From the course: Digital Audio Foundations
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Digital formats and data compression
From the course: Digital Audio Foundations
Digital formats and data compression
- We've discussed most of what happens to audio on its way into and out of the digital domain, but there's a little more to the story of how those digital files are stored and shared with others. In general there's a trade off between audio quality and file size depending on the file format. Let's explore this a bit. Digital audio can be saved in a variety of file formats and these formats can be sorted into three groups: uncompressed, losslessly compressed and lossy compressed. Now we're talking about data compression here not dynamic range compression, which we'll cover later. It's very important not to confuse those two concepts. First, let's discuss uncompressed audio formats. The most common uncompressed formats are WAV and AIFF. Here the audio data is just a list of raw numbers that represent samples. Since numbers can be organized in different ways, WAV and AIFF files also include a header with instructions on how to interpret the audio data, like the sample rate, the bit…
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