A lor of people think that MP3 means 'music file'. But in fact, MP3 means MPEG Audio Layer 3, and is only one way of converting music into digital files.
There are many various audio formats, and almost all of them compress the audio data so that it takes up less space on hard drive or less space on your portable music player.
Audio compression comes in two forms: lossless compression, and lossy compression.
1. LOSSY compression.
The MP3 format uses lossy compression.
This means that it loses some of the audio information found in the original to make the compressed file much smaller.
The information that lossy compression loses is the information deemed least important to the file.
In music, this tends to be the very high and very low frequencies that are not considered to add as much to the music as the range of frequencies in between.
2. LOSSLESS compression.
FLAC and many other audio formats use lossless compression.
This means that they retain every bit of information that is found in the original, so nothing is lost at all.
Because of this, lossless compression cannot make the compressed file as small as it would be using lossy compression.
However, lossless compression means that you get a smaller file without losing any information, and so is the only method that can be used when absolute fidelity is required.
- Add new comment
- 95 reads