Best audio format for compressed quality

[cyborg]

Not really a Fedora, or even Linux based question (and even "Programming" is questionable), but I digress.

I'm helping out a community online radio station that is recording each show for a "listen again" feature that I've put onto their website. Currently these are in MP3 format as that's what their streaming software kicks out when the show is marked as finished. These are around 50MB each for an hour's worth which isn't bad going, but I was wondering if there is any better format for this that anyone could recommend? I've never done much work with audio files, I just dump MP3 onto my player and save things in Ogg when recorded in the past.

If it's anything like images, I'm assuming there are lossy and lossless formats etc.

[secipolla]

I'm no music listener but from the little I do listen (actually I listen more to speeches than music) mp3 is pretty bad.
For music I hear that flac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac ,which is a compressed lossless format, is pretty good.
For talk there are formats targeted for that like speex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex but don't know if a generic mp3 player reproduces that.
Online radios use a lot aac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aac because it has both better compression and better quality than mp3.

[cyborg]

Originally Posted by secipolla

I'm no music listener but from the little I do listen (actually I listen more to speeches than music) mp3 is pretty bad.
For music I hear that flac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac ,which is a compressed lossless format, is pretty good.
For talk there are formats targeted for that like speex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex but don't know if a generic mp3 player reproduces that.
Online radios use a lot aac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aac because it has both better compression and better quality than mp3.

Thanks, I'll look at FLAC. It think it's similar to .ogg, so I'll have an experiment and post my results.

[Dutchy]

FLAC will give you only bigger files but with better (lossless) quality.
I would go for aac (not open but good compression), ogg (open but a little bit worse compression wise) or opus (open, best of both worlds but very new).

The problem with all these audio formats is compatibility (your visitors need to be able to play the files), so you'll probably also need to take that into consideration.

[BBQdave]

Originally Posted by cyborg

Thanks, I'll look at FLAC. It think it's similar to .ogg, so I'll have an experiment and post my results.

I am curious what you determine. Though for compression and sound quality, I would go with Ogg Vorbis

[cyborg]

Originally Posted by Dutchy

FLAC will give you only bigger files but with better (lossless) quality.
I would go for aac (not open but good compression), ogg (open but a little bit worse compression wise) or opus (open, best of both worlds but very new).

The problem with all these audio formats is compatibility (your visitors need to be able to play the files), so you'll probably also need to take that into consideration.

I have an embedded player which can read almost anything, so no worries there! These aren't meant for download.

[marko]

FLAC is not really similar to ogg, it's bit perfect to the original wav file that was used to make it. Ogg (actually the sound format is "vorbis", ogg is the container the vorbis goes in) on the other hand is lossy depending on what compression/quality factor you use.

So when you play a song via flac, it's effectively bitwise identical to the wav file that came from the CD. You can even test if the flac file has been corrupted at any time since it was created by checking it with the "flac -t" command and option:

$ flac -t songtitle.flac
songtitle.flac: ok

So "ok" means the checksum in the flac file matched what was computed

There's some people that claim that flac's don't sound as good as wav but that's pretty controversial. Explaining such a quality reduction requires resorting to the extra work the cpu does uncompressing the file adds some EMI noise to the computer or maybe the fact that the cpu is slightly more busy in the flac case means some process timing gets sloppier making more jitter (which is a term for variation in timing in audio) at getting the music stream to the DAC (the component that converts the digital format back to analog for your speakers)

[Penguinclaw]

Personally for quality I'd recommend Flac. Okay they are bigger files but with TB hard-drives this is less of an issue. In fact I've converted my entire cd collection to Flac and connected my pc to my hifi via an M-audio soundcard and the quality is very good. I'm also blessed with a Samsung "mp3" player that plays Flac

Having said that I don't know much about internet radio which I guess has a certain bandwidth thus making the use of Flac, perhaps, not so useful. In that case I guess AAC may be a better choice or of course Ogg Vorbis; don't forget you can alter the bit rate of your recordings to ensure you get a good balance between quality and size.

[Fenrin]

For such tasks low bitrates with good quality are much more important than lossless audio compression. Probably the best choice is Vorbis or AAC. There is also a new emerging audio format, which is said to have even an better quality/filesize ration. But Opus is not widely supported yet Opus audio codec is now an Internet Standard, wikipedia