Audio Compression Primer

Hack Jandy writes "For those of you with a little extra time this afternoon, check out Sudhian's primer to all things concerning audio compression. The article details everything from DRM to CRC matrixes (with a healthy dosage of Ogg)."

Re:Is FLAC worth it?

[k3v1n]

I personally think 256kbps or even 192kbps is good. But it depends on your output (speakers, headphones) and more importantly your ears. Some people don't mind 92kbps while others won't settle for anything less than vinyl (usually people with $30k+ wrapped up in their setups...)

In short--its entirely up to you!

Re:Is FLAC worth it?

[t_allardyce]

Considering 4GB is enough to store about 6 hours of CD quality uncompressed audio, if you're an audiophile with a hard-drive based music player you would probably want to try it, except most mp3 players don't have much RAM so you will probably get allot of skipping if you move it around. Still, people are going to start storing uncompressed or losslessly compressed music on their computers more and more since capacity and price are pretty good now and most people can't be assed to compress all the music they've ripped - you have to decide on the bit rate and then what if you compress your whole CD collection and decide you want it at a higher quality, you might as well just keep it lossless.

Re:Make the right choice. Choose Vorbis.

[valkraider]

I had a Vorbis listening party this past Summer at my home.

But no one came.

Re:I still hear MDCT distortions

[Anonymous Coward]

The recording is lossy but that's irrelevant, the original live sound includes the bit where the drummer shouted "You fucking piece of shit, I'll kill you," because he saw one of the engineers touching his girlfriend. I don't want to hear that, I want to hear the 4:16 of decent music they produced after three days in the studio and two weeks of fiddling about in post-production.

That 4 minutes 16 seconds is 16-bit PCM data played in the car CD player on the way home that night with a feeling of satisfaction. If it sounded OK when they did that, it will sound OK when I play back the FLAC file. If it sounded shit when they did that, I'm an idiot for buying it. Will it sound OK with Compressor-of-the-week at 128 kbit/s ? Maybe it will and maybe it won't, I'll let someone else take that chance.