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
A key difference between audio compression and data/text compression is that audio compression is “lossy”. Meaning some data is lost, but because of the nature of the data, you can still mostly get the idea of what’s going on.
If I started typing an explanation and left out a lettr frm ech wrd, yu wuld stil mstly knw wht I ws sayng, it would just look like I’m an idiot that can’t type. But it would use less space!
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFBgxJM7cGU) is an example of an audio clip encoded in various levels of compression. You can tell it’s the same music, but sounds muffled or scratchy because a lot of the data has been removed.
Another notable difference with data/text compression is that it’s completely reversible. Audio compression is not. Once you have lost some of the data, you can make guesses about the pieces to fill in the gaps, but can’t guarantee that you can get back to the full data package.
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