There's also the m4a format.

sample rates above 44.1KHz are useless :-) it is just marketing *b*s* :-)

Still using WinAmp. I like to play .Flac wherever possible.

Sir Barnatt, you are a gentelman, scholar and a smartypants. You R our resident "IT Whisperer" j8O)

This is a good video, but I think since you have your website, you could expand upon it and allow us to hear various samples in different quality to be able to see if we can even tell the difference. From the video it made it seem like the only difference with audio file formats are higher frequencies ?

After watching, I looked up what happened to SPEEX (my old 90's fave for archiving audio books). It seems to have been absorbed into OPUS. Since a about 5 years, I moved to Mint Linux and was relieved that both Celluloid and MPV had no problem playing even those old files!

Thanks Chris for your information and making sense out of non-sense. That explains why my FLAC files sounded better than my .Ogg encoded ones. Having reached the over fifty years over fourteen years ago. I’m sure when you were grading papers at college, you didn’t mind not hearing the high pitched screaming “ You can’t fail me…..” 😂😂😂😂! Have a great day!

As an music lover I got 4TB of music all in FLAC and some in WAV. We live in a golden era for audio quality.

I just wondered what makes the mp3 so popular? Is it provide best quality/size ratio?

WavPack also has a lossy mode (hybrid compression) :)

Poor Musepack can never get the love it deserves.

Good video Chris! and Thanks for always sharing with us!💖👍😎JP

Essential viewing for a beginner like me. And you're British, as I am, not yet another American. Discovering your channel really has made my day. Thank you so much.

Audio formats tend to take a lot of FLAC these days. (Sorry, couldn't help it.) 😉

So then is it correct to say that even "lossless" coding has some loss but it is not perceptible to the human audio processing system (as noted at the end of your video)? It would seem that anytime we digitally sample an audio signal we are losing some information between the samples.

Brings me back to the Napster days

Lovely video. Reminds me of the days 30 some years ago when I was taking computer science courses in college. Things certainly have progressed since then. Also you are a far better teacher than any I had in school. Thank you!!

These are my favourite type of EC vids

excellent

Congratulations on 1 million subscribers! I watch every video and send a Super-like when I actually use the data.

YEEEEEEEEAAAH my ears still work I'm not knackred yet

Another informative video Chris. I pretty much stick with MP3 formats as that is the best of both worlds for me personally, and is very easy to transport or edit, using Audacity. My memory banks got a good dusting off as it has been a few years since I looked at these different audio formats. I was reminded years ago not all audio players or editors easily could support MP3, I believe due to licensing issues. Anyway, thanks for a well presented video on something we take for granted these days.

Mr. Barnatt, I've been an audio nerd / tech most of my adult life, and I still learn something new. Thanks for the refresher between codecs and containers. I'm in my late 50s, and for me, yep, it's harder to tell the difference between totally lossless and lossy formats. Currently I'm downloading ALAC songs on Apple Music, which sounds indistinguishable from CD to my current hearing ability.

Even though we all like to pretend we are precious individuals who constantly rebel against 'the system'... we are a species of standardization and standards. We are for the most part much better off because of it. From standardized measures to audio file formats, we humans certainly like our agreed upon standards as well as constantly trying to improve upon them. Great video!

Hi Chris. Would you ever consider doing a new Explaining the Future video ? It's just that your previous videos are scarily prophetic and to hear your views on the latest things like AI etc and the impact it could have (as an example) would be good. However time is precious so wouldn't blame you if you've finished with that side of things.

Ogg vorbis is excellent 👌. I have about 10,000 songs on my phone in that format (224kbs).

Another excellent video. I think Mp3 @ 192kbits as it's the best compromise between quality and size for anyone that listens off his phone and isn't an audiophile.

I'm satisfied with a 192kbs mp3 (or better), provided that the input was high quality.

There are some good tools to look at audio files, to see the quality of them. The Free Lossless Audio Checker and SPEK. I have found that MP3 usually clips off anything over 15kHz, and some flacs are of production-level quality, containing frequencies right up to 30kHz.

Good grief!

Looks cute. Looking at the test, Linux mint, docs and stuff like that, make me doub about the performance/cost rating. These small computers should be more affordable, as they are mostly DIY small home hobby projects and not some big enterprise solutions. Anyways I found something very interesting. Something for enthusiast and something that will save some serious money. When I compare it to stuff bought from store shelf I have no doub that this is actually a win win project in every way. I found Bananna BPI R-4 router board. There is also alu case for it and antennas I think come seperately. This might be the best home router on the planet. A router so cool it changes the way I see routers, and its cheaper then all of the "hi end" gaming routers but at the same time much better. Now, I am not trying to advertise, just sharing some cool ideas for enthusiasts, so we can build something that is actually better and cheaper at the same time.

Just think how different a recording of Ravel's Bolero would be if we only had 8 bit depth audio.

As always, very informative video. Thank you Chris.

Если сравнивать мр3 и. Ogg, то у мр3 ниже качество... И мр3 не може иметь битрейт больше 500 в отличии от ogg... Thank, Chris!

What gets me is one will spend large amounts of cash in their audio gear, but use lossy compression, often very lossy. I suppose it makes sense for the lower end of the audio spectrum

UMX? Sry' just having thé Age for: Rabbits, Unreal n' Deus Ex ;-) 14:22 Oh! that's why womens freq#¤☠%X/voice getZ lower - so WE(♂s) can still hear them? ♫😕♪ ^O' dear AI watching..... i meant of course: ♥& ☮To ALL ♀s 😐

ac3 is still very useful if you need multichannel support

I know there are better formats, but I can't abandon mp3. It's nostalgic, or refusing to deal with tons or files (or both)... I don't know. Great video Chris!

Another excellent video. I always learn something new on a Sunday.

I'm 47 years old and I can still hear my high pitch voice aunt next door. Can't wait to turn 50 for that codec update!

In the early days, I joined all my mp3s from each album in my collection into a non-compressed zip file, changed the ending to .mp3 and used that on my car's mp3 CD player so I didn't have to go through all the songs of each album to get to the album I wanted. Worked like a charm!

I'd enjoy an EC breakdown exploring the higher bitrate audio formats. How might one enjoy the DSD formats on a PC? Plus, I don't see a lot of Linux support for external DACs.

Atrac! Brilliant quality on Minidisc

Another really good video. My entire collection is a combination of primarily WAV and FLAC's. No lossy music for me. We have 20 TB HDD's, 6GHZ CPU's and dedicated hardware decoders or CPU's who can decode dozens of streams without breaking a sweat.

I started using MP3 when I was in high school starting in 2004. I only started switching to FLAC in the past two years, although I still have tons of MP3s. I had to re-rip all my CDs to get a lot of my FLACs.

Audio digital standards salad bar! Thanks, Chris, but I have a question: I listen to classical music concerts via KZbin a lot. What drives me nuts is the grainy quality of the sound of the orchestra string section. It is obnoxiously annoying. I know about the high harmonic content of bowed string sound but over the internet the sound is not the same as heard in a concert hall. Why has digital recording so miserably failed massed string instrument sound? Can you address this conundrum for me? Thanks 🙂

Looking back to the 90s, how many of us mistakenly compressed and replaced our entire CD collection into MP3 (16/44.1/128) to maintain that precious hard drive space? Now 128 kb/s seems so Napster.

Fascinating.....as always. Thank you!

problem with m4a how do you determine if it is a aac or alac format? as for lossless, you need to compare perhaps the filesize but most are almost the same - also the problem is some lossless codecs like Monkey's Audio is not very efficient during playback from what i have heard(higher than normal CPU usage), so portable players such as phones are not well suited. I use FLAC for all my audio now , and I am perfectly happy with that format. Also you failed to mention another lossless codec called "Shorten" , but to be fair that is almost an obscure format at this point.