this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
28 points (83.3% liked)

Asklemmy

43340 readers
2067 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Wav is more or less "raw" audio. It is typically not compressed.

Ogg Vorbis is a lossy compressed format. It reduces the "quality" of the audio in exchange for a smaller file. More often than not, the change in quality is not perceptible to the human ear.

Other lossy compressed formats include MP3, AAC, and Ogg Opus. There's plenty of neuance to compare between these lossy formats. But if you don't already know about them, just assume Ogg Opus is best, Ogg Vorbis and AAC are the same, and MP3 is worse. AFAIK Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis, but they may have upgraded to Ogg Opus by now.

FLAC is a losslessly compressed format. It compresses the raw audio without changing the quality at all. All lossless formats are the same quality as Wav. The only differences between the lossless formats are the size of the file and the CPU cost to decompress the data.

Have more questions about codecs? Just ask! I'm not an expert but I do know a decent bit about this stuff.