![]() Typical complaints are that lossy compressed music sounds tinny, a bit distorted and lacking in dimensionality. Audiophiles, audio professionals and others keenly aware of fidelity can tell the difference, and most don’t like what they hear. It can reduce a digital audio file by as much as 90 percent, and a lot of people can’t hear the difference between the original and compressed audio. Lossy compression has a lot of practical advantages. If you’re curious to compare the sizes of various audio formats at different resolutions and bitrates, you can find several file size calculators online, such as this one. With lossy compression at a bitrate of 128kbps, you can reduce the file size to just under a megabyte, as shown in this illustration: One minute of music uncompressed and compressed. ![]() For example, the MP3 format supports bitrates from 96 to 320 kbps, while Spotify offers bitrates of 96 kbps (for mobile devices) and 160 kbps (on desktop devices) subscribing to Spotify Premium unlocks access to 320 kbps audio streaming.Ī CD-quality (16-bit, 44.1kHz) WAV or AIFF stereo audio file takes up approximately 10.6 MB of data per minute of music. The specific bitrates available depend on the format and/or streaming service being used. Here’s the TIDAL screen that offers this option: TIDAL lets you choose higher or lower bitrates. Because of that, most streaming music sites allow you to select a lower (“normal”) or higher bitrate. If file sizes get too large, you might have trouble streaming if you don’t have a fast Wi-Fi connection. The higher the bitrate, the better the quality, but the larger the file size. Expressed in kilobits per second (kbps), the bitrate indicates how much data-per-second was used to encode the audio. If you convert uncompressed audio to a lossy format, you can reduce its file size significantly, depending on the bitrate setting. They contain too much data to stream in real-time, take a long time to download and use up a great deal of hard drive space. The reason that data compression is necessary is that uncompressed music files are large and often unwieldy. ![]() But here’s the catch: with lossy compression, the frequencies removed during the encoding process do not get restored when the file is decoded back into audio. When you play or stream a compressed file, your phone, tablet, computer or receiver automatically uses the appropriate codec to decode the compressed data. The algorithm in the codec knows it can discard the data representing those masked frequencies at any point in the song where the levels match those amplitude criteria. ![]() For example, some frequencies mask others at specific amplitudes (levels). Lossy codecs decrease the size of a music file by looking for and removing specific frequencies that, for psychoacoustic reasons, your ears either won’t be able to hear or are not likely to notice are missing. Either way, the job of a codec is to encode the audio information on one end and decode it on the other. If you’ve streamed music on Spotify ®, TIDAL or Apple ® Music ®, or if you’ve downloaded songs from iTunes ®, chances are what you’ve been listening to has been converted to MP3, AAC, WMA or some other lossy format, which means it’s literally not all there.ĭata compression takes full-bandwidth music files and reduces their size significantly, using a codec, which is short for “code/decode.” These are usually software-based, though there are some hardware devices and chips that carry out this function. To put lossless technology in its proper context, let’s start by looking at lossy audio compression, a related process that’s in much wider use. Here are the ins and outs of how it works. ![]() That’s because music processed this way can be downloaded quickly and streamed in real time - without sacrificing any audio fidelity. If you’re an audiophile (or just someone who appreciates high-fidelity sound) and you haven’t taken advantage of a technology called lossless audio compression, you owe it to yourself to check it out. ![]()
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