The following tables compare general and technical information for a variety of
audio coding formats.
For listening tests comparing the perceived audio quality of audio formats and codecs, see the article
Codec listening test A codec listening test is a scientific study designed to compare two or more lossy audio codecs, usually with respect to perceived fidelity or compression efficiency.
Most tests take the form of a double-blind comparison. Commonly used methods ar ...
.
General information
Notes
# The 'Music' category is merely a guideline on commercialized uses of a particular format, not a technical assessment of its capabilities. (For example, in terms of marketshare, MP3 and AAC dominate the personal audio market, though many other formats are comparably well suited to fill this role from a purely technical standpoint.)
# First public release date is first of either specification publishing or source releasing, or in the case of closed-specification, closed-source codecs, is the date of first binary releasing. Many developing codecs have pre-releases consisting of pre-1.0 versions and perhaps 1.0 release candidates (RCs), although 1.0 may not necessarily be the release version.
# Latest stable version is that of specification or reference tools.
# If there happens to be OSI licensed software available for a particular format, this does not necessarily permit one to use said codec free of charge. Likewise, if there is only proprietary licensed software available for a particular format, one might be able to use the codec free of charge.
Operating system support
Multimedia frameworks support
Technical details
Notes
* The latency listed here is the total delay (frame size, plus all lookahead) at the normal operating sample rate (typically 44.1 kHz).
*
Lossless compression
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistic ...
will have a
variable bit rate
Variable bitrate (VBR) is a term used in telecommunications and computing that relates to the bitrate used in sound or video encoding. As opposed to constant bitrate (CBR), VBR files vary the amount of output data per time segment. VBR allows ...
.
See also
*
Comparison of audio player software
The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play ...
*
Comparison of video player software
The following comparison of video players compares general and technical information for notable software media player programs.
For the purpose of this comparison, ''video players'' are defined as any media player which can play video, even ...
*
List of codecs
The following is a list of compression formats and related codecs.
Audio compression formats
Non-compression
* Linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM, generally only described as PCM) is the format for uncompressed audio in media files and it is al ...
**
List of open-source codecs
*
Comparison of video codecs
*
Comparison of video container formats
These tables compare features of multimedia container formats, most often used for storing or streaming digital video or digital audio content. To see which multimedia players support which container format, look at comparison of media players.
...
References
External links
Comparative test April, 2004EBU subjective listening tests on low-bitrate audio codecsHydrogenaudio comparison of lossless formats* Tsabary, Eldad.
" ''eContact! 9.4 — Perte auditive et sujets connexes / Hearing (Loss) and Related Issues'' (May 2007). Montréal:
CEC.
* Rodman, Jeffrey
VoIP to 20 kHz: Codec Choices for High Definition Voice Telephony (July, 2008)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Comparison Of Audio Codecs
Audio Codecs
An audio codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream (a codec) that encodes or decodes audio. In software, an audio codec is a computer program implementing an algorithm that compresses and decompres ...
Audio coding