this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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what does lossy mean and why flac
Edit: Check the replies to my post for corrections and clarifications.
I'll answer your question and more.
Lossless quality: The highest quality you can practically get, where it's as close to a 1:1 recreation from the studio as reasonably possible.
Lossy quality: The audio is compressed in a manner where you get the majority of the sound, but slight, fine details are lost to lighten up on file size. Heavy compression can greatly alter overall sound quality, but it's not the early 2000s anymore, we don't need to compress music that hard to get an album or two to fit on a 128 mb card.
.wav: Lossless, uncompressed file. Full quality, full file size.
.flac: Lossless quality, but with some compression, to minmax file size to audio quality.
.mp3: Lossy compressed. Small file size with reduced audio quality.
.ogg: Lossy compressed. Basically just an alternative to the .mp3 standard.
Your answer is correct but I am going to needlessly nitpick: Actually, OGG is just the name of the container format. The audio stream inside a
.oggfile is usually using a format called Vorbis. However,.flacfiles also use an OGG container afaik, they just have different file format convention. Same goes for the newer Opus audio format which usually uses.opusdespite also being packaged in an OGG container. In any case, it wouldn't be entirely wrong to name a FLAC or Opus file.ogg.Side note: Opus is the future but sadly not yet widely compatible outside browsers. FLAC is great and more widely established but also has its support deficits. MP3 and WAV are still the most widely compatible formats sadly.
Nitpick: lossless would actually bit-identical to the original. The trade-off in compression level is based on how much processing is required to compress/uncompress it. The audio fidelity remains the same; 1:1.
quick question, when i looked through the source files of some of the videogames i own most of them store the music as ogg and not mp3, is there a specific benefit of one over the other?
They donβt have to pay any license fees to use it.
It can also hold more than audio, although it is more common now to use other extensions like ogv.
Basically if you rip a CD to WAV, you're getting a 1:1 rip of the audio that takes up the same amount of space. A 75 minute CD will take up 650mb as a WAV rip.
Lossy compression means that some data is basically thrown out to improve the compression ratio. It might sound the same to most people, but something is missing, and you can't reconstruct the original anymore. You can easily get a 10:1 compression ratio with near-CD quality audio. Ogg is a lossy format with high compression and good sound quality.
Lossless compression means that the resulting file is compressed in such a way that all of the data is still there. You can convert the compressed file back to the exact original file. The compression here is closer to 4:1 generally. FLAC is lossless and the sound is exactly the same as the source.
Lossy means that the compression gets rid of the finer points of data to save on space that usually wouldn't bee too noticeable in the music. Lossless keeps all the data
Lossy means that data is lost on encoding, so the original quality of the recording will be compromised in some fashion.
FLAC is superior to WAV because it's still lossless but compressed so the files take up less space.