Since the days of Napster, the Internet has been flowing with this magical, wonderful beast known as “MP3″. What is it, exactly?
Well,it’s a compression standard dating back to 1991 that shrinks the size of audio by throwing away parts we don’t hear very well. The higher the compression ratio, the more information is thrown away and the lesser the quality of sound.
Needlessto say, we’ve learned a lot about audio compression in the years since 1991. After all, MP3 is part of the first set of standards on digital video set forth by MPEG (MP3 = MPEG 1, Layer 3). There are a lot of modern alternatives that are worth considering for your audio collection.
Whatwould you move to? Well, there are a few options. We’ll start with the most direct competitor to MP3:
AAC is the most popular: it’s has been made widely popular as the audio codec of choice of iTunes and iPod. In addition, support is strong among hardware and software players, as almost every major vendor supports it. And with good reason: it’s a very decent codec, engineered more recently than MP3, and sounds better than MP3 at the same bitrate. The only two downsides to AAC are that iTunes, by default, encrypts the AACs you buy from them (this is changing soon, and does not affect ones you rip yourself).
Anotherstrong competitor to the powerhouses that are AAC and MP3 is Ogg Vorbis (often just referred to as “Ogg”, despite the fact that there are several other Ogg codecs). Ogg’s appears to be of similar quality to AAC, and is completely free. Support is mixed: many software players support natively or through add-ons, but hardware support is very lacking. For some reason or another, it just never really caught on.
MP3,AAC, and Ogg are all lossy codecs, as opposed to lossless. The difference being that lossless audio codecs have the exact same quality as the original source, whereas lossy codecs make no such guarantees. But the lossless codecs also require much more storage space. (But, with ballooning hard drive sizes, are we really concerned with how much space our songs take nowadays? This used to be critical when I had a 4 GB hard drive, but in the 1+ TB age … not so much.)
Comparethe normal, lossy codecs like MP3 and AAC: these have typical bitrates of 128–256 kbps, meaning that a 3-minute song is roughly 3 to 6 MB in size. With no compression, the same song would be about 31 MB in size. The lossy codec would preserve most of the quality, but there is loss of information. The lower the bitrate encoded, the more “tinny” it will sound. Most people can’t tell, so lossy codecs are very popular due to their small size.
Foraudiophiles, though, any loss is too much. This is where lossless codecs come in, giving sizes of around 15 MB for a 3-minute song. The main competitors are probably FLAC and Apple Lossless.
FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio Codec. It has good compression ratios and is well supported in software. As a matter of fact, I used it for quite a while since it is the only format that was (at the time) well-supported by Windows, OS X, and Linux. Hardware support is fairly poor, with almost no hardware vendors supporting it. Honestly, this is sort of to be expected with lossless codecs in general. Except …
Apple Lossless is Apple’s proprietary lossless codec. However, it’s not too proprietary, as it has been successfully reverse engineered and supported in many major music players recently, including VLC. Hardware support is “limited” to Apple iPods (other than the Shuffle), as far as I know. Limited in the sense that it supports only the most popular portable music player in the world. It’s fairly comparable in abilities to other lossless codecs, typically giving you an audio file about half the size of a raw WAV file.
So,after all of this, what is the verdict? MP3 is dead. It’s only good component is that it is universally supported. But AAC is extremely well supported, more modern, and sounds much better. For true audiophile needs, sticking with FLAC or Apple Lossless is your best option.
Personally?I rip all of my albums from CDs using both AAC (typically 192 kbps) and Apple Lossless. This way, if I ever get pickier in the future about my audio, I can just re-encode it later, but in the mean time I can fit plenty of songs on my iPod.
Tags: aac, apple lossless, ipod, mp3, ogg, vorbis
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