Which are widely used lossless audio codecs and supported formats?

Tech QnA
1

We are building a music streaming platform and wanted to stream some tracks in a lossless format. Since we are new to this field, want to know which are some widely used lossless audio codecs and formats.

2

The following are the most commonly used lossless audio codecs for digital music.

  1. FLAC: FLAC is a widely used audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. FLAC audio streams are supported by FLAC (.flac) and Matroska (.mkv) formats.
  2. ALAC: The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. ALAC audio streams are supported by MPEG-4 Part 14 (.m4a) and Core Audio Format (.caf) formats.

Here is the detailed article on this: Popular Codecs

3

When playing lossless audio files, do they maintain their original quality, when later converted?

4

It must be decompressed in order to be utilized, like all compressed files.

The main distinction between lossless compression and conventional compression is that lossless compression does not “lose” values in order to make the file smaller.

This indicates that the technique can recover all of the source data from the compressed files.

For instance, the mp3 codec will only select a portion of the original audio stream and ignore other frequencies (the ones that are inaudible).

If you play this type of file, some information is lost as a result.

5

Will the highly compressed FLAC require more bandwidth to decompress than an MP3 with a larger file size but no decompression?

6

The size of the compressed file is the only factor that affects bandwidth.

For FLAC and MP3, this should work well because the speed of the client CPU determines whether the file can be decompressed and played without stuttering. A highly compressed FLAC may not use more CPU resources than a less compressed FLAC because FLAC uses far more resources for compression than for decompression.

However, I believe that most browsers do not directly support playing FLAC files in the browser, so you might experience some difficulties.