The following tables compare general and technical information for a variety of
audio coding format
An audio coding format (or sometimes audio compression format) is a content representation format for storage or transmission of digital audio (such as in digital television, digital radio and in audio and video files). Examples of audio coding ...
s.
For listening tests comparing the perceived audio quality of audio formats and codecs, see the article
Codec listening test.
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 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 a ...
.
See also
*
Comparison of audio player software
*
Comparison of video player software
*
List of codecs
**
List of open-source codecs
This is a listing of open-source codecs—that is, open-source software implementations of audio or video coding formats. Many of the codecs listed implement media formats that are restricted by patents and are hence not open formats. For exampl ...
*
Comparison of video codecs
*
Comparison of video container formats
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
An audio coding format (or sometimes audio compression format) is a content representation format for storage or transmission of digital audio (such as in digital television, digital radio and in audio and video files). Examples of audio coding f ...