TNL's Guide to The Music File Formats: Part One
The pure digital sound of the compact disc had become the dominant music format by the end of the 1980’s. Along with audio clarity, the CD’s small size, portability, and durability all contributed to its quick adoption as the most popular music format. Of course, it didn’t hurt that relatively inexpensive players in both portable and stereo rack form factors were available.
As avid collectors filled shelf upon bulging shelf with plastic cases protecting shiny discs, the shortcomings of CD technology became apparent –there was just too much of a good thing. Organizing the collection with an eye toward accessing individual tracks was a task meant for a full-time librarian. Toting around more than few hours of music also was an odious chore. And while you could easily sit back, close your eyes, and dream your way through the music, once it ended it was time to wake up, get up, and switch discs –unless you were fortunate enough to have a multidisc player.
Nice as they were, it was soon time to morph these little silver discs into something more portable and certainly more manageable. Enter the computer, the hard disk, and the CD-ROM drive. Tagged with sound cards and high quality speaker systems, music and the computer became joined at the hip. (The MP3 player would show up a little while later to create the first audio ménage a trios, but that’s getting ahead of the tale.)
Getting the music to the hard disk wasn’t all that difficult. Along with the CD drive came a digitized sound format called “WAV” (a.k.a. Waveform Audio). It was great. The default file format was 44,100Hz, 16-bit stereo –roughly the same as a CD audio track. Not so good was the resulting file size –about 10MB per minute of audio. Today you can carry 10GB in the palm of your hand. Back then, when a 1GB hard drive sat by itself on a table, the idea of 13 three-minute songs, roughly 390MB, meant a sincere commitment.
In order to fit our music collection onto our hard drive, some element of compression was needed to store it all. The format that gained popularity early on is better known as MP3, and before long became a popular search term, and then a household word. However, several competing formats also emerged, each backed by its own camp of supporters. As in other areas of computing, each of the formats has its own unique issues involving file size, compression algorithm, and compatibility.
I think it is important to understand where we have been, to know where we are going. Over the course of the next few installments, we’ll be looking at the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of music file formats commonly in use in early 2006 –with an emphasis on those formats that will be easy to create and playback on a variety of devices. After all, it’s a serious commitment to “rip” (the process of encoding CD’s into compressed music files) a CD collection into compressed audio files once, no one wants to have to do it again (and again).
Part One: An Introduction
Part Two: MP3's
Part Three: Windows Media Audio
Part Four: OGG, AAC, and a Preliminary Verdict
Part Five: Popular Software
Part Six: Conclusion & Links To Software
As avid collectors filled shelf upon bulging shelf with plastic cases protecting shiny discs, the shortcomings of CD technology became apparent –there was just too much of a good thing. Organizing the collection with an eye toward accessing individual tracks was a task meant for a full-time librarian. Toting around more than few hours of music also was an odious chore. And while you could easily sit back, close your eyes, and dream your way through the music, once it ended it was time to wake up, get up, and switch discs –unless you were fortunate enough to have a multidisc player.
Nice as they were, it was soon time to morph these little silver discs into something more portable and certainly more manageable. Enter the computer, the hard disk, and the CD-ROM drive. Tagged with sound cards and high quality speaker systems, music and the computer became joined at the hip. (The MP3 player would show up a little while later to create the first audio ménage a trios, but that’s getting ahead of the tale.)
Getting the music to the hard disk wasn’t all that difficult. Along with the CD drive came a digitized sound format called “WAV” (a.k.a. Waveform Audio). It was great. The default file format was 44,100Hz, 16-bit stereo –roughly the same as a CD audio track. Not so good was the resulting file size –about 10MB per minute of audio. Today you can carry 10GB in the palm of your hand. Back then, when a 1GB hard drive sat by itself on a table, the idea of 13 three-minute songs, roughly 390MB, meant a sincere commitment.
In order to fit our music collection onto our hard drive, some element of compression was needed to store it all. The format that gained popularity early on is better known as MP3, and before long became a popular search term, and then a household word. However, several competing formats also emerged, each backed by its own camp of supporters. As in other areas of computing, each of the formats has its own unique issues involving file size, compression algorithm, and compatibility.
I think it is important to understand where we have been, to know where we are going. Over the course of the next few installments, we’ll be looking at the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of music file formats commonly in use in early 2006 –with an emphasis on those formats that will be easy to create and playback on a variety of devices. After all, it’s a serious commitment to “rip” (the process of encoding CD’s into compressed music files) a CD collection into compressed audio files once, no one wants to have to do it again (and again).
Part One: An Introduction
Part Two: MP3's
Part Three: Windows Media Audio
Part Four: OGG, AAC, and a Preliminary Verdict
Part Five: Popular Software
Part Six: Conclusion & Links To Software
posted by digitaldoc at 10:27 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home