Digital Audio Formats

There are several digital audio formats out there but what makes each one special?

Since the dawn of electronics in sound technology, there have always been efforts to make the conversion of analog audio to digital and back for smooth and lossless playback. The transmission of audio through various media, depending on whether they are analog or digital, is usually compressed. The quality of the compression and the conversion back is what determines the quality of the sound through the devices. Audio files are compressed for various reasons; to save space on the storage media, to reduce bandwidth incurred when transmitting the data over a network and so on. With the rise in digital music players and streaming services, there has been a demand among the audiophiles and enthusiasts for better compression methods, lossless audio and more clarity in the audio files.

Audio compression and the dawn of the 1s and 0s.

Digital files are full of 1s and 0s. When a file is written, the method of writing is not linear, which means that the data is not physically continuous, but logically continuous. This means that if you read the file in an order you were not supposed to, all you would find is garbage. The problem with this is that, there are a lot of redundant spaces in between the data written. These gaps need to be represented in the file to maintain the sequential order and hence cannot be randomly eliminated. Compression solves this by using specific algorithms to remove the spaces and group all the data together. The algorithms also find patterns in the data which are repeated, so that they can be represented in a manner which consumes less data.