concatenated on frame/packet boundaries.)
@@nickwallette6201 Exactly right! Only I was shocked and stunned that it actually worked, I never thought it would. Though I did make sure they all had the same bitrates as that would have led to interesting results otherwise, probably.
Nowadays I'd use the command _cat ./*.mp3 > albumname.mp3._
@@TheDotBot Probably would've been fine with different bitrates too! Each frame has its format encoded in the header, and using different bitrates on a frame-by-frame basis is essentially how Variable Bit Rate (VBR) works. Not ALL players support VBR, so it's not a guarantee, but it's usually OK.
@@nickwallette6201 This was long before VBR was widely supported, early 2000s if I remember right. I did a weird transition from cassette tape to mp3-CD. Since all my "music" was recorded off the radio in mono, I also did the split-channel millisecond (nanosecond? I forget) shift thing to make it sound like stereo. So no, the quality wasn't exactly premium either. But I had my entire music collection on one CD, that was so wild.
Always go lossless if you're backing up/archiving your cd collection. That way if you ever want lossy versions to save on space/bandwidth you're basically future proofed to make lossy copies with whatever the best format is at the time.
I ripped all my CDs to flac for that very reason. A friend of mine spent ages using windows media player to rip his collection only to find when his Windows went tits up he was left with thousands of unplayable wma files that were drm protected.
Great advice, but I think most people don't really care about having a lossy format. I always rip and convert my music to MP3, even if I buy an album in FLAC, because I know it will play on every device. I've had too many experiences trying to play a FLAC file on a stereo that doesn't support lossless files. I eventually just gave up.
@@Reed-Publications My old car is so noisy the audio quality doesn't really matter when playing music while driving. So the file format I use is _loud!_
@@Reed-Publications How can you have problems playing flac lol
For long term storage lossless is the only way to go. Even if the lossless format becomes obsolete in the future you can always convert it to a newer lossless format preserving 100% of the audio quality, same can't be said of lossy files since each conversion from lossy to lossy degrades the audio quality. So always have a lossless backup of your music.
I love how Apple always comes in like _Yeah, we're doing our own thing that'll be slightly different._
So true . . .
Sony did a similar thing with, I believe ATRAC (and not forgetting "memory sticks"), and that is why I will never purchase another Sony product or ever buy an Apple item. This despite both companies making some of the best hardware available
@@skf957 Circa 1998 I got an MiniDisc player for my car, and a Sony component MiniDisc recorder. I used the format for mix discs. Anyway, the issue I had.... ATRAC back then had - for me - a lack of lower frequency and noticeably less bass.
@@skf957 Apple, I can understand, but Sony? Even now? They aren't on a non-stop train to purposefully make things difficult like Apple. Every company tries something stupid then gets back on track. It all depends on if the customer allows it. Apple customers allow Apple to do whatever they want and that's why they are the way they are. They can do no wrong. But other company customers will actually speak up.
...and then they have the gall to call it "interchange format"
Thank you Chris this has been a real education for me . I’ve ripped many CD’s in my collection & saved most to .mp3 at 192khz or 320khz & to be honest I couldn’t really tell the difference even using decent quality headphones. Several years ago I started saving in flac format using Audacity I also tried VLC but it didn’t always place nice.
I loved your parting shot when you mentioned upper frequency loss at 50 or over, my upper frequency loss started in my early 30’s working in close proximity to jet aircraft, I can still enjoy my music. Here's something for the tea & biccky fund. 🖖
Hello, Alan! For around three or four years now, I've been using Exact Audio Copy for CD ripping. Prior to that, I used Windows Media Player for ripping. The results I got from EAC were better than what I got from WMP.
Hi Alan -- thanks for your support. :)
@@ExplainingComputers you're most welcome :)
@@Praxibetel-Ix Hi Ford thanks for this, I'd totally forgotten about 'Exact Audio Copy' (I'd searched for this before posting) I got on OK with it, I used it on Win 7 until that went EOL. Hope you're OK? Yes = 👍, No = 👎 in between meh ;)
@@alanthornton3530 Hello! I'm doing a lot better today than I was last weekend.
I use EAC on Windows and, as you may remember, went on to install it on Linux Mint with some help from Wine. EAC and MP3Tag are the dynamic duo of CD ripping in my opinion. :)
Thanks for that very clear breakdown. One thing that podcasters (talking audio podcasts of course) had to balance was quality, bit-rate (and therefore) file size - especially going back 10+ years or so ago when they were just becoming popular. To keep our file sizes down for these almost exclusively 'spoken word' recordings many (of us) opted to drop the mp3 audio to 22050 kz MONO In fact after a few years we then decided to go better & moved up to 44100kz Stereo mp3 - only to get complains from some of our listeners! For health and safety reasons at work (although listening was allowed) they could only have an earbud in one ear to still be aware workplace dangers. Consequently they missed half of the two-person chat. Our solution - we switched to encoding in 'joint-stereo' mp3 :-)
th-cam.com/video/i6n-p9HdcOM/w-d-xo.html
something important about opus is that it can have the same quality of mp3 at half the bit rate. for example, i use 64kb opus files on my phone, and they have the same quality as 128kb mp3 files. This brought my music library from 18gb to 9.
My lib is like 90gb😅
I actually do the opposite, simply because so many devices and programs can't read, sort or display cover art for opus while storage is dirt cheap. But yeah, if you use a HQ converter the resulting mp3 has around double the bitrate.
Maybe under half. Opus > Vorbis > MP3.
I would still - always - archive lossless. The days of me hand-wringing over storage and bandwidth are 20 years ago.
@@hansdampf2084 Same. Or so I thought. It's actually 461GB and I don't even use it; I listen to Spotify. So 461GB was from 5-10 years ago.
Thank you very much for this video on audio! I hope this develops into a miniseries about software to record, produce, and reproduce audio, about audio routing and mixing, as well as about computer audio peripherals.
Thanks for your support, most appreciate. :) And video ideas noted.
Lovely video. Reminds me of the days 30 some years ago when I was taking computer science courses in college. Things certainly have progressed since then. Also you are a far better teacher than any I had in school. Thank you!!
This video is a great explanation of how all these file formats work and what they are. I've been working with many of them for years and still learned a couple of new things. Thanks, Chris!
Great video. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to explain that MP4 files are containers and not a specific codec.
Would have been nice to mention that AAC can achieve the same quality at a lower bitrate than MP3.
Hi Chris. Would you ever consider doing a new Explaining the Future video ? It's just that your previous videos are scarily prophetic and to hear your views on the latest things like AI etc and the impact it could have (as an example) would be good. However time is precious so wouldn't blame you if you've finished with that side of things.
You are right -- I should return to the ETF channel in some form . . .
I never knew the whole "container vs codec" thing until today. Thank you for your concise and insanely informative videos!
This is why you hit a million subscribers, Christopher - because you can take a complex topic and make it understandable and interesting. It's a great skill, keep up the great work :-)
well, you always post the most important subjects, explaining things that we deal with on a daily basis and that we probably didn't see in school. Nailed it, amazing job
Thanks :)
These are my favourite type of EC vids
Thanks. :)
my dude got 1M views? last time i watched u were 2k and never thought u would grow honestly. keep up. love the nerdy vibes
Another really good video. My entire collection is a combination of primarily WAV and FLAC's. No lossy music for me. We have 20 TB HDD's, 6GHZ CPU's and dedicated hardware decoders or CPU's who can decode dozens of streams without breaking a sweat.
As a musician almost exclusively using a computer to make my music, this is a great complement for my knowledge, thanks!
Even though we all like to pretend we are precious individuals who constantly rebel against 'the system'... we are a species of standardization and standards. We are for the most part much better off because of it. From standardized measures to audio file formats, we humans certainly like our agreed upon standards as well as constantly trying to improve upon them. Great video!
Back in the early 2000s I transcoded my Vinyl collection to high bit rate MP3. The best we had at the time was 192k which, as far as I could tell, decoded back to identical sound when compared to the originals. A couple of years later, I re-coded them to be 320kbps, which still sounds just like the originals.
Since then I've stayed with MP3 format for one simple reason ... I can curate them with MP3-Gain to play at the same -16lufs level as streaming services use. So my entire collection now plays at practically the same loudness allowing me to start long playlists and enjoy them without constantly interacting with my music system.
It's a great solution for me... Good sound quality and no huge racks of stored LPs or CDs, no wear and tear, easy local storage and all nicely at the same volume.
It's pretty amazing what you can do with the right software.
I did exactly the same.
Except once I got computer with two 500 mb hard drives, I redid them third time into .WAV
@@jhutt8002
Yep. Wav files are pretty big, though. My current collection, which has grown rather a lot, occupies about 30gb on disk. The whole thing is now housed, along with 1,400 transcoded movies, in MP4 files, on a 4tb NAS drive in an external housing.
@@Douglas_Blake_579 500 mb... Yea, sorry bout that, I of course meant 500 gb!
They are large indeed, but storage is cheap these days.
I upgraded my computer with two 1 tb drives couple of years back, as I couldn't fit my digitized library on it anymore. Currently at 456 gb of WAV + 387 gb of ISO files containing virtual copies of my music CD's.
I'm always a little bit smarter after watching an EC episode. Thanks, Chris.
As someone who creates music my go to audio file format is .WAV, gotta keep it as high quality as possible for the streaming services just in case the quality degrades a little on their platform 😎
In my wheelhouse now, this is concise and complete and I even learned some interesting trivia. Since I work with thousands of hours of production audio, I switched to ALAC and FLAC since the computation for compressing and decompressing is not a time factor with current hardware. Conveniently, each 3-hour reel-to-reel tape I do is 1 GB in ALAC. 3,500 reels will fit on a 5 TB drive with room to spare.
Great summary of the different audio formats dancing around today; it's also worth noting that many "super high quality formats" (MQA, DSD or even FLAC at 24bits 192Khz) are nearly indistiguishable from a properly mastered, engineered and post-produces audio cd quality (16 bit 44Khz) file.This is easily confirmed with a double blind test; kind of an 80s Coke vs Pepsi challenge when you don't get a clue about brand, model or format of the subject being tested.It's made to avoid bias, which is a great problem in testing or "personal taste".
That's why it's important to separate music from audio quality.
And we don't even want to go into cable price snake-oil, which is a plague among audiophiles.
Thanks for the very well produce explaining video. I got into MP3 back in 94 when one of my cousins demoed how he was able to back up a CD audio that was about 600MB into a fraction of the size into his hard drive so he can listen it on his computer whenever.
I did not get into the other newer formats except FLAC since I didn't need to keep up with audio formats. Thanks to this video I am all caught up.
I deal a lot with videos and would like a similar video explaining the video codecs.
Great explanation behind some things i've always taken for granted, used the terms, and not know the details! Thanks!
Mr. Barnatt, I've been an audio nerd / tech most of my adult life, and I still learn something new. Thanks for the refresher between codecs and containers. I'm in my late 50s, and for me, yep, it's harder to tell the difference between totally lossless and lossy formats. Currently I'm downloading ALAC songs on Apple Music, which sounds indistinguishable from CD to my current hearing ability.
Very useful information. You always make easy to understand explanations!
I am obsessive with my music collection and years ago I moved to a home media server for better access to my collection. I decided to go with .mp3 for the file size and quality, but also the id3 tag structure that would allow me to make corrections to what many MP3 ripping softwares would make, such as selecting the wrong genre (in my opinion) or splitting an album between mutiple artists, because of one guest artist on the album.
As always, a really great video that I look forward to every Sunday morning!
Thank you. Another well organized, informative presentation.🙂
Personally, I buy CDs and rip them into Flac files. I love how your videos look and sound like the 90s. I was born in 2003, so its an experience I never had. Subscribed.
Thanks for this quick and very helpful overview! I have always been an audio guy at heart, working in radio broadcast engineering, as well as for companies who designed and manufactured audio equipment for broadcast and streaming.
Greetings Chris. Sounds like an interesting career.
I have archived my whole CD collection (way more than 100 cd's over many years) in the Flac format on my pc. Great video explaining audio formats.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us, I recently started my journey as an anime video encoder but wasn't really sure which audio codec to use, you helped me to clear my questions
Exactly the subject most relevant to my computer needs. This is my favorite computer channel on TH-cam. How about one on how to make a good amplifier from a Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi by itself doesn't have enough amplification to drive a set of speakers. I've seen Raspberry Pi "hats" (accessory boards) that are DAC's (Digital to Analog) converters but no audio amplifiers that would drive a speaker. "Toids DIY Audio" had a nice feature about an amplifier sold by "Parts Express" that included onboard programmable DSP (Digital Signal Processing) that could be done from a PC to achieve premium sound for whatever speaker drivers you were using in your build. Hope this helps!!!
Build a Pi4 into a boombox. Better than using a laptop for entertainment. Power tool batteries, 5A buck converter. You'll want to power using 2 separate batteries. Android 13 because of higher over_voltage allowed for overclock. Accessories would cut out. I use mine for music, movies and tv anywhere.
You've got to kidding me. I am learning audio processing, cutting etc. since a month or two and recently thought about the file formats ^^. Now there is the Video, what a world. Thanky
Just this week I went and watched one year old videos explaining video formats and codex....then this comes out!!
An interesting coincidence!!
Spooky! :)
@@ExplainingComputers
Another TH-camr was saying something about video codex es, and showed a list of videos on TH-cam. I recognized your thumbnail style in the list I went looking for that particular video. Turns out I had already watched it, (and give it a thumbs up), but I watched it again....
AV1 and AV512 we're not mentioned in the video, but I still got the idea....though I wonder where they fit in.
I'm still learning every time I watch your videos. Thanks for sharing, Chris.
Greetings Brian. :)
The spirit of the 1990's ... when they chased 16-year olds for sharing their mp3 files with Napster. It was such a classic age.
Good old limewire.
That was the early 2000s, not the 1990s. And they weren't "chasing" anyone as P2P sharing of music wasn't illegal until later.
16-year-olds*
But you got Napster right in that comment.
@@encycl07pedia- _Money good, Napster bad!_
Metallica.
@@encycl07pedia- Thanks for the history lesson
@@encycl07pedia- Napster launched in 1999.
this is for me going to be very beneficial i have played with a few formats and never checked each one thank you for covering this information in brief is helpful
Didn't know Donkey Kong had his own audio file format lol
Great presentation as usual. "Tagging" is an additional considerations if you have a music collection stored on (for instance) a home server - sourced from ripped CDs, and purchased digital downloads. For that use case you want file formats which support storing tags (eg metadata such as album name, artist name, genre, cover art picture). But in addition there need to be music players, music servers and tagging editors which support those formats. Most of my experience is with MP3 and FLAC files which have comprehensive cover.
Some applications claim that they support tags in WAV files, tho I have never encountered tagged WAV files.
Pairing each audio format with their image format equivalent:
WAV - Bitmap
MP3 - JPEG
FLAC - PNG
AAC - HEIF
Opus - WebP
MIDI - SVG
Reason for each comparison:
WAV - Bitmap
- Uncompressed
- Old
- Owned by Microsoft
MP3 - JPEG
- Lossy compression
- Outdated, poor quality-size ratio compared to newer alternatives
- Most ubiquitous format, supported by just about everything
- Often the only audio/image format(s) supported by devices like older TVs, DVD players, stereos and digital photo frames
FLAC - PNG
- Lossless compression
- Royalty-free
AAC - HEIF
- More advanced lossy compression with better quality-size ratio
- Less supported than their predecessors
- Royalty-burdened
Opus - WebP
- Modern highly-efficient formats used on the web
- Poor support outside of the web
MIDI - SVG
- Don't contain the actual data, just information about how to generate the data
Nice post. :)
was going to do some research on audio file formats since most music players i use doesn't support opus and hey what do you know my favourite tech explaining youtube channel posted exactly that recently!
wonderful stuff chris! keep up the great work :D
As always, very informative video. Thank you Chris.
Now that I've watched the video, let me say that I have always ripped my CDs in the .mp3 format and have been doing so since I was still a teenager. In recent months though, I've started fiddling with the settings on my CD ripping software so the MP3 rips would come out sounding better.
Also, wow, what a difference editing on Linux makes! The color grading in the host segments look more natural. I actually compared screenshots of you from this video and last week's and I can really see the difference. :)
A very interesting observation on the colour grading -- and you are spot on.
@@ExplainingComputers :)
Thanks for a brilliant clear explanation, fantastic!
Наконец-то!!! Нашелся человек, который сказал правду про MQA. Браво! А не пудрит мозги людям со степенью развертывания
Finally a video about Audio file formats love your video. Miguel
Wow, such a great and accurate video about audio formats! I’m a music producer and I use WAV for production. Most of the time I record in either 24 or 32-bit at 44.1 and 48kHz (sometimes higher if needed). Printing a mix is done in WAV 32-bit (takes up a lot of storage, though), only most of the time, 16-bit is enough and yes, I use dithering when printing a 32-bit project to 16-bit. I’ve subscribed to your channel.
Thanks for the sub -- welcome aboard! :)
Nice explanation. One correction: 32-bit floating point does not allow 10^38 steps. It allows value up to that big, which small steps for small numbers and big steps for big numbers. 32 bits will always only allow 2^32 or ~4 billion unique values.
Yes, true -- but I did not want to get diverted into this.
I’ve been looking more and more into all video file types lately. Time to see what audio has to offer. Great video as always 👍
I amused myself once by taking a .wav file, taking its SHA-256 hash, compressing to FLAC and then uncompressing back to .wav The SHA-256 hash of the resulting file was identical so proving that it was bitwise identical to the original retaining all the information that was captured at the time of digital recording. Loss of information = loss of sound quality even if someone tells me my ears shouldn’t be capable of detecting the difference
Intresting...
Flac rocks !
Makes sense since it’s a lossless compression algorithm. No different to compressing a very large text file with zip.
So, you compressed and decompressed a file, and checked if any data was lost using a SHA-256 hash. Very nice, I never would have thought of taking the hash. My 7 year old brain would have just used dd to make a copy of the original, performed the experiment on the original, and used diff to check for equality.
Question - what was the file size of the original WAV, and how much did it shrink when compressed to FLAC?
@@Tom-uy4io I didn't actually check the compression ratio when I did this test but when I routinely convert .wav to .flac files I usually find that the flacs are around half the size or maybe a bit less.
I onced got into an argument with an audiophool who claimed that FLAC sounded better than ALAC. I did exactly the same experiment -- or, mostly the same, anyway. I took a source file, compressed with ALAC and FLAC, then decoded back to WAV. Then, to avoid any arbitrary differences in the WAV format headers (note), I used an audio editor to save the resulting decodes as raw PCM data. Then I used "fc /b" to compare them. "No differences encountered."
The guy's reply? "I don't care. I hear the difference, even if tools like that can't distinguish them." Sure ya do, bud.
(Note: If you write the bare minimum WAV file, the headers will _probably_ be identical too. But there are lots and lots of ways they can be different, while describing exactly the same audio data. This would ruin a checksum, and produce benign differences with a comparison utility, but the audio samples would still be a 100% match, so I dropped the headers before comparing to avoid that.)
I've been waiting for your presentation for a long time, until now I was using MP3 and FLAC format to listen to my favorite songs, but now after watching your presentation I will also use WAV format. Thanks for the presentation, it was very well explained like your other presentations.
Why would you use WAV? He explained twice that WAV is only useful in audio production work and not as a listening format. FLAC or ALAC is what you use for lossless listening as that is generally about half the size of WAV with no lowering of bitrate or loss of quality. FLAC or ALAC can be converted back to WAV and the WAV file will be identical to the one originally used to make the FLAC or ALAC file. Consider FLAC or ALAC to be a zip version of your WAV file, identical when unpacked, but smaller in its packed state.
@@radman8321 Yes, that's right, I didn't think about it, I wanted to have the songs without loss, but you're really right, it's not worth the effort. Thanks for everything.
Also worth a mention is the fact that there is far wider support for meta-data (tags for album, artist, track number, track name, album art, etc) in FLAC or ALAC files and players than is the case with WAV. It can be done, but most utilities will do this stuff much better with FLAC or ALAC files.
I remember when you couldn't listen to music on Linux because most of it was stored in a proprietary format and Linux was all about "open software." I'm glad that nonsense is behind us. But it would be great if the industry would settle on a single format in each category. It would make things much easier for everyone.
As usual another fantastic video where I learned a lot, thank you so much for your work.
Just what I need! I've just picked up an iPod classic, no idea which file format should I use.
I copied a lot of files, ripped from my CDs, to it in MP3 format. It sounded fine.
Like the other guy said, MP3 is fine. Stick with 320k. It does support ALAC (at least mine did) if you want lossless, but it will affect battery life. Unless you have some high end headphones you probably wouldn't be able to notice the difference between lossy and lossless anyway.
Thanks!
Thanks for your support. :)
My whole music collection has been digitized and compressed into Ogg Vorbis format and takes up a lot less space than the alternatives while sounding great.
Mine, too, with the exception of a small percentage of downloads that aren't available in lossless formats. ~26k tracks (just under 150GiB at 192k) and still growing.
And while I am keeping an eye on its successor, Opus (very nice, both qualitatively and quantitatively), there's just no way I'm going to re-rip that many CDs. I prefer to keep things as uniform as possible. Plus there are a few idiosyncrasies in tagging that I don't like.
I have switched to it as the go-to audio codec for my video encodings, though.
Opus, the successor of Vorbis is better than Vorbis in every way.
• Quality better than Vorbis
• Encoding speed faster than Vorbis (libopus 1.5)
• Decoding speed faster than Opus (libopus 1.5)
Thanks for going into such detail. I already knew some of this, but even that, not very well.
Very informative; great work!
On top of me being over 50 (64 yrs old) I also have Tinnitus so my higher frequency hearing is really bad! so for me it really won't matter about the higher quality or not as I won't hear it! but thanks for all the wonderful info on the different file formats and Codecs/containers.
32 bit floating point has a range in excess of 10^38, but really only provides about 4*10^9 different levels, because the levels are not equally spaced... they get coarser as the number gets higher.
Very true. I agonized on what to say without getting bogged down in detail at that juncture.
@@ExplainingComputers A video on how floating-pointer numbers are represented might be interesting!
Sunday Greetings.
This is a great content in the long series of explaining technology. Nice. ❤
YESSSSSSS, AUDIO FORMATS!!! THANK YOU, CHRIS! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!! I LOVE YOU!!! 🥺🥺🥺
Another informative video Chris. I pretty much stick with MP3 formats as that is the best of both worlds for me personally, and is very easy to transport or edit, using Audacity. My memory banks got a good dusting off as it has been a few years since I looked at these different audio formats. I was reminded years ago not all audio players or editors easily could support MP3, I believe due to licensing issues. Anyway, thanks for a well presented video on something we take for granted these days.
All that you ever wanted to know about audio file formats but were too afraid to ask. Thank you for another awesome video, Chris! 🫡
Would be nice to see tutorials on how to create audio in different formats - especially lossless
Excellent video as always. I would only add that contrary to what lossless streaming services wants you to belive, basically 320kbps MP3 is undistinguishable from FLAC in A/B blind testing on a hi-end audio equipment. If someone don't agree with me then by all means check it yourself - take your favorite song in FLAC format, compres it to 320kbps MP3 (fir example in free Audacity) and test yourself.
I would personally agree with this -- although it probably depends a bit on your age and hearing capabilities. Some younger people may be able to hear the difference -- but certainly not me! :)
@@ExplainingComputers I'm 39 years old. Few months ago I went and check my heating as there was free checkup program avaible in my town. Lady said that normal hearing is around +20 in all frequencies while I scored mostly +5 and two +10 so better then normal hearing :) She said I have better score then she has and she is 31.
With storage being relatively cheap, my entire music collection (25+TB) is archived in WAV format. I then just convert files using dBpoweramp into whatever format I need for the various hardware playback gadgets I have- FLAC for my car audio systems, MP3 for the MP3 player/speaker I use when I'm working in the yard or garage where sound quality isn't of utmost concern. In the house, I just play the WAV files. My actual CDs are in pristine shape, as they are only used to create the archive or repair an occasional corrupted archive (which isn't much of a problem anymore since I went RAID).
Careful of disk rot...
Disc rot is very rare, in my experience. (One disc out of 1500 over 40 years of CD ownership). But please don't rely on RAID as a backup. It isn't. It offers protection against some hardware failures, but there are many other ways to lose data. (Apologies if you are already well aware.)
@@GodmanchesterGoblin I'm not really worried about disc rot. I have a bunch of CDs that are pushing 50 years old with no problems so far. The discs are my main backup. RAID mirroring is just an extra layer of protection on the hardware side.
@@TheREALJosephTurner No worries. Enjoy the music. 😊
This was a much needed video.
Excellent work!
Did you know that "The Mother of MP3" is Suzanne Vega? Her acapella song "Tom's Diner" was used as the basis for the compression algorithm by Karl-Heinz Brandenburg.
Suzanne is probably better know for tracks such as "Luka", "Marlena on the Wall" and "Blood Makes Noise".
This I did not know!
@@ExplainingComputers My job here is done! However do look into it (fact-checking and all) :-)
Another excellent video. I always learn something new on a Sunday.
I think the argument for lossy compression schemes like mp3's was more justified a few years ago when storage was more expensive. But nowadays, hard drives are incredibly cheap, so I see no reason to use lossy compression anymore. I can understand bandwidth costs, and therefore the need for internet-based radio stations to use lossy formats, but with paid-for music streaming services, [I use Qobuz] uncompressed is the way to go [though technically it is FLAC lossless]. Anyone with a decent internet connection is able to stream 16bit 44.1Khz content with ease, which is the minimum needed for high-quality audio.
Grateful for the video. I’ll have to remember to watch it again, when I have audio questions, since I’ll never remember it all. LOL. Looking forward to your next video!
Greetings Perry. :)
@@ExplainingComputersIt’s always great to be greeted by you! Wishing you a great day!
@9:09 -- The flac format supports multiple (lossless) compression levels, including 0 compression.
Presumably, you used your application's default compression value?
My Honda Accord's factory stereo can play flac files, but has a problem advancing to the next song. It takes 3 seconds, which is an eternity -- especially when you are manually trying to jump a few songs forward or backward.
It has no issue with wav files. So I converted all of my music files to the wav format, and my delay issue is gone.
However, the wav format provides next to no metadata. So my car's display will not even show me the name of the artist (it gets listed as "Unknown". And that is all the more problematic, when wanting to search for an artist.
Your video has renewed my interest and might have resulted in my finding a better solution (which I will have to test).
I will convert all of my flac files to non-compressed flac files. My car's stereo might have an easier time with zero compression in the flac format. If that works, I will also have my metadata.
-----
@12:44 -- MQA is technically lossy. But it deletes samples that contain frequencies above the capabilities of human hearing. Even if someone could hear such frequencies, there is basically no musical content at those frequencies.
@14:06 -- Yes, we lose the ability to hear high frequencies, as we age. But lossy formats do other harm to the sound's fidelity -- such as soundstaging.
However, in order to hear the harm, you need a revealing stereo, professionally set-up.
Most people plop down their speakers where they look best. Most rooms have too many reflections / echoes. So for 99.999% of us, we will probably not hear the harm that lossy file formats deliver. But if you have a revealing stereo, with your speakers properly positioned (feet apart from each other, and from you, and from the back wall, and properly towed in, and properly tilted up or down), and at least some basic room treatments, then for such a stereo, you will hear the difference between a flac file, and an mp3 file that was derived from the flac file.
Well, one more caveat.
Most songs have sub-par or nothing special sound quality. So if the studio did an incompetent job, then the format will not matter.
But if you have some properly mixed and mastered flac files, played on a revealing stereo, etc, then you will hear the difference between a flac file and an mp3 file, even if you are in your senior years.
I wish I had seen this video years ago, it would of saved me a lot of time
My choices for files are ogg/vorbis and FLAC for current use, mp3 for legacy devices. Kia stuff can read ogg vorbis, maybe other cars can too. Opus is cool but good luck getting native car support for it, unless you know otherwise. It just doesn't offer much over vorbis to justify using it.
Oh and for movies, 8 channel vorbis works great with Kodi.
Opus:
=> Much better quality than Vorbis
=> Higher encoding speed
=> Higher decoding speed
=> Low latency
=> Even more efficient for small files like sound effects
=> Surround optimizations (The LFE channel gets lower bitrates since it only needs a very low bitrate)
@@EmergedFromReddit It might have better quality than vorbis *for a given bitrate*, but this isn't 2004 where storage is tiny. And not sure why decoding speed means anything when vorbis has been hardware decoded for over 15 years on SoCs for android and other chips. Latency also means nothing when listening to music. LFE is a thing but again, means probably little when dealing with gigabyte size files.
And again, opus means nothing to me unless my car supports it.
Brilliantly explained Chris, thank you very much.
Audiophiles incoming in 3...2...1...
They would argue which format is the best until the end of time. However, there was an experiment which proved that even the best music student with perfect pitch could not even differentiate between mp3s and lossless audio. Great video as always!
Very good explanation of the formats. I like the way you sang the last sentences !
MP3 is still the king of audio file formats, because of its presence in the majority of audio players. My personal favourites are Opus and Flac. All my Beatles albums are in Flac 24/96 ripped from vinyls.🤣
If you Own Nokia Phone Back In The Day.
They always Used AAC Quality For Ringtones 👍
Given that MP3 is over 30 years old, it's surprising how well it still holds up today. It can still keep up with modern codecs and is perfectly usable, although I'd say that AAC is probably more prevalent in newer media.
@@cromulence there was a time when I used to have my mp3 files on 128kbs range. I can’t stand the sound of files lower than 192kbs.
@@dougr.8653 Agreed, 192 is really the viable minimum, but 128k files were my first foray into music files I could actually keep on my PC!
Happy Monday 😁
I'd be interrested in a algorithm comparison of a few of these, you could do that with explanations, compress-decompress and then compare the waveform or possibly even analysis of the raw data of the compressed files and seeing what edits do to a decompressed sound
Ahh Audio Formats I love it❤