A recent post asking about file zipping made me wonder…does audio compression do the same thing? Is it finding pieces of the sound that are identical and then saving them only once in the MP3 file? It’s one thing to identify patterns in a text file and only save one version of the repeating parts, but somehow that doesn’t seem feasible with audio since things like music have so much complexity.
In: Technology
Lossless algorithms like FLAC work pretty much the same as a zip file: they compress the same information into a smaller space by maximizing entropy.
Lossy algorithms like MP3 or Ogg Vorbis actually remove information from the soundfile. If you encode the same soundfile into MP3s of different bit rates, you will probably not hear a difference at the higher rates, but you might notice that at lower rates the sound gets duller, as the algorithm starts to aggressively remove higher frequencies.
Latest Answers