It essentially fakes high frequency audio in a way that your brain can't hear anyway, and by doing so, allows it to "spend" more bits in the encoding of lower frequencies that are more noticeable. HE-AAC v1 uses a technique "spectral band replication", which discards high frequency audio before encoding, and then recreates those high frequencies during decoding using a psychoacoustic model. "High-Efficiency AAC" (HE-AAC) is an extension to the AAC format that provides better sound quality at lower bitrates, which makes it more optimized for streaming. The origin of the Ogg name comes from the jargon of a video game called Netrek. It was originally thought that the Ogg name was based on a character from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, but the creators of the Ogg format say that isn’t the case. Today, it is widely supported in players and browsers as a streaming audio format, but generally still lags behind AAC in terms of quality and compatibility. Ogg Vorbis gained popularity in the early 2000s as it offered better sound quality than MP3 and WMA, but grew more slowly due to a lack of support in hardware players. It consists of an audio compression format called "Vorbis" and a container format called "Ogg". Ogg Vorbis was created as a patent-free open source codec as a response to MP3. (AAC is now sometimes referred to as Low Complexity AAC, or LC-AAC.) It is nearly universally supported across every device and web browser, and is an excellent choice for streaming radio because of the better sound quality when compared to MP3s. The format was created in 1997, but did not achieve widespread usage until Apple introduced AAC support in iTunes and began distributing iTunes Music Store downloads in AAC format. Today, MP3 as a streaming format is universally supported across effectively every device, and still offers relatively good sound quality due to improvements in encoders over the years.ĪAC is the successor to MP3, and offers higher accuracy, higher efficiency, and more samplerates than MP3. The quality achievable at standard bitrates (128 kbps) were also well below the download speeds of early broadband modems (1000 kbps), so the invention of the MP3 codec kickstarted the trend for internet radio and music downloading. It was the first codec that offered good sound quality with file sizes that were convenient at the time. MP3 is a compressed audio format that emerged in the mid-90s, and gained widespread usage as the format of choice for digital music. The Radio Mast Streaming Network is compatible with both MP3 and all AAC-type codecs. If any of you guys can convert some of your uncompressed music to the above format and listen in headphones, please tell me I am not crazy and that they do actually sound amazing by any standards.Not all audio formats are created equal! Here is what you need to know about the history of streaming audio codecs, and choosing a format that suits your needs. 25 (estimated bitrate: 64Kbps) - even though it says 64 the files usually end up averaging around 37k I usually try to compress from FLAC/WAV wherever possible, and I use dbPoweramp with the following settings when converting: But seriously, apart from specific parts of audio, eg a complex piece with a lot of high frequency sounds along with mid and low, I actually find it quite difficult to differentiate between these songs and their uncompressed variants.Īm I crazy or missing something? Before commenting, if you haven't already tried it, please do. And before I experimented, I probably would have been disgusted at the thought of a 40k compressed song too. Now whenever I mention "40k" to people understand what that means in the digital audio world, I get looks of disgust. If need be I use a little EQ tweaking where necessary. It hasn't got a huge amount of storage, so I compress songs to approximately 40k. When on the go, I listen to music on my phone, which according to what I have read around the internet has a decent enough audio hub (Qualcomm WCD9310). However, what amazes me is the HE AAC v2 format, specifically songs generated using the Nero encoder. When listening carefully, with good headphones in a quiet environment, I can easily notice differences between a >192k mp3 and FLAC for example. I enjoy good quality uncompressed music just as much as anyone would, though I don't consider myself an audiophile as such.
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