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At least, the TRUTH about AUDIO ! The Adverstising Evil. There is an easy, fast and full-proof way to know if this girl/boy is right for you: Smell her/him. Ouch, its not working anymore, They all smell the same, reksona, haxe ... The advertising evil has brain-washed them. Even the smartest people has to follow, because they are often not primarly interested in their partner's brain. Usually a bit, and mostly , quite ... lower. The same happened in the audio world. All the truth has became lies for the sake of companies selling you over-priced cables and under-performant equipement. So here is the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. |
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What is the best lossy format ? OGG, without doubt. As a Free Open Source format, Ogg was created as a replacement for mp3 and its copyrights headaches. Not only it has no royalties and DRM problems but is also the highest quality audio compression algorithm ever made and can be played on almost any hardware. At high bit rate, 192 kbps and over, it is just as CD quality and a third the size of a lossless compression. At 96 kbps, it is way better, and smaller, than any other format at 128 kbps. Even at low bit rate, 24/32 kbps, it is still better than specialised voice format like Speex. What about the others ? WMA comes as a desserving runner up technically. Always a good quality at any bit rate. Unfortunately, DRM makes more problems than it should solves. MP3 was designed as the audio compression format for Mpeg movies known as VideoCD or VCD. Mpeg 1, layer 3, its true name, compress audio at 224 kbps in VCDs and was not really intended for low bit rates. But at 128 and over is still an interesting choice as it is universally playable. Wavpack, in hybrid mode, is a very interesting solution for listening to high quality compressed music while still keeping a lossless copy. When hardware/mobile playback become more available, it could be sitting right next to OGG. AAC is the result of the Mpeg copyright owners being mad of watching people using their mp3 format for sharing music without paying for it ! While they call it "Advanced Audio Coding" to make us think it is better than mp3, it should really be called "Altered Audio Coding" as for sure it is never better than mp3 and even much, much worse at low bit rates, where the bandwith is cut by half (no trebles). Of course at 224, or even 130 using a very professionnal compressor as Apple do with its Itunes (m4a), it is listenable, as any other format. The only Advanced part in AAC (aac, m4a, m4b and mp4 extensions) is how to make us pay for music, lock the songs to a player, limit the playback to x times, prevent copying, reducing quality, etc... Microsoft try the same with WMA, but at least they made it better sounding than mp3. So, unless you are addicted to Ipod, you have NO NEED AT ALL to use AAC. OptimFrog looks like a Wavpack would-be. Unfortunately, it take 3 times more processing power. MP2, Musepack (Mpeg plus) should only be used if your target player can only play these formats. |
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