Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works, and I love all things tech and
Speaker 1: it's time for a tech Stuff Classic episode. Today's classic
Speaker 1: episode has the title tech Stuff Listens in on sound Files.
Speaker 1: Chris Pallette and I did this episode to kind of
Speaker 1: look at all the different types of sound files that
Speaker 1: were really kind of prevalent at that time and discuss
Speaker 1: what makes them different, lossy versus lossless, all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff kind of give a little insight as to
Speaker 1: the variations and differentiations between these. So I hope you
Speaker 1: guys enjoyed this episode originally aired on October eight, two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve. And take it away, Chris and Jonathan. We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk today about sound files and why there are
Speaker 1: so many any different why are there so many sound files,
Speaker 1: never mind sound file formats? Uh and also um just
Speaker 1: kind of get into the particulars of various popular sound files.
Speaker 1: Maybe we'll talk about some of the more rare ones
Speaker 1: that you can encounter two um and and if this
Speaker 1: any of this sounds familiar, then you're probably a long
Speaker 1: time listener of tech stuff. We did an episode many
Speaker 1: many many moons ago on the MP three format. I
Speaker 1: was just a kid then, yeah, boy, when we had
Speaker 1: stars in our eyes and and and uh and lunch
Speaker 1: and our belly. Uh. That's back when we used to
Speaker 1: record in the afternoon. Anyway, so we do this in
Speaker 1: the mornings. Now. We want to talk about different types
Speaker 1: 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. UM,
Speaker 1: and so there are a lot of different things that
Speaker 1: make up the quality of that sound. Synthesized is a
Speaker 1: little bit different. Synthesized is a type of sound file
Speaker 1: where the file contains information in it that says something
Speaker 1: along the lines of play this note as if it
Speaker 1: were played by this instrument. So play a c as
Speaker 1: if it were on a tenor saxophone, right, and then
Speaker 1: the software itself and the hardware is able to take
Speaker 1: 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 files. And mini files are not just
Speaker 1: for PCs that those were really I mean, the mini
Speaker 1: files were made so that synthesizers could communicate with each other. UM,
Speaker 1: So sorry, no, no, no no, I was just going to say, so,
Speaker 1: if you're thinking of a digitized digitized UH sound file,
Speaker 1: you might play an actual guitar and record it into
Speaker 1: a digital file and play it back versus UH plugging
Speaker 1: um a USB keyboard into your computer, UH, you know,
Speaker 1: and using software and saying, oh, I want this to
Speaker 1: sound like a grand piano and hitting a c and it,
Speaker 1: you know, makes the approximation of that sound, rather than
Speaker 1: taking an actual instrument and digitizing it. Right. And in general,
Speaker 1: a digitized file is going to be larger than the
Speaker 1: synthesized files. Synthesized files, like I said, are just giving
Speaker 1: general instructions to recreate a sound. Digitized has to hold
Speaker 1: all that information in it. Now, UM, you could have
Speaker 1: a pretty small digitized version of a sound file, but
Speaker 1: the means that you don't have as much information there,
Speaker 1: which means the sound you're going to get is not
Speaker 1: the necessarily going to be that UM nice. The fidelity
Speaker 1: will not be high be lo fi actually UM. Although
Speaker 1: it is not the same. It reminds me of the
Speaker 1: differences between UH 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
Speaker 1: it and it has less information in it because it
Speaker 1: can be manipulated like that. Yeah, it reminds me a
Speaker 1: lot 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 i that are on or off and you know,
Speaker 1: it's a little more complicated than that, but it looks
Speaker 1: like if you look at it looks different from an
Speaker 1: analog sound wave. So, um, those two different approaches define
Speaker 1: the characteristics of that sound file. Now, the other big
Speaker 1: way of dividing up the sound files, and the one
Speaker 1: that I think is uh is one of those that
Speaker 1: most people have heard about, um and it's mainly applies
Speaker 1: to the digitized form means synthesize as well, but digitized
Speaker 1: is really where a lot of the sound file discussion
Speaker 1: revolves around uncompressed, lossless and lossy file formats. So let's
Speaker 1: talk a bit about what those means. So uncompressed is
Speaker 1: probably the easiest because it just means it's a sound
Speaker 1: file that doesn't you haven't compressed it at all. You
Speaker 1: haven't lost any information whatever information was in that sound file,
Speaker 1: uh at the very beginning, or or the sound recorded
Speaker 1: into some sort of device, is is replicated as close
Speaker 1: as possible, depending upon them 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 a an actual musical instrument, and uh,
Speaker 1: let's say a guitar string. You pluck the string and
Speaker 1: it's going to play reverberated a certain frequency. Um. But
Speaker 1: there there is more to it than that. I mean,
Speaker 1: is 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 here 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, uh 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 it's the compression level. Your mileage may vary. You
Speaker 1: might it might not be a significantly smaller file than
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. Okay, Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's you think about. That That could results 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 alluding to 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 killer hurts. Anything outside of that
Speaker 1: range of frequencies UH is outside the range of normal
Speaker 1: human hearing that hurts and UH. And so the the
Speaker 1: ideas that if there are any frequencies that are either
Speaker 1: above or below that range, those would get cut out,
Speaker 1: they would not be encoded in the file, and that
Speaker 1: would decrease the size. There are other ways that lossy
Speaker 1: formats tend to compress files, and there are things that
Speaker 1: you can choose to do when you're creating a lossy
Speaker 1: file format that will affect the quality of the recording
Speaker 1: to some extent. And there are a lot of different factors,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk about them in just a second, but
Speaker 1: lassy definitely has more of a stigma against it because
Speaker 1: the idea is that you know, there are ties where
Speaker 1: real listen to music and you think, wow, that that
Speaker 1: really does sound like it's a lot different from that
Speaker 1: that that live performance I saw. Like you you might
Speaker 1: go to a live performance and then get a digital
Speaker 1: copy of that live performance. Some bands do that, you know,
Speaker 1: where they record their their shows and then the fans
Speaker 1: can end up buying a digital copy of something that
Speaker 1: they saw, and depending on the encoding, it may not
Speaker 1: really reflect what you experienced. For instance, there might not
Speaker 1: be a four pound guys standing next to you stepping
Speaker 1: on your toe every five minutes, um, right, so they
Speaker 1: might be giants show owen too. Anyway, So the idea
Speaker 1: there being that that depending on how they're encoding it,
Speaker 1: you might not have as rich a listening experience as
Speaker 1: you 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 code X
Speaker 1: and 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 C D audio.
Speaker 1: What if you guys, you may not remember these there
Speaker 1: were these things called compact discs. I have to I
Speaker 1: remember when compact discs were a new thing. I remember
Speaker 1: thinking this will never take off. And let me listen
Speaker 1: to back cast um or vinyl album or wax cylinder
Speaker 1: or this bard that I hired to follow around and
Speaker 1: sing sagas to higher recorder. Yeah, hey, it's Jonathan from
Speaker 1: the future talking to Jonathan from the past. Cool your jets, buddy,
Speaker 1: we gotta take a quick break and thank our sponsor. Anyway,
Speaker 1: uh so the CD audio is something like forty four
Speaker 1: point one killer hurts as I recall something like that.
Speaker 1: That that's the frequency for their sample rate UM And
Speaker 1: in general, you want to sample rate that's about UM well,
Speaker 1: that that's high enough so that you're going to get
Speaker 1: a good experience when you get playback. And depending on
Speaker 1: your application, you may not need a very high sample rate. So,
Speaker 1: for example, for telephone uh fidelity, when you're speaking on
Speaker 1: the phone to someone else, that sample rate is much
Speaker 1: you know, and we're talking about digital phones. They're doing
Speaker 1: the same thing. They're converting an analog signal into a
Speaker 1: digital information and transmitting it and then decoding it and
Speaker 1: putting it back into analog. Uh, They're sample rate is
Speaker 1: much lower because in general, we've become used to the
Speaker 1: idea that a telephone quality conversation does not need to
Speaker 1: have high fidelity. And if you've ever spoken on the
Speaker 1: telephone with me, you know the quality of my conversations
Speaker 1: is quite low. Well, um, that doesn't really have that
Speaker 1: much to do with this sound quality. Oh, you're right,
Speaker 1: you're right. I got off on a little tangent there. Well, no,
Speaker 1: if you if you take a I'm speaking in general
Speaker 1: terms here, but if you take a podcast file, maybe
Speaker 1: a half hour podcast file, um, from an audio store,
Speaker 1: and you buy a five minute song from that same
Speaker 1: audio store, the song is probably going to be a
Speaker 1: larger file because there is a greater range of sound,
Speaker 1: um that they are trying to preserve to create that
Speaker 1: audio file then to to or that music file. Then
Speaker 1: for the voice because um, you know, the voice files
Speaker 1: don't really need to convey the same rain of frequencies
Speaker 1: right to just stand still, sound good and beyond the
Speaker 1: sample right. There are other factors that also informed the
Speaker 1: quality of a particular sound file, a digitized sound file.
Speaker 1: The resolution. It's just you know, sound files can have resolution,
Speaker 1: just like an image file. It's um. Essentially, it comes
Speaker 1: into the how how the a d C measures the
Speaker 1: incoming um signal voltage and converts that into digital code.
Speaker 1: So the accuracy of that is dependent upon how many
Speaker 1: bits are used in the process. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: the more data you include about the sound, the more
Speaker 1: accurately you can recreate the sound when you play it back.
Speaker 1: So in other words, if and this makes sense, it's
Speaker 1: it's just like any other kind of experience where you're
Speaker 1: trying to recreate something that you've seen. The more data
Speaker 1: you have, the better chances you have of recreating it accurately.
Speaker 1: So if I'm in a room and you were to
Speaker 1: give me a stone tablet and a chisel and a
Speaker 1: hammer and tell me to take notes, those notes would
Speaker 1: be very very limited. If you gave me a pen
Speaker 1: and paper, there would be a little bit better. If
Speaker 1: you gave me a a computer with a working keyboard,
Speaker 1: unlike mine. Um, I would be even better. If you
Speaker 1: gave me a keyboard like mine, it would probably be
Speaker 1: back to stone tablet. Anyway, that's another part that determines
Speaker 1: another factor that determined sound quality, and then data rates.
Speaker 1: And this is really anyone who's converted any sound file
Speaker 1: into MP three format or a format similar to the
Speaker 1: MP three format knows about data rates. You usually you
Speaker 1: have a choice of what what uh data rates speed
Speaker 1: you can pick to uh convert a sound file into
Speaker 1: an MP three and generally high air is better. It
Speaker 1: means that you're going to have a higher fidelity experience.
Speaker 1: It also means the file size it'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 bombed 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: hears sound differently and that's that sounds strange probably um,
Speaker 1: probably because you're hearing it differently than I am. No, 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 uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they have studies that have been done that
Speaker 1: that show that women hear different ranges of sound than
Speaker 1: men do. And you know they're there are always people
Speaker 1: who UM listen to a vinyl record, for example, and
Speaker 1: they'll they'll say, Wow, that sounds so much better than
Speaker 1: a c D 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 audio file that that you hear on
Speaker 1: the on the disk. UM. So you know, everybody is different.
Speaker 1: Let's let's use that as a caveat. But UM, it's
Speaker 1: important to note that in general, the file size the
Speaker 1: the information you want more information encoded on there because
Speaker 1: it's going to provide a richer sound. But it does
Speaker 1: 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 in 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
Speaker 1: file one recorded at a much faster data rate and
Speaker 1: have a hard time telling the difference, simply because the
Speaker 1: hardware you were using to play back the music wasn't
Speaker 1: capable of capturing those subtle differences or even not so
Speaker 1: subtle differences. Because let's let's face it, some of the
Speaker 1: speakers that came out years ago, we're pretty well they
Speaker 1: were definitely sub standard compared to some of the ones
Speaker 1: you can get today. Not saying that today's speakers are,
Speaker 1: you know, the height of human achievement. We definitely have
Speaker 1: a huge range on the market. And uh, and it's
Speaker 1: not always a case if you get what you pay
Speaker 1: for either. That's a totally different podcast though. Uh. It
Speaker 1: just means that that it wasn't as important back then.
Speaker 1: And also we should talk about why there are so
Speaker 1: many different types, So we know, the ones people tend
Speaker 1: to hear about a lot are wave files, uh MP
Speaker 1: three's UM A C files for some folks. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: the A lack files A L A C sometimes flak
Speaker 1: for a few people out there anyway, UM, and then
Speaker 1: there are a lot of other ones, but those are
Speaker 1: those are some of the ones that are the most
Speaker 1: popular but there are. If you were to look at
Speaker 1: a list of every type of audio file that has
Speaker 1: had any sort of traction out there, it would be
Speaker 1: incredibly long. I mean, the different types of them are. Um,
Speaker 1: there's easily easily over a hundred. Now some of those
Speaker 1: are project files, not audio file formats, and the project
Speaker 1: files really just have information about an audio file as
Speaker 1: opposed to having any actual audio information in it itself.
Speaker 1: But you know, you might say, well, why are there
Speaker 1: so many? And there are several different reasons for that.
Speaker 1: One is that as time has gone on, we've created
Speaker 1: more sophisticated computers and sound chips that are able to
Speaker 1: do more than earlier ones. So they were suddenly able
Speaker 1: to support a greater number of features. But the older
Speaker 1: file formats didn't necessarily have that built in, and so
Speaker 1: new file formats emerged that we're able to take advantage
Speaker 1: of the technical uh abilities of the new stuff that
Speaker 1: we were building. In some cases, there were file formats
Speaker 1: that were designed to work specifically with particular types of hardware.
Speaker 1: So if you were back if you had a computer
Speaker 1: back in the old days of the of the sound
Speaker 1: card boom, you know when they had like ruland and
Speaker 1: sound Blaster and all of those coming out. You might
Speaker 1: be familiar that there were certain files file types that
Speaker 1: could play on some cards but not on others, and
Speaker 1: this could get really frustrating as a user. I remember
Speaker 1: going out and looking at computer games and looking at
Speaker 1: a computer game and saying, Wow, I'm not gonna have
Speaker 1: a very good experience with this because, uh, the sound
Speaker 1: file type that they went with was for a different
Speaker 1: sound card than the one I had, So I'm going
Speaker 1: to have more basic, you know, array of sounds that
Speaker 1: is sort of the baseline for this game. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna have any of the advanced stuff because they decided
Speaker 1: to back this other sound card. So there was a
Speaker 1: division in the market, right, I mean, there wasn't a
Speaker 1: lot of standards that there was no standardized format, so
Speaker 1: you had a lot of proprietary formats, and we still
Speaker 1: have those as well. There's still some proprietary formats, some
Speaker 1: of which are actually used fairly widely. I think most
Speaker 1: people try to get away from those because it's um
Speaker 1: it limits you, it limits what you can play that
Speaker 1: file back on. UM it also means that a lot
Speaker 1: of these proprietary file formats were designed so that you
Speaker 1: could have digital rights management built into the file format,
Speaker 1: so DRM, that's uh, you know, that's something else that
Speaker 1: that determined the different types of files. Another is the
Speaker 1: change in how we listen to these files, all right,
Speaker 1: so um listening to it on a computer or on
Speaker 1: a on a sound device. You can have a certain
Speaker 1: type of file format. Back in the earlier days of
Speaker 1: the Internet, when you wanted to listen to music that
Speaker 1: was going to be coming over uh an internet connection,
Speaker 1: you couldn't use those file formats. They just the files
Speaker 1: were too big. So that meant that you had to
Speaker 1: design a different standard to be able to stream music
Speaker 1: usually had a lower fidelity and uh so that the
Speaker 1: file size was manageable, and that you could have a
Speaker 1: specific type of software to play back those files. So
Speaker 1: things like real audio. Do you remember the old real
Speaker 1: audio days? Right? Unfortunately? Yeah, dark times before the Empire.
Speaker 1: John Than from the future again. You know, these lights
Speaker 1: don't pay for themselves. We're gonna take a quick break
Speaker 1: from this classic episode to thank our sponsor. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there are there's a lot of different reasons. So some
Speaker 1: of the reasons are technological, some are based upon the
Speaker 1: limitations of that technology. Somewhere kind of you know, let's
Speaker 1: face it, some of them are a little greedy, these
Speaker 1: are you know. Some some file types were designed by
Speaker 1: companies saying, if we design the hardware and we designed
Speaker 1: the file type, we lock people into this because they
Speaker 1: won't be able to go and buy some other piece
Speaker 1: of hardware because they're hardware is not gonna be able
Speaker 1: to play our file. Yeah. And then there were some
Speaker 1: that were sort of political, as in, uh, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: specifically of VORBIS, which was was created as an open standard.
Speaker 1: Are you down with a gig? You know me? UM,
Speaker 1: mostly because of the MP three file format taking off,
Speaker 1: but UM the codec used to create it, the primarily
Speaker 1: the Fraunhofer UH Institute that came up with the the
Speaker 1: MP three file standard. UM the codec you had to
Speaker 1: license that UM, so if you wanted to create software
Speaker 1: that would make MP three files, you were supposed to
Speaker 1: license the official codec to do that. And then the
Speaker 1: people who started UH, we're saying, you know what, if
Speaker 1: you want to use our standard to create our audio files,
Speaker 1: then 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 you know, that's a good example. But
Speaker 1: 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. Let's not
Speaker 1: to mention it anyway. I mean, it is sort of
Speaker 1: the eight 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. Ops. 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 complicated
Speaker 1: and then there and there are a lot of different
Speaker 1: UM file extensions that fall under the impact audio for UH,
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
Speaker 1: out With the different types of sound files, some of
Speaker 1: them support metadata and some do not, and metadata turned
Speaker 1: out to be really important. Uh. Metadata, of course, is
Speaker 1: information about other information, So metadata for a sound file
Speaker 1: might include things like the artist's name, the album name,
Speaker 1: other information. It could also include things like who uploaded it,
Speaker 1: who who encoded it. It all depends on the code
Speaker 1: dec It all depends on the file type. So some
Speaker 1: of these file types are essentially digital fingerprints. Like if
Speaker 1: you were to download one of these files and then
Speaker 1: you 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. Uh. And not all the files, of course,
Speaker 1: support metadata, but a lot of really popular ones do
Speaker 1: because it's a useful way to get information in uh
Speaker 1: in a music UM management software, right, So that way,
Speaker 1: because you think about music management software like iTunes, that's
Speaker 1: one of the most popular ones. So it's easy to
Speaker 1: talk about iTunes has all the information about the artists,
Speaker 1: the album, the song tied, all that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: and that lets you sort your albums through various ways. UM.
Speaker 1: Without the metadata, you wouldn't have that information. You would
Speaker 1: have the name of the file and what kind 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 UM. It kind of takes and it
Speaker 1: creates an arbitrary sampling rate uh and a number of
Speaker 1: channels in the sample size. UM. It's uh one of
Speaker 1: the first audio file types that were developed for the
Speaker 1: PC UM and it's defined as being lossless. So this
Speaker 1: is the wave files are lossless files. They tend to
Speaker 1: be much larger than MP three files. Uh, not necessarily
Speaker 1: as large as an uncompressed version of that file, but
Speaker 1: still pretty big. And UM. Yeah, so those are the
Speaker 1: those are two of the main ones. But then and
Speaker 1: you can have either digitized or synthesized wave files. And
Speaker 1: then there's uh the the A C files UM, which
Speaker 1: is again another lossy compression format. UM. That's the depending
Speaker 1: on who you ask, I've heard people say that they
Speaker 1: prefer a C over MP three's and that they think
Speaker 1: a C compression leads to less loss of fidelity. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they were. Apple adopted it for for the iTunes store
Speaker 1: a long time ago as the music format, and you know,
Speaker 1: they the company really pushed it as being a superior
Speaker 1: format to the MP three. UM. You know, again it
Speaker 1: depends on whom you ask, UM, but you know they
Speaker 1: and then they started with a k uh digited digit
Speaker 1: tization rate. Hey, I said it UM, and you know,
Speaker 1: they they semi recently, it's not recent recent, but it's
Speaker 1: UM over the past while here they've they've upgraded that
Speaker 1: UM too, so you know that that has been a thing.
Speaker 1: But UM, yeah, some people feel that that A C
Speaker 1: is a better UM. You know, an a C at
Speaker 1: K sounds better than an MP three at K encoding UM.
Speaker 1: Another Apple file format. There was an earlier one developed
Speaker 1: by Apple as the Audio Interchange File Format or ai
Speaker 1: f F. Yeah, basically a long time ago, I would say,
Speaker 1: in the mid nineties, if you ran across a wave file,
Speaker 1: you'd say, oh, that's a Microsoft file, and if you
Speaker 1: ran across an ai f F, you'd say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's a Macintosh file. It's not so clear cut these days,
Speaker 1: but they, you know, it was sort of the this
Speaker 1: is what we use on our operating system, and that's
Speaker 1: what they use on their operating system kind of thing, right.
Speaker 1: And then there was the Apple Lossless Audio Codec or
Speaker 1: a L A C A LACK uh. And that was
Speaker 1: one that in Apple kind of surprised folks by by
Speaker 1: converting it into open source and royalty free, uh, which
Speaker 1: for people who were big followers of Apple was something
Speaker 1: of a SHOCK they and and ALAC file or Apple
Speaker 1: Lossless Audio Codec file is stored in an MP four
Speaker 1: container with the file extension of M four A. So
Speaker 1: uh if you see an M for a file, then
Speaker 1: that's that's a potential uh pointer that that's what you're
Speaker 1: looking at in a LACK file. UM. But there's so
Speaker 1: many more. Uh. There's like I said, there was FLAK,
Speaker 1: which is the free lossless audio codec, very similar to
Speaker 1: a LACK except that it's UM. It was started off
Speaker 1: as open source and free. UM. Yeah, lot of people
Speaker 1: who are are real audio files and and still download
Speaker 1: music because a lot of them won't because of the
Speaker 1: lossy nature of a lot of the audio files online. UM,
Speaker 1: a lot of people prefer the FLAK files. And I've
Speaker 1: seen artists who sell their music files from their websites
Speaker 1: offer uh MP three or 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
Speaker 1: format which is dot AU UH that was specifically created
Speaker 1: for Unix Systems. That's another reason why there's so many
Speaker 1: different file types out there is because there's some that
Speaker 1: were designed with specific operating systems in mind. UH. There's
Speaker 1: Windows Media Audio 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 two 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 plays or
Speaker 1: or he's allowed to loan it to somebody. That that's um,
Speaker 1: that's how they determine those uh, those free preview things
Speaker 1: will say oh, yes, you can download this and listen
Speaker 1: one time for free, and you can listen to the
Speaker 1: entire song, and then the DRM information encoded in the track. Um,
Speaker 1: when the player tries to read the file again, and
Speaker 1: it will, it will check the information. It says, oh, well,
Speaker 1: it has been played one time and therefore I will
Speaker 1: not allow you to play it again. Sucker go away. Yep.
Speaker 1: So I mean all of these, all of these different
Speaker 1: files are all meant to do essentially the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's again just depending depended upon the equipment you're using
Speaker 1: and the software you're using, and whether or not it's
Speaker 1: an open approach or if it's a proprietary approach. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, there's nothing necessarily that says one sound file
Speaker 1: is better than another, uh, because it all depends on
Speaker 1: what you value. Do you value a manageable file size?
Speaker 1: If storage is a is an issue, then that might
Speaker 1: be very important to you. Do you value as close
Speaker 1: to the original performance as possible, like that experience. If so,
Speaker 1: then the quality, the actual sound quality is going to
Speaker 1: be the most important. UM do you use a specific
Speaker 1: type of device, because that will also help determine which
Speaker 1: file size is best or file type is best for you.
Speaker 1: Uh So, you know, you can't. I don't think you
Speaker 1: can just necessarily come out and say, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: AC files are better than m P three's period always, etcetera.
Speaker 1: It all depends on your particular sular situation and the
Speaker 1: equipment that you have. UM. I guess one other thing
Speaker 1: we can talk about before we sign off is the
Speaker 1: fact that there there has been for a long time,
Speaker 1: for years really uh a discussion within the music industry
Speaker 1: about how the MP three file format, in particular, because
Speaker 1: it's so popular and so dominant, has changed the way
Speaker 1: music sounds. Because there's a discussion that it kind of
Speaker 1: flattens the highs and the lows of of what you
Speaker 1: can get out of a piece of music, and so
Speaker 1: a lot of the music is starting to sound similar
Speaker 1: to each other because you can't reach those dynamics that
Speaker 1: you could without that you know, lossy compression format that
Speaker 1: is part of it. There's also a human element involved
Speaker 1: in that, and it has to do with the way
Speaker 1: the music is produced. UM, because I have seen examples
Speaker 1: of UH songs that were produced UH 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 the 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
Speaker 1: lows and there is less dynamic range. UM. And again
Speaker 1: this is this, this is a human element element. And
Speaker 1: you know what people are listening for. What do I
Speaker 1: want from UH this new CD that I'm going to buy?
Speaker 1: Do I want to crank it up in my car
Speaker 1: and go driving down the boulevard and have people notice
Speaker 1: who I am and associate this music with me. Um.
Speaker 1: The answer to that as always yes, yeah, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: Polka all the time people, Okay, funny, that's also the
Speaker 1: disco sound. Um but um, but yeah, I mean this
Speaker 1: is a this can be a problem, you know, because
Speaker 1: then you don't have the same you don't get that
Speaker 1: dynamic range, and you say, well, is this something that's
Speaker 1: important to me or not? Again, it's it's partially a
Speaker 1: matter of choice, but it's also partially what the market
Speaker 1: is asking for, and people are producing and putting out
Speaker 1: to the market as well well. And there's also the argument,
Speaker 1: and this becomes a circular argument. Yeah, but there's also
Speaker 1: the argument that the equipment that people are using to
Speaker 1: listen to music is incapable of distinguishing some of the
Speaker 1: subtleties that we might associate with earlier types of music. Therefore,
Speaker 1: since the playback equipment cannot handle it, why would you
Speaker 1: put it in there? Why bothered to do that when
Speaker 1: you can take this other route, which is exactly what
Speaker 1: the equipment can handle, and that thus you also get
Speaker 1: to a more homogenized sound across various industries or various genres.
Speaker 1: I guess I should say, is it also pasteurized? It
Speaker 1: can be, It can be pasteurized. Rarely do you have
Speaker 1: vitamin D added you know, there's a lot of vitamin
Speaker 1: D deficiency in the music industry. So it's it's a scandal,
Speaker 1: it's about it's poised to break wide open. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: also no fluoride. 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, earbuds are wet. Is there anything
Speaker 1: 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 waves and chip tunes.
Speaker 1: Uh so, yeah, it's it's one of those things that
Speaker 1: I do not expect us to ever reach a point
Speaker 1: where we're going to have the one standard audio file
Speaker 1: and some of them, some of them will become kind
Speaker 1: of de facto standards, just because the fact that so
Speaker 1: many people are using it. But that's not the same
Speaker 1: thing as to say we've all settled on one particular
Speaker 1: file format. Alright, guys, that wraps up this classic episode
Speaker 1: of tech stuff from the wonderful year of two thousand
Speaker 1: and twelve, when Chris and I decided to talk about
Speaker 1: all these different types of sound files. We've got a
Speaker 1: bunch of cool classic episodes lined up for the following weeks,
Speaker 1: some of which date all the way back to two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, almost a decade ago. Wow. I hope you
Speaker 1: guys are enjoying these, uh these classic episodes. I know
Speaker 1: a lot of you started listening to the show fairly recently,
Speaker 1: so you missed out on all these gems from back
Speaker 1: in the day. That's the purpose of bringing them to you.
Speaker 1: If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff or or future past episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: get in touch with me. The email address is tex
Speaker 1: Stuff at how stuff works dot com. We're dropping a
Speaker 1: line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle there is tech
Speaker 1: Stuff h s W. Don't forget to follow us on
Speaker 1: Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com.