Speaker 1: Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camry.
Speaker 1: Hey there, tech stuff listeners, this is Jonathan Strickland, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about
Speaker 1: something cool going on at how stuff works right now.
Speaker 1: I know all of you guys are really creative and
Speaker 1: you love technology. Well, now you can show us what
Speaker 1: you're made of because Toyota is sponsoring a new photo
Speaker 1: upload widget over at how stuff works dot com. You
Speaker 1: can share your gadget ideas, modifications, hacks, some great tech ideas.
Speaker 1: Show us what you're made of. Let us know how
Speaker 1: creative you are. You can go to www dot how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com, slash upgrade your tech and upload
Speaker 1: those photos. Now we want to see what you got.
Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech stuff from house
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone, and welcome to
Speaker 1: tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and I am
Speaker 1: an editor at how stuff works dot com. Standing across
Speaker 1: from me. Actually it's sort of cat corner as usual.
Speaker 1: As senior writer Jonathan the pre show puns they burn guys.
Speaker 1: You you should be thankful that you missed out on
Speaker 1: that one. What a gem that was it. I'm reeling
Speaker 1: is what I am. You know, I love puns, but
Speaker 1: Chris takes his love of puns to a level that
Speaker 1: I thought was unattainable by humans, and yet somehow he
Speaker 1: has managed it. You all take that as a compliment.
Speaker 1: That's neither here nor there for this particular podcast, other
Speaker 1: than the fact that you guys know we love puns. Waca, waca.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk today about sound files and why
Speaker 1: there are so many different why are there so many
Speaker 1: sound files, never mind sound file formats, and also, um,
Speaker 1: just kind of get into the particulars of various popular
Speaker 1: sound files. Maybe we'll talk about some of the more
Speaker 1: rare ones that you can encounter too. Um and and
Speaker 1: if this any of this sounds familiar, then you're probably
Speaker 1: a long time listener of tech stuff. We did an
Speaker 1: episode many many, many moons ago on the MP three format.
Speaker 1: I was just a kid then, yeah, boy, when we
Speaker 1: had stars in our eyes and and and uh and
Speaker 1: lunch and our belly. Uh. That's back when we used
Speaker 1: to record in the afternoon. Anyway, so we do this
Speaker 1: in the mornings now. We want to talk about different
Speaker 1: types of sound files. And before we get into specifics, uh,
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about categorizing sound files. There's really
Speaker 1: a couple of different ways you can look at it.
Speaker 1: One is digitized sound files versus synthesized sound files. Now,
Speaker 1: digitizes where you're taking you're you're creating sound files out
Speaker 1: of bits, out of zeros and ones that are little
Speaker 1: tiny pieces of information that essentially tell a speaker how
Speaker 1: to move in and out to create whatever the sound is.
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of different factors that go
Speaker 1: into determining how well the speaker can recreate any particular sound.
Speaker 1: Basically involves how much information you're able to put within
Speaker 1: that particular kind of file uh and uh. For one
Speaker 1: of the more most popular sound files of this type
Speaker 1: is the wave type of sound file. And so as
Speaker 1: a digital sound file or digitized version of a sound file,
Speaker 1: um and so, there are a lot of different things
Speaker 1: that make up the quality of that sound. Synthesized is
Speaker 1: a little bit different. Synthesized is a type of sound
Speaker 1: file where the file contains information in it that says
Speaker 1: something along the lines of play this note as if
Speaker 1: it were played by this instrument. So play a c
Speaker 1: as if it were on a tenor saxophone, right, and
Speaker 1: then the software itself, and the hardware is able to
Speaker 1: take that instruction set and uh send out the appropriate information.
Speaker 1: So it's a little bit different. It's not looking at
Speaker 1: zeros and ones and saying, all right, move the speaker
Speaker 1: out this much this quickly in order to um create
Speaker 1: this sound. It's more like, all right, here here's what
Speaker 1: here's the sound we have to make. Now let's do
Speaker 1: what needs to be done to make it. So it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of two different perspectives. And a very very
Speaker 1: popular version of the synthesized type of sound file would
Speaker 1: be the mini yes files and mini files are uh
Speaker 1: not just for PCs that those were really I mean
Speaker 1: the mini files really made so that synthesizers could communicate
Speaker 1: with each other. Um so no, no, I was just
Speaker 1: going to say, so, if you're thinking of a digitized,
Speaker 1: digitized uh sound file, you might play an actual guitar
Speaker 1: and record it into a digital file and play it back,
Speaker 1: versus uh plugging um a USB keyboard into your computer, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, and using software and saying, oh, I want
Speaker 1: this to sound like a grand piano and hitting a
Speaker 1: c and it you know, makes the approximation of that sound,
Speaker 1: rather than taking an actual instrument and digitizing it right,
Speaker 1: and in general, a digitized file is going to be
Speaker 1: larger than the synthesized files. Synthesized files, like I said,
Speaker 1: are just giving general instructions to recreate a sound. Digitized
Speaker 1: has to hold all that information in it. Now, um,
Speaker 1: you could have a pretty small digitized version of a
Speaker 1: sound file, but the means that you don't have as
Speaker 1: much information there, which means the sound you're going to
Speaker 1: get is not necessarily going to be that um nice.
Speaker 1: The fidelity will not be high low fi actually um
Speaker 1: although it is not the same. It reminds me of
Speaker 1: the differences between h vector and raster graphics files. You know,
Speaker 1: with the with a photo being made up of individual
Speaker 1: pixels and um, you know vector file line drawings being
Speaker 1: uh more manipulative. You know, you can do more with it,
Speaker 1: and it has less information in it because it can
Speaker 1: be manipulated like that. Yeah, it reminds me a lot
Speaker 1: of just the just the very basic analog versus digital, right,
Speaker 1: because with analog you've got this continuous signal that can
Speaker 1: change and pitch and in volume. But it's it's you know,
Speaker 1: if you look at a an analog like a sound
Speaker 1: wave from an analog source, it's this curvy wave that
Speaker 1: you know that that's unbroken, right, whereas a digital one
Speaker 1: is either on or off, and you know, it's a
Speaker 1: little more complicated than that, but it looks like I
Speaker 1: feel like it, it looks different from an analog sound wave.
Speaker 1: So um, those two different approaches define the characteristics of
Speaker 1: that sound file. Now, the other big way of dividing
Speaker 1: up the sound files, and the one that I think
Speaker 1: is UH is one of those that most people have
Speaker 1: heard about, UM, and it's mainly applies to the digitized
Speaker 1: form I means synthesize as well, but digitized is really
Speaker 1: where a lot of the sound file discussion revolves around uncompressed, lossless,
Speaker 1: and lossy file formats. So let's talk a bit about
Speaker 1: what those means. So uncompressed it is probably the easiest, sure,
Speaker 1: because it just means it's a sound file that doesn't
Speaker 1: you haven't compressed it at all, You haven't lost any information.
Speaker 1: Whatever information was in that sound file UH at the
Speaker 1: very beginning, or or the sound being recorded into some
Speaker 1: sort of device, is is replicated as close as possible,
Speaker 1: depending upon the the abilities of that file format. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you if you take a musical instrument. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: like a like an actual musical instrument. And uh, let's
Speaker 1: say a guitar string. You luck the string and it's
Speaker 1: going to play reverberated a certain frequency. UM. But there
Speaker 1: there is more to it than that, I mean, is
Speaker 1: it uh slows it starts to to change somewhat. Um.
Speaker 1: Some guitars hold pitch better than others, and you can
Speaker 1: kind of hear it fluctuate somewhat. Um. But as you
Speaker 1: play a song or you know, with a band or
Speaker 1: an orchestra for example, UM, you're going to hear a
Speaker 1: richness of sound if you're right there. Um. And that's
Speaker 1: because there are It covers a wide range of frequencies um.
Speaker 1: In some cases frequencies that we can't actually hear. But
Speaker 1: sometimes those high frequencies we can't hear interact with what
Speaker 1: one another and create harmonics that we can here. And
Speaker 1: sometimes it's it's something that you can feel, um, and
Speaker 1: that that adds to the depth of the music. Like well,
Speaker 1: I mean we've we've sort of talked about bone conduction
Speaker 1: before too. UM. So what what the compression does essentially
Speaker 1: is determined whether or not you know, it should include
Speaker 1: all the different frequencies and the amount of compression that
Speaker 1: someone would use to create a file basically says well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to cut out this much of the info
Speaker 1: in this file. Um, and you can dial that up
Speaker 1: or down as as you decide to compress that file. Right,
Speaker 1: So a lossless file would be compressed, but would not
Speaker 1: You don't lose any of the actual information there. So um,
Speaker 1: it's the compression level. Your mileage may vary. You might
Speaker 1: it might not be a significantly smaller file than an
Speaker 1: uncompressed file, but it does mean that you have found
Speaker 1: ways to try and uh minimize that file size. For one,
Speaker 1: here's an example. In an uncompressed file, Let's say that
Speaker 1: you have a minute of silence between sounds. All right,
Speaker 1: An uncompressed file is going to encode that minute of
Speaker 1: silence the same way it would as if there were
Speaker 1: sound present, So that file size is going to reflect
Speaker 1: the the total amount of time of the recording, not
Speaker 1: just the time when something is actually happening. A lossless
Speaker 1: one may encode that same file, but use a an
Speaker 1: algorithm that that doesn't encode that minute of silence, so
Speaker 1: that that makes the overall file size smaller. M okay, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's you think about that that could result in
Speaker 1: a in a huge savings of information because you know,
Speaker 1: if you're you're trying to capture the depth of sound
Speaker 1: that is present with an entire orchestra and there's literally
Speaker 1: nothing there, then you've recorded a lot of nothing and
Speaker 1: that that takes up space. So then then you have
Speaker 1: the lossy formats. And this is what you were kind
Speaker 1: of an into with the whole the frequencies that are
Speaker 1: outside the range of human hearing. Um, I wanted to
Speaker 1: explain what it was there that you would lose. Yeah, ideally,
Speaker 1: with a lossy format, the only things you lose are
Speaker 1: things that we could not perceive. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: any frequency that's below or above the range of human hearing,
Speaker 1: which is about twenty hurts to twenty killer hurts. Anything
Speaker 1: outside of that range of frequencies, UH is outside the
Speaker 1: range of normal human hearing that hurts and UH. And
Speaker 1: so the the idea is that if there are any
Speaker 1: frequencies that are either above or below that range, those
Speaker 1: would get cut out, they would not be encoded in
Speaker 1: the file, and that would decrease the size. There are
Speaker 1: other ways that lossy formats tend to compress files, and
Speaker 1: there are things that you can choose to do when
Speaker 1: you're creating a lossy file format that will affect the
Speaker 1: quality of the recording to some extent. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different factors, and I'll talk about
Speaker 1: them in just a second, but Lawsy definitely has more
Speaker 1: of a stigma against it because the idea is that,
Speaker 1: you know, there are ties where you will listen to
Speaker 1: music and you think, wow, that that really does sound
Speaker 1: like it's a lot different from that that that live
Speaker 1: performance I saw. Like you you might go to a
Speaker 1: live performance and then get a digital copy of that
Speaker 1: live performance. Some bands do that, you know, where they'll
Speaker 1: record their their shows and then the fans can end
Speaker 1: up buying a digital copy of something that they saw,
Speaker 1: and depending on the encoding, it may not really reflect
Speaker 1: what you experienced. For instance, there might not be a
Speaker 1: four pound guys standing next to you stepping on your
Speaker 1: toe every five minutes, um right as so they might
Speaker 1: be giants show owen too anyway, So the idea there
Speaker 1: being that that depending on how they're encoding it, you
Speaker 1: might not have as rich a listening experience as you
Speaker 1: otherwise would with an uncompressed or lossless format UM. Now,
Speaker 1: the way that the audio is compressed and stored is
Speaker 1: called a codec. Now, codec and file type are two
Speaker 1: different things. You should not confuse the two. It's easy
Speaker 1: to to get confused. But Kodak is Uh. They are related,
Speaker 1: but not the same. Right. There's some some codex and
Speaker 1: file sizes that tend to go together all the time,
Speaker 1: but they are not one and the same. And some
Speaker 1: of the things that can affect how that sound file
Speaker 1: will sound include things like the sample rate. Sample rate
Speaker 1: is when you're converting analog audio into digital information. Uh,
Speaker 1: you use an analog to digital converter or a d C,
Speaker 1: and this is what takes that signal, that continuous signal
Speaker 1: and converts it into a bunch of zeros and ones
Speaker 1: and uh, it kind of chops the signal up into
Speaker 1: segments and does this conversion. So the higher the frequency
Speaker 1: is of your sample rate, in general, the closer to
Speaker 1: the original sound it's going to be. Uh CD audio.
Speaker 1: If you guys, you may not remember these, There were
Speaker 1: these things called compact discs. I have to I remember
Speaker 1: when compact discs were a new thing. I remember thinking
Speaker 1: this will never take off, and let me listen to
Speaker 1: back cassette um or vinyl album or wax cylinder or
Speaker 1: this bard that I hired to follow around and sing
Speaker 1: sagas to wire recorder. Yeah anyway, Uh so the CD
Speaker 1: audio is something like forty four point one killer hurts
Speaker 1: as I recall something like that. That that's the frequency
Speaker 1: for their sample rate. Um. And in general, you want
Speaker 1: to sample rate that's about um. Well, that that's high
Speaker 1: enough that you're going to get a good experience when
Speaker 1: you get playback. And depending on your application, you may
Speaker 1: not need a very high sample rate. So, for example,
Speaker 1: for telephone uh fidelity, when you're speaking on the phone
Speaker 1: to someone else, that simple rate is much you know,
Speaker 1: and we're talking about digital phones. They're doing the same thing.
Speaker 1: They're converting an analog signal into a digital information and
Speaker 1: transmitting it and then decoding it and putting it back
Speaker 1: into analog. Uh, their simple rate is much lower. Because
Speaker 1: in general, we've become used to the idea that a
Speaker 1: telephone quality conversation does not need to have high fidelity.
Speaker 1: And if you've ever spoken on the telephone with me,
Speaker 1: you know the quality of my conversations is quite low. Well, um,
Speaker 1: that doesn't really have that much to do with this
Speaker 1: sound quality. Oh, you're right, You're right, I got off
Speaker 1: on a little tangent there. Well, no, if you if
Speaker 1: you take a I'm speaking in general terms here, but
Speaker 1: if you take a podcast file, maybe a half hour
Speaker 1: podcast file, um from an audio store, and you buy
Speaker 1: a five minute song from that same audio store, that
Speaker 1: the song is probably going to be a larger file
Speaker 1: because there is a greater range of sound um that
Speaker 1: they are trying to preserve to create that audio file
Speaker 1: than to to or that music file. Then for the
Speaker 1: voice because um, you know, the voice files don't really
Speaker 1: need to convey the same range of frequencies to just
Speaker 1: and still sound good and beyond the sample rate. There
Speaker 1: are other factors that also informed the quality of a
Speaker 1: particular sound file and digitized sound file. The resolution, it's
Speaker 1: just you know, sound files can have resolution, just like
Speaker 1: an image file. It's um. Essentially, it comes into the
Speaker 1: how how the a d C measures the incoming um
Speaker 1: signal voltage and converts it into digital code. So the
Speaker 1: accuracy of that is dependent upon how many bits are
Speaker 1: you in the process. So in other words, the more
Speaker 1: data you include about the sound, the more accurately you
Speaker 1: can recreate the sound when you play it back. So
Speaker 1: in other words, if and this makes sense, it's it's
Speaker 1: just like any other kind of experience where you're trying
Speaker 1: to recreate something that you've seen. The more data you have,
Speaker 1: the better chances you have of recreating it accurately. So
Speaker 1: if I'm in a room and you were to give
Speaker 1: me a stone tablet and a chisel and a hammer
Speaker 1: and tell me to take notes, those notes would be
Speaker 1: very very limited. If you gave me a pen and paper,
Speaker 1: there would be a little bit better. If you gave
Speaker 1: me a a computer with a working keyboard unlike mine, um,
Speaker 1: I would be even better. If you gave me a
Speaker 1: keyboard like mine, it would probably be back to stone tablet. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's another part that determines another factor that determined sound quality,
Speaker 1: and then data rates. This is really anyone who's converted
Speaker 1: any sound file into P three format or format similar
Speaker 1: to the m P three format knows about data rates.
Speaker 1: You usually you have a choice of what what UH
Speaker 1: data rates speed you can pick to UH convert a
Speaker 1: sound file into an MP three, and generally higher is better.
Speaker 1: It means that you're going to have a higher fidelity experience.
Speaker 1: It also means the file size that's going to be larger.
Speaker 1: And uh uh, I'd say, you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: the sound files you would find, at least until fairly recently,
Speaker 1: we're around the nice six kill a bit per second
Speaker 1: or kill a bit per second range. We're starting to
Speaker 1: see that get bumped up now, which is nice. Um.
Speaker 1: Those are a lot of the cloud services have higher
Speaker 1: bit data rates for their encoding. Um, and in general
Speaker 1: that should translate to a higher fidelity experience. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you get right down to it. Well, frankly, everybody
Speaker 1: here is sound differently, and that's that sounds strange probably um,
Speaker 1: probably because you're hearing it differently than I am. Now, um,
Speaker 1: because you know, it sort of depends on the range
Speaker 1: of hearing. Now, I say that that kids can hear
Speaker 1: a different range of sound than adults, um, and that
Speaker 1: uh you know, they have studies that have been done
Speaker 1: that that show that women hear different ranges of sound
Speaker 1: than men do. And you know they're there are always
Speaker 1: people who, um, listen to a Vinyl record for example,
Speaker 1: and they'll they'll say, Wow, that sounds so much better
Speaker 1: than a CD. And then other people prefer the sound
Speaker 1: of C d s, which typically are are compressed uh
Speaker 1: pretty pretty significantly at least too to get it to uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the the audio file that that you hear
Speaker 1: on the on the disc. Um. So you know, everybody
Speaker 1: is different. Let's let's use that as a caveat. But um,
Speaker 1: it's important to note that in general, the file size
Speaker 1: the the information. You want more information encoded on there
Speaker 1: because it's going to provide a richer sound, But it
Speaker 1: does depend on the Kodec used to to create the file. Um.
Speaker 1: And that is that is one of those things that
Speaker 1: to paraphrase the song, it ain't what you do, it's
Speaker 1: the way that you do it. Um. And I think
Speaker 1: that's probably where we're getting ready to go. But uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you you when MP three's became the popular standard, uh,
Speaker 1: the popular bit rate for those was you know, k
Speaker 1: um and um. You know that a lot of people
Speaker 1: who can hear the difference in in sound files would say,
Speaker 1: you know, that's crummy. It sounds terrible, but it was
Speaker 1: acceptable for a lot of people, acceptable enough that they
Speaker 1: would say, you know what, I'm willing to fork over
Speaker 1: money for an MP three player, or I'm willing to
Speaker 1: listen to my music at this bit rate. And now
Speaker 1: that we've become more sophisticated in our tastes and have
Speaker 1: more bandwidth available to us both an MP three player
Speaker 1: audio players, let's say that, and UH in our internet connections, UM,
Speaker 1: we're having more choices available to us. We also had
Speaker 1: an era where the speakers that were available to us,
Speaker 1: unless we were really spending a lot of money on
Speaker 1: our our computer systems or what you know, our music
Speaker 1: player systems, we're not really capable of playing at a
Speaker 1: high enough fidelity for it to make a huge difference.
Speaker 1: So you could even have two versions of the same file,
Speaker 1: one recorded at a much faster data rate, and have
Speaker 1: a hard time telling the difference, simply because the hardware
Speaker 1: you were using to play back the music wasn't capable
Speaker 1: of capturing those subtle differences or even not so subtle differences.
Speaker 1: Because let's let's face it, some of the speakers that
Speaker 1: came out years ago, we're pretty well they were definitely
Speaker 1: sub standard compared to some of the ones you can
Speaker 1: get today. Not saying that today's speaker are, you know,
Speaker 1: the height of human achievement. We definitely have a huge
Speaker 1: range on the market, and UH and it's not always
Speaker 1: a case if you get what you pay for either.
Speaker 1: That's a totally different podcasts how Uh, it just means
Speaker 1: that that it wasn't as important back then. And also
Speaker 1: we should talk about why there are so many different types,
Speaker 1: so we know the ones people tend to hear about
Speaker 1: a lot are wave files, uh MP three's, UM, A
Speaker 1: A C files for some folks. Uh, there's the A
Speaker 1: lack files A L A C sometimes flak for a
Speaker 1: few people out there anyway, um, and then there are
Speaker 1: a lot of other ones, but those are those are
Speaker 1: some of the ones that are the most popular, But
Speaker 1: there are If you were to look at a list
Speaker 1: of every type of audio file that has had any
Speaker 1: sort of traction out there, it would be incredibly long.
Speaker 1: I mean, the different types of them are. Um, there's
Speaker 1: easily easily over a hundred. Now some of those are
Speaker 1: project files, not audio file formats, and the project files
Speaker 1: really just have information about an audio file as opposed
Speaker 1: to having any actual audio information in it itself. But
Speaker 1: you know, you might say, well why are there so many?
Speaker 1: And there are several different reasons for that. One is
Speaker 1: that as time has gone on, we've created more sophisticated
Speaker 1: computers and sound chips that are able to do more
Speaker 1: than earlier ones, so they were suddenly able to support
Speaker 1: a greater number of features. But the older file formats
Speaker 1: didn't necessarily have that built in, and so new file
Speaker 1: formats emerged that we're able to take advantage of the
Speaker 1: technical abilities of the new stuff that we were building.
Speaker 1: In some cases, there were file formats that were designed
Speaker 1: to work specifically with particular types of hardware. So if
Speaker 1: you were back if you had a computer back in
Speaker 1: the old days of the of the sound card boom,
Speaker 1: you know, when you had like Ruland and sound Blaster
Speaker 1: and all of those coming out, you might be familiar
Speaker 1: that there were certain files file types that could play
Speaker 1: on some cards but not on others. And this could
Speaker 1: get really frustrating as a user. I remember going out
Speaker 1: and looking at computer games and looking at a computer
Speaker 1: game and saying, Wow, I'm not gonna have a very
Speaker 1: good experience with this because, uh, the sound file type
Speaker 1: that they went with was for a different sound card
Speaker 1: than the one I had, So I'm going to have
Speaker 1: the more basic, you know, array of sounds that is
Speaker 1: sort of the baseline for this game. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: have any of the advanced stuff because they decided to
Speaker 1: back this other sound card. So there was a division
Speaker 1: in the market, right, I mean, there wasn't a lot
Speaker 1: of standards. There was no standardized format, so you had
Speaker 1: a lot of proprietary formats, and we still have those
Speaker 1: as well. There's still some proprietary formats, some of which
Speaker 1: are actually used fairly widely. I think most people try
Speaker 1: to get away from those because it's UM. It limits you,
Speaker 1: it limits what you can play that file back on. UM.
Speaker 1: It also means that a lot of these proprietary file
Speaker 1: formats were designed so that you could have digital rights
Speaker 1: management built into the file format. So DRM, that's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, that's something else that determined the different types
Speaker 1: of files. Another is the change in how we listen
Speaker 1: to these files, all right, so UM listening to it
Speaker 1: on a computer or on a on a sound device,
Speaker 1: you can have a certain type of file format. Back
Speaker 1: in the earlier days of the Internet, when you want
Speaker 1: to listen to music that was going to be coming
Speaker 1: over uh an Internet connection, you couldn't use those file formats.
Speaker 1: They just the files were too big, So that meant
Speaker 1: that you had to design a different standard to be
Speaker 1: able to stream music, usually at a lower fidelity, and
Speaker 1: uh so that the file size was manageable, and that
Speaker 1: you could have a specific type of software to play
Speaker 1: back those files, so things like real audio. Do you
Speaker 1: remember the old real audio days right? Unfortunately? Yeah, dark
Speaker 1: times before the empire. So yeah, there are there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different reasons. So some of the reasons are technological,
Speaker 1: some are based upon the limitations of that technology somewhere
Speaker 1: kind of you know, let's face it, some of them
Speaker 1: are a little greedy. These are you know someone Some
Speaker 1: file types were designed by companies saying if we design
Speaker 1: the hardware and we designed the file type, we lock
Speaker 1: people into this because they won't be able to go
Speaker 1: and buy some other piece of hardware because their hardware
Speaker 1: is not gonna be able to play our file. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then there were some that were sort of political,
Speaker 1: as in, uh, I'm thinking specifically of og vorbis, which
Speaker 1: was was created as an open standard. Are you down
Speaker 1: with O g G? You know me? Um, mostly because
Speaker 1: of the MP three file format taking off, but um
Speaker 1: the codec used to create it. The primarily the Fraudenhofer
Speaker 1: UH Institute that came up with the the MP three
Speaker 1: file standard. Um, the CODEK you had to license that. Um,
Speaker 1: so if you wanted to create software that would make
Speaker 1: MP three files, you were supposed to license the official
Speaker 1: codec to do that. And then the people who started
Speaker 1: uh OG, we're saying, you know what, if you want
Speaker 1: to use our standard to create our audio files, then
Speaker 1: you can do with it what you like, open source, unlicensed.
Speaker 1: So the that was an attractive alternative for for people
Speaker 1: who didn't want to have to, you know, go through
Speaker 1: the red tape of an official licensed piece of software.
Speaker 1: Not that that ended up being much of a problem
Speaker 1: in the long run, but you still and then there's
Speaker 1: still a license fee that has to be paid. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, it was so I had so much weight
Speaker 1: behind it that that people just went with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that was, um, you know, that's a good example.
Speaker 1: But then let's let's go ahead. We'll touch on MP three.
Speaker 1: Even though we have done a full episode about m
Speaker 1: P three's before, it would just take a lot of
Speaker 1: digging for you guys can get that episode. It's hard
Speaker 1: not to mention it anyway. I mean, it is sort
Speaker 1: of the pound gorilla in the room. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: IMPEG stands for moving picture Experts Group, which is exactly
Speaker 1: what you would expect out of a sound file. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's which was working under the direction of the International
Speaker 1: Organization for Standardization and the International Electro Technical Commission. Yeah
Speaker 1: and uh. The idea was that they wanted to create
Speaker 1: a standard to avoid this proprietary problem. Oops. Um. Yeah, Actually,
Speaker 1: it's the funny thing is it's not like it's it's
Speaker 1: not MPEG three, it's MPEG one layer three. Just complicating things.
Speaker 1: And then there and there are a lot of different
Speaker 1: UM file extensions that fall under the impact audio form.
Speaker 1: It's not you know, MP three is one of the
Speaker 1: more common ones, but it's not the only one. Um.
Speaker 1: It's a lossy format, so you do end up losing
Speaker 1: data when you convert to MP three as part of
Speaker 1: the compression, and the CODEC you use to create your
Speaker 1: MP three sort of helps determine what it is that
Speaker 1: it loses because it has a different algorithm behind it.
Speaker 1: Right and uh, and again you change depending on the
Speaker 1: data rate. You can make the file larger, smaller, and
Speaker 1: thus have more or less information about the sound file. Um.
Speaker 1: Another thing we should something else I should have pointed out.
Speaker 1: With the different types of sound files, some of them
Speaker 1: support metadata, some do not, and metadata turned out to
Speaker 1: be really important. UH. Metadata of course, is information about
Speaker 1: other information. So metadata for a sound file might include
Speaker 1: things like the artist's name, the album name, other information.
Speaker 1: It could also include things like who uploaded it, who
Speaker 1: who encoded it. It all depends on the code dec
Speaker 1: it all depends on the file type. So some of
Speaker 1: these file types are essentially digital fingerprints. Like if you
Speaker 1: were to download one of these files and then you
Speaker 1: were actually open up the code and look at it,
Speaker 1: you could potentially, depending on the file type, determine who
Speaker 1: it was that originally UM encoded it and uploaded it,
Speaker 1: or at least who encoded it. You might not know
Speaker 1: who who uploaded it UM, so that's kind of an
Speaker 1: interesting thing. And not all the files, of course, support metadata,
Speaker 1: but a lot of really popular ones do because it's
Speaker 1: a useful way to get information in UH in a
Speaker 1: music um management software. So that way, because you think
Speaker 1: about music management software like iTunes, that's one of the
Speaker 1: most popular ones, so it's easy to talk about UH.
Speaker 1: iTunes has all the information about the artists, the album,
Speaker 1: the song title, all that kind of stuff, and that
Speaker 1: lets you sort your albums through various ways. UM, without
Speaker 1: the metadata, you wouldn't have that information. You would have
Speaker 1: the name of the file and what kind of what
Speaker 1: type of file it was, and that that would be
Speaker 1: about it. So that's something else that I wanted to
Speaker 1: point out. So, so along with MP three, you know,
Speaker 1: you've got the wave files, which are uh again pretty
Speaker 1: pretty popular. That's a format that was created by Microsoft
Speaker 1: and IBM and it kind of takes and it creates
Speaker 1: an arbitrary sampling rate uh and a number of channels
Speaker 1: in the sample size. UM. It's uh one of the
Speaker 1: first audio file types that were developed for the PC
Speaker 1: UM and it's defined as being lossless. So this is
Speaker 1: the wave files are lossless files. They tend to be
Speaker 1: much larger than MP three files. Uh, not necessarily as
Speaker 1: large as an uncompressed version of that file, but still
Speaker 1: pretty big. And UM. Yeah, so those are the those
Speaker 1: are two of the main ones. But then and you
Speaker 1: can have either digitized or synthesized wave files. And then
Speaker 1: there's uh the the A C files UM, which again
Speaker 1: another lossy compression format. UM. That's depending on who you ask.
Speaker 1: I've heard people say that they prefer a C over
Speaker 1: MP three's and that they think a C compression leads
Speaker 1: to less loss of fidelity. Yeah, yeah, they were. Apple
Speaker 1: adopted it for for the iTunes store a long time
Speaker 1: ago as the music format, and you know, they the
Speaker 1: company really pushed it as being a superior format to
Speaker 1: the MP three. UM. You know, again it depends on
Speaker 1: whom you ask, um, but you know, they then they
Speaker 1: started with a tight k uh digit digitization rate. Hey,
Speaker 1: y set it UM, and you know they they semi recently,
Speaker 1: it's not recent recent, but it's UM over the past
Speaker 1: while here they've they've upgraded that UM too, so you
Speaker 1: know that that has been a thing. But um, yeah,
Speaker 1: some people feel that that A A C is a
Speaker 1: better um. You know, an A C at K sounds
Speaker 1: better than an MP three at K encoding. UM. Another
Speaker 1: Apple file format. There was an earlier one developed by
Speaker 1: Apple as the Audio Interchange File Format or ai f F. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically a long time ago. I would say, in the
Speaker 1: mid nineties, if you ran across a wave file, you'd say, oh,
Speaker 1: that's a Microsoft file, And if you ran across an
Speaker 1: A I F you'd say, oh, well, that's a Macintosh file.
Speaker 1: It's not so clear cut these days, but they, you know,
Speaker 1: it was sort of the this is what we use
Speaker 1: on our operating system and that's what they use on
Speaker 1: their operating system kind of thing. Right. And then there
Speaker 1: was the Apple Lossless Audio Codec or a L A
Speaker 1: C A LACK uh. And that was one that in
Speaker 1: Apple kind of surprised folks by by converting it into
Speaker 1: open source and royalty free, uh, which for people who
Speaker 1: were big followers of Apple was something of a shock.
Speaker 1: They and and ALAC file or Apple Lossless Audio Codec
Speaker 1: file is stored in an MP four container with the
Speaker 1: file extension of M four A. So uh, if you
Speaker 1: see an M for a file, then that's that's a
Speaker 1: potential uh pointer that that's what you're looking at in
Speaker 1: a LACK file. Um. But there's so many more. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's like A said, there was FLAK, which is the
Speaker 1: free lossless audio codec very similar to a LACK except
Speaker 1: that it's um it was started off as open source
Speaker 1: and free. UM. Yeah, A lot of people who are
Speaker 1: are real audio files and and still download music because
Speaker 1: a lot of them won't because of the lossy nature
Speaker 1: of a lot of the audio files online. UM. A
Speaker 1: lot of people prefer the FLAK files. And I've seen
Speaker 1: artists who sell their music files from their websites offer
Speaker 1: UH MP three or A A C and and FLACK
Speaker 1: as an option, so you know, if you want to
Speaker 1: pay a couple of extra dollars, you can get the
Speaker 1: fancy hi fi audio files. Well, there's the Sun Audio format,
Speaker 1: which is dot AU UH that was specifically created for
Speaker 1: Unix systems. That's another reason why there's so many different
Speaker 1: file types out there is because there's some that were
Speaker 1: designed with specific operating systems in mind. UH. There's Windows
Speaker 1: Media Audio O w M A UM again developed as
Speaker 1: a competing my guess standard is the wrong word, but
Speaker 1: a competing file format tow MP three and UH designed
Speaker 1: to play in within the Windows Media Player, and UM
Speaker 1: UH supposedly had a much more efficient compression algorithm than
Speaker 1: MP three. Also designed with DRM protection in mind, and
Speaker 1: that was one of the other reasons why Microsoft was
Speaker 1: really interested in developing its own file format sound file
Speaker 1: format beyond wave UM was to try and protect intellectual property.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah. Basically, DRM is just another layer of
Speaker 1: information encoded. It's it's essentially metadata, but it's metadata that
Speaker 1: explains UM who essentially who owns the file. So if
Speaker 1: if Jonathan buys a song from um, you know, a
Speaker 1: an online music store that has DRM embedded in it. It
Speaker 1: It will say, well, this this belongs to Jonathan. UM,
Speaker 1: he paid for it, and he is allowed to listen
Speaker 1: to it on his registered machines, but only on his
Speaker 1: registered machines, or um, you know, it might say he's
Speaker 1: allowed to listen to this file for free for three
Speaker 1: weeks and three weeks only. And so when the audio
Speaker 1: player tries to go back and says, oh wait, it's
Speaker 1: past three weeks, you know, it might disappear or twenty plays,
Speaker 1: or or he's allowed to loan it to somebody that
Speaker 1: that's um, that's how they determine those uh, those free
Speaker 1: preview things will say oh, yes, you can download this
Speaker 1: and listen one time for free, and you can listen
Speaker 1: to the entire song. And then the d r M
Speaker 1: information encoded in the track. UM, when the player tries
Speaker 1: to read the file again, and it will, it will
Speaker 1: check the information, It says, oh, well, it has been
Speaker 1: played one time and therefore I will not allow you
Speaker 1: to play it again. Sucker, go away. So all of these,
Speaker 1: all of these files are all meant to do essentially
Speaker 1: the same thing. It's again, just depending depended upon the
Speaker 1: equipment you're using and the software you're using, and whether
Speaker 1: or not it's an open approach or if it's a
Speaker 1: proprietary approach. Uh. You know, there's nothing necessarily that says
Speaker 1: one sound file is better than another, uh, because it
Speaker 1: all depends on what you value. Do you value a
Speaker 1: manageable file size? If storage is a is an issue,
Speaker 1: then that might be very important to you. Do you
Speaker 1: value as close to the original performance as possible, like
Speaker 1: that experience. If so, then the quality, the actual sound
Speaker 1: quality is going to be the most important. UM. Do
Speaker 1: you use a specific type of device, because that will
Speaker 1: also help determine which file size is best or file
Speaker 1: type is best for you. Uh. So, you know you
Speaker 1: can't I don't think you can just necessarily come out
Speaker 1: and say, ah, you know, AC files are better than
Speaker 1: MP three's, period always, etcetera. It all depends on your
Speaker 1: particular situation and the equipment that you have. UM. I
Speaker 1: guess one other thing we can talk about before we
Speaker 1: sign off is the fact that there there has been
Speaker 1: for a long time, for years, really uh, a discussion
Speaker 1: within the music industry about how the MP three file format,
Speaker 1: in particular, because it's so popular and so dominant has
Speaker 1: changed the way music sounds because there's a discussion that
Speaker 1: it kind of flattens the highs and the lows of
Speaker 1: of what you can get out of a piece of music.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of the music is starting to
Speaker 1: sound similar to each other because you can't reached those
Speaker 1: dynamics that you could without that you know know, lossy compression format.
Speaker 1: That is part of it. There's also a human element
Speaker 1: involved in that, and it has to do with the
Speaker 1: way the music is produced. UM, because I have seen
Speaker 1: examples of songs that were produced antal and you know,
Speaker 1: in a complete analog environment before it became so popular
Speaker 1: to have louder songs recorded on digital equipment in digital
Speaker 1: and and reproduced on digital equipment. And in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases the materials that now that that loudness is
Speaker 1: being has become somewhat of a priority. UM. A lot
Speaker 1: of the music is reproduced loud, and then that the
Speaker 1: high end and low end are trimmed off to create
Speaker 1: a digital file. So it's almost in some cases like
Speaker 1: a solid block of sound and in the highs and lows,
Speaker 1: and there is less dynamic range. UM. And again this
Speaker 1: is this, this is a human element element, and you
Speaker 1: know what people are listening for? What do I want from? Uh?
Speaker 1: This new CD that I'm going to buy? So I
Speaker 1: want to crank it up in my car and go
Speaker 1: driving down the boulevard and have people notice who I
Speaker 1: am and associate this music with me. Um. The answers
Speaker 1: always yes, yeah, yeah, um, polka all the time? People Okay, funny,
Speaker 1: that's also the disco sound. Um but um but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, And this is a this can be a problem,
Speaker 1: you know, because then you don't have the same you
Speaker 1: don't get that dynamic range, and you say, well, is
Speaker 1: this something that's important to me or not? Again, it's
Speaker 1: it's partially a matter of choice, but it's also partially
Speaker 1: what the market is asking for, and people are producing
Speaker 1: and putting out to the market as well well. And
Speaker 1: there's also the argument, and this becomes a circular argument,
Speaker 1: but there's also the argument that the equipment that people
Speaker 1: are using to listen to music is incapable of distinguishing
Speaker 1: some of the subtleties that we might associate with earlier
Speaker 1: types of music. Therefore, since the playback equipment cannot handle it,
Speaker 1: why would you put it in there? Why bother to do?
Speaker 1: That when you can take this other route, which is
Speaker 1: exactly what the equipment can handle, and that thus you
Speaker 1: also get to a more homogenized sound across various industries
Speaker 1: or various genres. I guess I should say. Is it
Speaker 1: also pasteurized? It can be, It can be pasteurized rarely.
Speaker 1: Do you have vitamin D added? Yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of vitamin D deficiency in the music industry. So it's
Speaker 1: a scandal. It's about it's poised to break wide open. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's also florid. Yeah. Well, fortunately they did lick the
Speaker 1: scurvy problem, so that was good. Not literally that would
Speaker 1: be gross. So anyway, my earbuds are wet. Is there
Speaker 1: anything else in particular? You want to talk about sound files?
Speaker 1: I mean, like I said, there are literally hundreds of
Speaker 1: different types of sound files, some of which are really
Speaker 1: obscure and haven't been used in more than a decade
Speaker 1: except on legacy systems. Yeah. The we had we had
Speaker 1: a couple of people write us in and ask us
Speaker 1: to do this, and I'm wondering if we actually, uh,
Speaker 1: this is not the kind of thing that we can
Speaker 1: wrap up in a nice package and tie off because
Speaker 1: it is such a diverse thing. And it's not it's
Speaker 1: probably not going to end because even once we standardize,
Speaker 1: we get closer to standardizing on maybe two or three
Speaker 1: audio standards, um, somebody will still be working on coming
Speaker 1: up with a better way to reproduce sound, and thus
Speaker 1: we'll introduce a new file format for us to consider, right,
Speaker 1: And and plus just with new equipment coming out, things
Speaker 1: like video game systems, like handheld video game systems, they
Speaker 1: have their own proprietary sound file extensions too, like the
Speaker 1: Nintendo ones have their own proprietary sound file extensions. So
Speaker 1: and then we still have people going back and trying
Speaker 1: to reproduce the eight bit sound, right. So yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that I do not expect
Speaker 1: us to ever reach a point where we're going to
Speaker 1: have the one standard audio file and some of them,
Speaker 1: some of them will become kind of de facto standards,
Speaker 1: just because the fact that so many people are using it.
Speaker 1: But that's not the same thing as to say we've
Speaker 1: all settled on one particular file format, and with with
Speaker 1: things like DRM in the picture, I mean that obviously
Speaker 1: is a big issue. Driver. Yeah, they're there are companies
Speaker 1: that famously got out of it, you know, Apple being
Speaker 1: one of them, uh saying that you know what, we
Speaker 1: have come to the same conclusion that our listeners have been,
Speaker 1: uh saying, which is that, um, this is a negative
Speaker 1: impact on their experience, and we don't want to do
Speaker 1: it anymore. Um, it's a good business decision for Apple
Speaker 1: at the time. Uh. There's other companies that are still
Speaker 1: for really behind DRM and they say that that is
Speaker 1: the good business decision for them in their in their
Speaker 1: particular situation. And maybe maybe that's true. Uh. Personally, Uh,
Speaker 1: if the DRM is is intrusive in any way, I
Speaker 1: just find it awful. Yeah. If there's if there's a requirement, yeah,
Speaker 1: like you must have an Internet connection to listen to
Speaker 1: your music. Like really that doesn't seem right. Even better
Speaker 1: when he goes, you must have an internet connection your
Speaker 1: listeners music, but I have an Internet connection. Why aren't
Speaker 1: you playing? Right? You must have the band in your
Speaker 1: living room to listen to this music, but they're sitting
Speaker 1: right here. Yeah, Marian Call, she can't play anything for
Speaker 1: me until after I run the actual foul and then
Speaker 1: then she starts playing. That's totally not true. Uh. And
Speaker 1: if you guys don't know who Marian Call is, you
Speaker 1: should definitely look her up and listen to her music.
Speaker 1: It's awesome. So we're gonna wrap this up. There are
Speaker 1: so many things we could say about sound files. We
Speaker 1: could do an episode about each type of major sound five,
Speaker 1: and then do episodes where we would group ten more
Speaker 1: obscure sound files together, and we would still be recording episodes.
Speaker 1: Well passed episode five for tech Stuff. So we are
Speaker 1: not going to do that because some market research tells
Speaker 1: us that you would all leave, So we're not going
Speaker 1: to do that. But but if you have any questions
Speaker 1: about sound files in general, or any sort of tech
Speaker 1: topic you would like us to address in a future episode,
Speaker 1: please let us know. Send us an email or I
Speaker 1: addresses tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, or send us
Speaker 1: a message on Facebook or Twitter, or handle it both
Speaker 1: of those as tech Stuff. Hs W and Chris and
Speaker 1: I will talk to you again really soon for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. See guys, I told you we
Speaker 1: talked to you again really soon. That really soon is
Speaker 1: right now. I'm just reminding you that we have our
Speaker 1: photo upload widget live on the site at www dot
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Slash upgrade your heck. Toyota
Speaker 1: is giving us the chance to let you share your creativity.
Speaker 1: So send us those pictures of your modifications, your tech ideas,
Speaker 1: those gadgets that you've created, all those hacks. If you're
Speaker 1: steampunking everything in sight, put on your goggles and show
Speaker 1: that to us. We can't wait to see them. Brought
Speaker 1: to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera