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Common Formats of Music Compression
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posted by Vincent Zhang
Bluetooth Audio Amplifier is becoming more and more popular as an digital and wireless mobile device for short distance. But do you know music format for compression to be transferred from Bluetooth enabled devices like as smartphones or tablets? There is some summaries for those common format of music compression as below such as MP3,WAV, AAC, FLAC?
Why so many? Good question, and one that's not easy to answer. What we can do, however, is look at some of the more popular ones and understand their individual advantages (and drawbacks).It depends on music format for compression that acoustics quality of Bluetooth speaker reproduction.
MP3
MP3s, you have them. We're pretty sure you're aware of what these are. A compressed, or "lossy" format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group. Clever algorithms maintain fidelity, while reducing file sizes, by compressing the data which is believed to be hard to hear in its original form. When encoded at a bit rate of 128Kbps, the resulting file will be approximately 1/11th the size of the uncompressed original. This ratio obviously changes when a different rate is employed. For example the maximum bit rate of an MP3 is 320Kbps which is a much more favorable compression ratio nearer to 4:1. Should you wish to know more about the origins of the ubiquitous specification, there are lots more details about the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 layer III standards online, which make excellent restroom reading, but are beyond the scope of this article. The positives of the MP3 format are well-known -- small file sizes with minimal impact to audible quality. As such, it has been adopted as the standard format for many media players and devices. The downsides are that, no matter how good the final result is, you are losing some data on the way, which for purists and audiophiles isn't ideal. Many arguments have been had about the noticeable differences between a high-bit-rate MP3 and a WAV file which, to date, have never been truly settled, and likely never will.
WAV / Wave
The WAV or Wave file is one of the most common uncompressed formats. Originally a Windows format, it's since become extremely widely supported be it Linux, OS X, or any mobile platform and beyond. The main advantage beyond versatility is that it's a "lossless" format, meaning audio is typically uncompressed, and is very similar, though not identical to, CD audio. The downside to this, of course, is that file sizes tend to be large. Using the calculations mentioned above, a five-minute audio file recorded at 16-bit, 44.1KHz would create a 53MB file.
AAC
If you've ever used iTunes, then there's a good chance you've met the AAC. Apple's preferred compressed format is still default encoding / compression choice in its ubiquitous software. The AAC format was hoped to be the successor to MP3, as it offers equivalent quality with a lower bit rate (this can depend on the encoder, of course) but as is often the case, the general public can have other ideas. While the format is widely supported across a variety of platforms, it never quite received the hardware, and user, adoption of the MP3, despite some clear technical improvements, such as support for high sample rates (96KHz compared to MP3's 48KHz max).
AIFF
Short for Audio Interchange File Format, AIFF is similar to WAV in that it is uncompressed and lossless. Whereas WAV started on Windows, AIFF found favor with the Macintosh platform, with its origins in the Interchange File Format from Electronic Arts. AIFF also stored integers in the arguably more efficient big-endian format which was also the default on Macs and Linux, but ultimately lost out to WAV, thanks to the popularity of Windows. Again, like WAV, support is wide, and file sizes are large. There is also an AIFF-C / AIFC variant which is "lossy" / compressed.
FLAC and beyond
So far the benefits of one format have been almost directly proportional to their drawbacks, i.e. a see-saw with audio quality on one end, and file size on the other. The Free Lossless Audio Codec tries to take on both of these qualities (high fidelity and smaller file sizes) and squeeze them into the same pot. It does so with some success, with the official site for the standard claiming an average compression of 53 percent in tests. As FLAC is open source, and therefore non-proprietary, it has gained wider support than some of the competing lossless formats such as Apple Lossless and WavPack. This balance of abilities has also earned FLAC a dedicated following, but file sizes are still larger than those offered by MP3 and AAC, which can still make these skinnier formats appealing to less demanding consumers.
There are, of course, many more digital formats, such as WMA, OGG (Vorbis), MP2 and so on. To exhaustively list them here would require a few more pages, or perhaps a Primed of its own. The main distinction, however, is whether they are lossless or not, and then whether compression is involved. While support for some is greater than others, widely available and popular software media players can usually support all of them natively, or if not, then at least by expansion with downloadable codec packs.
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