Audio formats: limitations of mp3

sidetone

sidetone

There's a discernible difference between 44.1kHz and 48 kHz for sample rate. There's a major difference between these and 96kHz, which there's more sound concentration or richness to be heard per second. For bit depth, I can hear the difference in high and low ranges between 16bit and 24bit, while others insist that this difference can't be heard.
Format/CodecBit DepthSample RateMisc
2nd generation gamingbasic tonesbasic tonesmono
POTS telephony codecs8bit8kHzmono
8bit PC codecs
(.au, .snd)		8bit8kHzstereo
ISDN telephony codecs16bit16kHzmono
4th generation gaming16bit32kHz, 44.1kHzmono
CD16bit44.1kHzlossless
MP316bit48kHz maxlossy
DVD video24bit96kHz maxlossy
DVD-A (audio)24bit192kHz maxlossless
SACD1bit (different standard)2,822.4kHzlossless
Bluray Audio24bit96kHz or 192kHzlossless or lossy
Ogg Vorbis & Ogg Opus are lossy codecs which offer higher resolutions and higher bit depths than mp3, and in less disk space. Opus was intended to be the successor to Vorbis. Opus use is best in streaming such as in video games, online radio and podcasts. While Opus was intended to have higher quality than Vorbis, when it comes to high fidelity, it's believed that Vorbis has higher quality than Opus. When it comes to data transmission, Opus is recommended. Speex is another lossy audio codec contained in Ogg used for speech transmission which was replaced by Opus.

Vorbis is contained in the .ogg format. .oga was intended to be Ogg for audio, and .ogv was intended to be Ogg for video. These conventions for Ogg didn't stay, and most widely used software doesn't recognize these format suffixes. The .ogg suffix is the default for Ogg sound files. Opus has previously been contained in the .ogg format, but now has its own .opus suffix. Opus can still use the .ogg suffix.

Flac is lossless like wav, and acc. However, flac uses less dataspace, which makes it great for storing lossless audio. Flac supports depths of 16bit, 24bit and 32bit.

There's also audio/mac which is a lossless codec which was opensourced to a BSD license in 2023. Unfortunately, sox and other media players don't recognize it. MAC is for Monkey's Audio Codec, and it uses .ape files. sox doesn't recognize this format. This codec may be limited to CD quality.

32bit bit depth is often used for mixing, to be converted back into lower or original bit depths. Use soxi(1) from audio/sox to see information of music files.

pls and m3u are playlist files recognized by sox: m3u was originally for mp3's. For unofficial specifications for both, from Winamp: https://forums.winamp.com/forum/tec...3345-m3u-and-pls-specification?threadid=65772. Xiph has playlist standards (https://xspf.org/) of xspf in XML, and jspf in Json. This is also not recognized by sox.
Feel free to add more information and interesting bits to this thread. Do you use any opensource audio codecs for streaming, speech synthesis, VOIP or other uses? See also: Thread playing-music-on-command-line.98870 & Thread share-what-you-use-for-audio-editing-and-creation.98868.
 
I forgot to mention, how there are Optical disk players for the home audio market, which up-sample lower bitdepths from CD quality to higher quality. It used dithering and noise filtering. It's not an exact representation, as it can't be, because the additional sound added quality is added by the Optical disk player. In my opinion, I care about sound quality, not exact representation, as long as I know this when listening. They also upgrade video from DVD quality. They're ones like Danon, which most media players in this market were bought out by Harmon Samsung. Yamaha is the main competitor to this market which wasn't bought out. I wonder how there could be opensource versions. sox(1) offers dither, and I'm unsure if upsampling in sox makes a difference.
angry_vincent said:
the only format that makes sense to human ears ( lossless wise ) is 24-bit 44.1kHz. 16-bit does not cover full dynamic range. Higher sample rait above 44.1kHz cannot be distinguished by humans
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They say it's at a sample rate of 48kHz. The difference to me was how much sound concentrated per second. I definitely heard the difference in range between 16 and 24 bit. On some Windows PC, one couldn't tell, because Flac24 sounds terrible distorted like an old TV set on it. They choose 44.1kHz to go onto CD, to fit a bit more data on it.
freezmi said:
no worries. I was always on the lookout for ogg and flac-capable music players back in the day.
I ended up making my own with no display or buttons but with remote control :)
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Is that an SBC (like Android type board Arm64), or Arduino like? Looks like an SBC (small board computer). From that link,
ogg, flac, mp3, ... customized player
schematics, pcb and avr source code available at https://github.com/rodan/playa
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link doesn't appear to be there.
VladiBG said:
It's the same as coastline paradox. (fractal)
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Are you saying sound quality is relative? I don't understand.
 
sidetone said:
Is that an SBC (like Android type board Arm64), or Arduino like?
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I think this was my first Atmel AVR-based project. it's the microcontroller that was used in arduino uno.

I needed a player that worked for weeks between charges, was shuffling by default and had no buttons that would be pressed by mistake - to be used during long motorcycle rides. the decoder chip was a nice surprise, I swear it sounds better than the PC decoding the same file :)
 
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