Explaining Audio File Formats 

Long live the FLAC

The sound coming from my PC speakers was exceptionally bad as I started watching this video and I thought "ah, he's comparing and contrasting lossy and lossless formats, very smart!" In the end it turned out to be a problem with my headphone jack. Great video!

I like to advocate for a bigger use of Ogg Vorbis due to one curious fact: for some reason MP3 has a little gap of silence when looping, while Ogg Vorbis does not - this is why you see so many game devs use Ogg Vorbis for music instead of MP3 (and WAV for sound effects). Also because despite the fact MP3 patents have expired long ago, Ogg Vorbis remains a free and open standard. Might be a moot point for some, but I stand firmly with it.

Chris hitting us with another WAV of knowledge

The interesting thing about 44.1kHz sample rate and 16 bit depth, which are still so often used today, is that they were set at the start of CD. In turn, they were chosen in part because of the bandwidth available on an old video cassette format called U-matic. The PCM digital audio data for early CD was delivered on U-matic video tapes recorded usually with the PCM1610/PCM1630 digital encoders. A long forgotten set of equipment whose specifications are still reflected in the data rates of today's digital audio formats. I have two PCM1630 and U-matic rigs set up here and use them to recover digital audio tapes which recording studios find in their archives, using a pure lossless digital route. Tapes which are 40 years old can still sound stunningly good today, though sometimes they do suffer from data errors.

Years ago I compressed my CD collection to 320 kbps mp3s using CDEX to fill micro SD memory cards with hundreds of songs each. I can rarely hear the difference except in the softest passages, though the bit rate was reduced by more than 2/3, and the file sizes shrank by as much as 10x. I thought I knew it all about audio codecs. I’m unceasingly amazed at what I continue to learn from watching EC videos. Thank you!

Always go lossless if you're backing up/archiving your cd collection. That way if you ever want lossy versions to save on space/bandwidth you're basically future proofed to make lossy copies with whatever the best format is at the time.

Being a DJ and tech enthusiast, this video is RIGHT UP my alley. Thanks for all the work chris. Its appreciated.

I only rip in FLAC these days. Then I take it to my Android phone and use PowerAmp's various features to get everything out. Great informative video; keep it up.

The spirit of the 1990's ... when they chased 16-year olds for sharing their mp3 files with Napster. It was such a classic age.

I love how Apple always comes in like _Yeah, we're doing our own thing that'll be slightly different._

I Worked in an audio facility for film dubbing and knew pretty much everything here but I watched all the video no matter what. A little brush up can’t hurt especially coming from a very well respected source. Thanks!

I amused myself once by taking a .wav file, taking its SHA-256 hash, compressing to FLAC and then uncompressing back to .wav The SHA-256 hash of the resulting file was identical so proving that it was bitwise identical to the original retaining all the information that was captured at the time of digital recording. Loss of information = loss of sound quality even if someone tells me my ears shouldn’t be capable of detecting the difference

Although there are a variety of formats, what's surprising is how many of them have lasted for decades, with no sign of disappearing. Thanks Chris, good one.

I've grown up listening to rather horrible audio quality, records and cassette tapes and I gotta tell you hearing digital music streaming in my car is a total joy. And I have no idea what the specs of the audio are on Spotify, it just sounds wonderful. I really enjoyed this lesson Chris. Fascinating, thank you.

something important about opus is that it can have the same quality of mp3 at half the bit rate. for example, i use 64kb opus files on my phone, and they have the same quality as 128kb mp3 files. This brought my music library from 18gb to 9.

In the early days, I joined all my mp3s from each album in my collection into a non-compressed zip file, changed the ending to .mp3 and used that on my car's mp3 CD player so I didn't have to go through all the songs of each album to get to the album I wanted. Worked like a charm!

As a news publisher, I receive for publication audio, video and text on a daily basis. Very often I receive what are described as MP4 files, but are in reality M4A. This is due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the reporters who don't understand the difference, believing that an MP4 is a 'better' MP3.

as a music producer, this is really helpful 😊

Наконец-то!!! Нашелся человек, который сказал правду про MQA. Браво! А не пудрит мозги людям со степенью развертывания

For long term storage lossless is the only way to go. Even if the lossless format becomes obsolete in the future you can always convert it to a newer lossless format preserving 100% of the audio quality, same can't be said of lossy files since each conversion from lossy to lossy degrades the audio quality. So always have a lossless backup of your music.

I never knew the whole "container vs codec" thing until today. Thank you for your concise and insanely informative videos!

Didn't know Donkey Kong had his own audio file format lol

Looking back to the 90s, how many of us mistakenly compressed and replaced our entire CD collection into MP3 (16/44.1/128) to maintain that precious hard drive space? Now 128 kb/s seems so Napster.

As usual, a very clear and understandable discussion of technical specifications. Keep up the good work!

A perfect way to forget about being at work!!! Chris is a saviour !

These are my favourite type of EC vids

DSD is very clever, never even thought about that idea

was going to do some research on audio file formats since most music players i use doesn't support opus and hey what do you know my favourite tech explaining youtube channel posted exactly that recently! wonderful stuff chris! keep up the great work :D

Thanks for that very clear breakdown. One thing that podcasters (talking audio podcasts of course) had to balance was quality, bit-rate (and therefore) file size - especially going back 10+ years or so ago when they were just becoming popular. To keep our file sizes down for these almost exclusively 'spoken word' recordings many (of us) opted to drop the mp3 audio to 22050 kz MONO In fact after a few years we then decided to go better & moved up to 44100kz Stereo mp3 - only to get complains from some of our listeners! For health and safety reasons at work (although listening was allowed) they could only have an earbud in one ear to still be aware workplace dangers. Consequently they missed half of the two-person chat. Our solution - we switched to encoding in 'joint-stereo' mp3 :-)

I'm always a little bit smarter after watching an EC episode. Thanks, Chris.

This is one of those tutorials that I am saving to re-listen to, as my BHPS )(Brain Head Space Storage) Needs some compression to find contiguous area to absorb and process!

Holy acronym Batman..... this was both enlightening and confusing.... thank you Chris! Stay well, see you next time....(you had to remind me of what over 50 feels like...cheers 😞 )

Щиро дякую! Дуже інформативно

My whole music collection has been digitized and compressed into Ogg Vorbis format and takes up a lot less space than the alternatives while sounding great.

great video mate, very well explained and easy to follow.

Great video. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to explain that MP4 files are containers and not a specific codec. Would have been nice to mention that AAC can achieve the same quality at a lower bitrate than MP3.

Thank you. Another well organized, informative presentation.🙂

FLAC is my prefered format these days. It preserves the 5.1 that I rip from DVDA and SACD. Plays back on my home theater and my car supports 5.1 as well.

well, you always post the most important subjects, explaining things that we deal with on a daily basis and that we probably didn't see in school. Nailed it, amazing job

My choices for files are ogg/vorbis and FLAC for current use, mp3 for legacy devices. Kia stuff can read ogg vorbis, maybe other cars can too. Opus is cool but good luck getting native car support for it, unless you know otherwise. It just doesn't offer much over vorbis to justify using it. Oh and for movies, 8 channel vorbis works great with Kodi.

Exactly the subject most relevant to my computer needs. This is my favorite computer channel on RU-vid. How about one on how to make a good amplifier from a Raspberry Pi.

Over here in the colonies, we pronounce WAV as wave. I still can’t say the way the UK pronounces aluminum. 😂

Just this week I went and watched one year old videos explaining video formats and codex....then this comes out!! An interesting coincidence!!

Another really good video. My entire collection is a combination of primarily WAV and FLAC's. No lossy music for me. We have 20 TB HDD's, 6GHZ CPU's and dedicated hardware decoders or CPU's who can decode dozens of streams without breaking a sweat.

Very useful information. You always make easy to understand explanations!

Thank you so much Chris! Very interesting video.

As someone who creates music my go to audio file format is .WAV, gotta keep it as high quality as possible for the streaming services just in case the quality degrades a little on their platform 😎

Finally a video about Audio file formats love your video. Miguel

That outro is insane!

Sr. You are amazing. Thank you for your work.

Ahh Audio Formats I love it❤

There was a very rare audio format which was .vqf The software name was Yamaha SoundVQ and it has an excellent sound quality for lower bitrates. I can fit a full 3 minutes song in a single 1.44MB floppy disk and I was so amazed by it!

This is why you hit a million subscribers, Christopher - because you can take a complex topic and make it understandable and interesting. It's a great skill, keep up the great work :-)

Lovely video. Reminds me of the days 30 some years ago when I was taking computer science courses in college. Things certainly have progressed since then. Also you are a far better teacher than any I had in school. Thank you!!

very well done video...audio formats are very underestimated specially on these days were we have music everywhere. Regards

Thank you, good information.

Very informative; great work!

I have archived my whole CD collection (way more than 100 cd's over many years) in the Flac format on my pc. Great video explaining audio formats.

As an music lover I got 4TB of music all in FLAC and some in WAV. We live in a golden era for audio quality.

Great video Chris and very informative.

Thanks for a brilliant clear explanation, fantastic!

Back in the early 2000s I transcoded my Vinyl collection to high bit rate MP3. The best we had at the time was 192k which, as far as I could tell, decoded back to identical sound when compared to the originals. A couple of years later, I re-coded them to be 320kbps, which still sounds just like the originals. Since then I've stayed with MP3 format for one simple reason ... I can curate them with MP3-Gain to play at the same -16lufs level as streaming services use. So my entire collection now plays at practically the same loudness allowing me to start long playlists and enjoy them without constantly interacting with my music system. It's a great solution for me... Good sound quality and no huge racks of stored LPs or CDs, no wear and tear, easy local storage and all nicely at the same volume. It's pretty amazing what you can do with the right software.

Oh look 👀 it’s the STANLEY and MR Scissors ✂️ BAND!

Yes, I'm watching this video for fun

Thanks for the video. 👍. Suggestion, a follow up video about the origins and history of digital audio. I remember when CDs were first released, it was amazing to hear such clarity without the artifacts common with records and tapes as they age.

In my wheelhouse now, this is concise and complete and I even learned some interesting trivia. Since I work with thousands of hours of production audio, I switched to ALAC and FLAC since the computation for compressing and decompressing is not a time factor with current hardware. Conveniently, each 3-hour reel-to-reel tape I do is 1 GB in ALAC. 3,500 reels will fit on a 5 TB drive with room to spare.

Peter this was a great explanation which was well done and a first for me thanks for doing this super valuable video you're the only one who does this or at a great well presented explanation and well explained to more easier terms to understand which really benefited me. Your a real God Send to people like me. Grateful to you forever. thanks Mike

Even though we all like to pretend we are precious individuals who constantly rebel against 'the system'... we are a species of standardization and standards. We are for the most part much better off because of it. From standardized measures to audio file formats, we humans certainly like our agreed upon standards as well as constantly trying to improve upon them. Great video!

As end user I prefer MP3. At higer bitrates it is indistinguishable from uncompressed CD-Audio, it has the best support in playback devices and it does not require a lot of disk space.

I remember when you couldn't listen to music on Linux because most of it was stored in a proprietary format and Linux was all about "open software." I'm glad that nonsense is behind us. But it would be great if the industry would settle on a single format in each category. It would make things much easier for everyone.

Great explanation behind some things i've always taken for granted, used the terms, and not know the details! Thanks!

Great summary of the different audio formats dancing around today; it's also worth noting that many "super high quality formats" (MQA, DSD or even FLAC at 24bits 192Khz) are nearly indistiguishable from a properly mastered, engineered and post-produces audio cd quality (16 bit 44Khz) file.This is easily confirmed with a double blind test; kind of an 80s Coke vs Pepsi challenge when you don't get a clue about brand, model or format of the subject being tested.It's made to avoid bias, which is a great problem in testing or "personal taste". That's why it's important to separate music from audio quality. And we don't even want to go into cable price snake-oil, which is a plague among audiophiles.

i can tell im getting older because i actually enjoy watching videos about different file formats.😂

- Excellent as always. - Thx.

excellent video I knew most of what you said already but I also learned something new too

Thank you very much for this video on audio! I hope this develops into a miniseries about software to record, produce, and reproduce audio, about audio routing and mixing, as well as about computer audio peripherals.

Bit rate affecting high frequency is an encoder thing, MP3 was designed for voice recording and there are lower roll offs. AAC and Opus maintain the same high frequency range at low bitrate, the quality will suffer, a 160kbit will sound very close to 320kbit MP3 in high freq. Other than high frequencies, quality mostly affect things like room reverb presence in recordings, aliasing like a vocalist matching the same note as a violin in background and mostly loud music. Aliasing sounds like a very light dial tone in tandem. Unlike headphones, stereo speakers share the same air which introduces phase distortion, and the effects are amplified that causes annoyance not just noticable, e.g: vocalist with many instruments will sound like a phone loudspeaker until the instruments stop. For AAC implementations, Fraunhofer and Apple differ in low bitrate, despite being compatible in most players, Apple's focusing on high freq. For listening, audio going through a chain of Bluetooth, DSP, audio enhancments and speakers benefit from higher sample rate, example: 44.1khz content will have to be resampled to 48khz or higher. Long chains are common in Hi-Fi and cars. Most systems run at 48khz and higher as a preperation for correction and effects, since there is more content in mids and highs and these noticeably degrade at lower sample rate when processed multiple times. Resampling isn't equal between operating systems, dedicated music players resample the content internally before sending to avoid issues. Playing 48khz content directly bypasses any imperfections. E.g Windows 8.1 and below had a bad resampler, Pulseaudio defaults were very low; macOS, Android and iOS avoids resampling unless multiple applications are using audio or the DAC doesn't support the target sample 16 bit depth is the main problem when used with 44.1khz especially when using replay gain, most people can't tell between 24bit 44.1khz and 192khz. Lowering the digital volume of a DAC or software mixer running at 16bit degrades quality quickly, hence why most DACs and players emphasise on controlling the analog output and not the digital gain, this isn't a problem when switching to 48khz with a resampler for the average ear.

Thank you for yet another excellent explanation video. 👍🏻

I'm old enough now(50) to remember when the MP3 codec came on the scene, and the world was obsessed with MP3 file-sharing of music with the likes of Napster. I also remember that there were plenty of free players for MP3, but that you had to purchase the rights to use the Fraunhofer codec of the time, until the likes of the LAME encoder came along, and then Fraunhofer basically became a thing of the past. ;) When I recently re-ripped ALL of my CD collection, I kept the WAV file masters, as you can re-encode into anything you like, from the original WAV masters.

love lossless sound! and especially the piracy part

Good video Chris! and Thanks for always sharing with us!💖👍😎JP

I’ve been looking more and more into all video file types lately. Time to see what audio has to offer. Great video as always 👍

Thanks for explaining audio formats. You took the mystery out of it.

FLAC for lossless and OPUS for Lossy. Simple!

Mr. Barnatt, I've been an audio nerd / tech most of my adult life, and I still learn something new. Thanks for the refresher between codecs and containers. I'm in my late 50s, and for me, yep, it's harder to tell the difference between totally lossless and lossy formats. Currently I'm downloading ALAC songs on Apple Music, which sounds indistinguishable from CD to my current hearing ability.

Another informative video Chris. I pretty much stick with MP3 formats as that is the best of both worlds for me personally, and is very easy to transport or edit, using Audacity. My memory banks got a good dusting off as it has been a few years since I looked at these different audio formats. I was reminded years ago not all audio players or editors easily could support MP3, I believe due to licensing issues. Anyway, thanks for a well presented video on something we take for granted these days.

Great video Chris!

I'm 26 and with the headphones I can reasonably afford I couldn't hear the difference between FLAC and 320kbps MP3 to save my life.

As always, very informative video. Thank you Chris.

Very informative!

Brilliantly explained Chris, thank you very much.

I wish I had seen this video years ago, it would of saved me a lot of time

this is for me going to be very beneficial i have played with a few formats and never checked each one thank you for covering this information in brief is helpful

Would be nice to see tutorials on how to create audio in different formats - especially lossless

YESSSSSSS, AUDIO FORMATS!!! THANK YOU, CHRIS! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!! I LOVE YOU!!! 🥺🥺🥺

Thanks for going into such detail. I already knew some of this, but even that, not very well.

This was a much needed video. Excellent work!

Atrac! Brilliant quality on Minidisc

Informative video as always, Chris!