Audio compression (data)

Audio compression is a form of data compression designed to reduce the transmission bandwidth requirement of digital audio streams and the storage size of audio files(SONY VGN NR11Z/S battery). Audio compression algorithms are implemented in computer software as audio codecs. Generic data compression algorithms perform poorly with audio data, seldom reducing data size much below 87% from the original, and are not designed for use in real time applications(SONY VGN NR11M/S battery). Consequently, specifically optimized audio lossless and lossy algorithms have been created. Lossy algorithms provide greater compression rates and are used in mainstream consumer audio devices(SONY VGN NR11S/S battery).

In both lossy and lossless compression, information redundancy is reduced, using methods such as coding, pattern recognition and linear prediction to reduce the amount of information used to represent the uncompressed data(SONY VGP-BPS13B/Q Battery).

The trade-off between slightly reduced audio quality and transmission or storage size is outweighed by the latter for most practical audio applications in which users may not perceive the loss in playback rendition quality(SONY VGP-BPS13Q Battery). For example, one Compact Disc holds approximately one hour of uncompressed high fidelity music, less than 2 hours of music compressed losslessly, or 7 hours of music compressed in the MP3 format at medium bit rates(SONY Vaio VGN-FW21M Battery).

Lossless audio compression

Lossless audio compression produces a representation of digital data that can be expanded to an exact digital duplicate of the original audio stream. This is in contrast to the irreversible changes upon playback from lossy compression techniques such as Vorbis and MP3(SONY Vaio VGN-FW21L Battery). Compression ratios are similar to those for generic lossless data compression (around 50–60% of original size), and substantially less than for lossy compression, which typically yield 5–20% of original size.

Applications

The primary application areas of lossless encoding are(SONY Vaio VGN-FW21J Battery):

Archives

For archival purposes it is generally desired to preserve the source material exactly (i.e. at 'best possible quality').

Editing

Audio engineers use lossless compression for audio editing to avoid digital generation loss.

High fidelity playback

Audiophiles prefer lossless compression formats to avoid compression artifacts(SONY Vaio VGN-FW21E Battery).

Mastering of casual-use audio media

High quality master copies of recordings are used to produce lossily compressed versions for digital audio players. As formats and encoders improve, updated lossily compressed files may be generated from the lossless master(SONY Vaio VGN-FW11S Battery).

As file storage and communications bandwidth have become less expensive and more available, lossless audio compression has become more popular(SONY Vaio VGN-FW11M Battery).

Formats

Shorten was an early lossless format; newer ones include Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), Apple's Apple Lossless, MPEG-4 ALS, Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless (WMA Lossless), Monkey's Audio, andTTA. See List of Lossless Codecs for a complete list(SONY Vaio VGN-FW11 Battery).

Some audio formats feature a combination of a lossy format and a lossless correction; this allows stripping the correction to easily obtain a lossy file. Such formats include MPEG-4 SLS (Scalable to Lossless),WavPack, and OptimFROG DualStream(SONY VAIO VGN-FZ21J Battery).

Some formats are associated with a technology, such as:

Direct Stream Transfer, used in Super Audio CD

Meridian Lossless Packing, used in DVD-Audio, Dolby TrueHD, Blu-ray and HD DVD

Difficulties in lossless compression of audio data(SONY VAIO VGN-FZ21Z Battery)

It is difficult to maintain all the data in an audio stream and achieve substantial compression. First, the vast majority of sound recordings are highly complex, recorded from the real world. As one of the key methods of compression is to find patterns and repetition(SONY VAIO VGN-FZ21E Battery), more chaotic data such as audio doesn't compress well. In a similar manner, photographs compress less efficiently with lossless methods than simpler computer-generated images do. But interestingly, even computer generated sounds can contain very complicated waveforms that present a challenge to many compression algorithms(SONY Vaio VGN-FW31M Battery). This is due to the nature of audio waveforms, which are generally difficult to simplify without a (necessarily lossy) conversion to frequency information, as performed by the human ear(SONY Vaio VGN-FW465J Battery).

The second reason is that values of audio samples change very quickly, so generic data compression algorithms don't work well for audio, and strings of consecutive bytes don't generally appear very often. However, convolution with the filter [-1 1] (that is, taking the first derivative) tends to slightly whiten (decorrelate, make flat) (SONY Vaio VGN-FW139E/H Battery) the spectrum, thereby allowing traditional lossless compression at the encoder to do its job; integration at the decoder restores the original signal. Codecs such as FLAC, Shorten and TTA use linear prediction to estimate the spectrum of the signal. At the encoder(SONY Vaio VGN-FW139E Battery), the estimator's inverse is used to whiten the signal by removing spectral peaks while the estimator is used to reconstruct the original signal at the decoder.

Evaluation criteria

Lossless audio codecs have no quality issues, so the usability can be estimated by

Speed of compression and decompression(SONY Vaio VGN-FW31E Battery)

Degree of compression

Robustness and error correction

Product support

Lossy audio compression

Lossy audio compression is used in a wide range of applications. In addition to the direct applications (mp3 players or computers), digitally compressed audio streams are used in most video DVDs; digital television; streaming media on the internet(SONY Vaio VGN-FW17W Battery); satellite and cable radio; and increasingly in terrestrial radio broadcasts. Lossy compression typically achieves far greater compression than lossless compression (data of 5 percent to 20 percent of the original stream, rather than 50 percent to 60 percent), by discarding less-critical data(SONY Vaio VGN-FW32J Battery).

The innovation of lossy audio compression was to use psychoacoustics to recognize that not all data in an audio stream can be perceived by the human auditory system. Most lossy compression reduces perceptual redundancy by first identifying sounds which are considered perceptually irrelevant, that is, sounds that are very hard to hear(SONY Vaio VGN-FW31J Battery). Typical examples include high frequencies, or sounds that occur at the same time as louder sounds. Those sounds are coded with decreased accuracy or not coded at all.

If reducing perceptual redundancy does not achieve sufficient compression for a particular application, it may require further lossy compression. Depending on the audio source, this still may not produce perceptible differences(SONY VGN-CR42E battery). Speech for example can be compressed far more than music. Most lossy compression schemes allow compression parameters to be adjusted to achieve a target rate of data, usually expressed as abit rate(SONY VGN-CR42S battery). Again, the data reduction will be guided by some model of how important the sound is as perceived by the human ear, with the goal of efficiency and optimized quality for the target data rate. (There are many different models used for this perceptual analysis(SONY VGN-CR42Z battery), some better suited to different types of audio than others.) Hence, depending on the bandwidth and storage requirements, the use of lossy compression may result in a perceived reduction of the audio quality that ranges from none to severe, but generally an obviously audible reduction in quality is unacceptable to listeners(SONY VGN-CR42ZR battery).

Because data is removed during lossy compression and cannot be recovered by decompression, some people may not prefer lossy compression for archival storage. Hence, as noted, even those who use lossy compression (for portable audio applications(SONY VGN-CR41SR battery), for example) may wish to keep a losslessly compressed archive for other applications. In addition, the technology of compression continues to advance, and achieving a state-of-the-art lossy compression would require one to begin again with the lossless(SONY VGN-CR41E battery), original audio data and compress with the new lossy codec. The nature of lossy compression (for both audio and images) results in increasing degradation of quality if data are decompressed, then recompressed using lossy compression(SONY VGN-CR41S battery).

Coding methods

Transform domain methods

In order to determine what information in an audio signal is perceptually irrelevant, most lossy compression algorithms use transforms such as the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) to convert time domainsampled waveforms into a transform domain(SONY VGN-CR41Z battery). Once transformed, typically into the frequency domain, component frequencies can be allocated bits according to how audible they are. Audibility of spectral components is determined by first calculating a masking threshold, below which it is estimated that sounds will be beyond the limits of human perception(SONY VGN-CR31Z battery).

The masking threshold is calculated using the absolute threshold of hearing and the principles of simultaneous masking - the phenomenon wherein a signal is masked by another signal separated by frequency - and(SONY VGN-CR31E battery), in some cases, temporal masking - where a signal is masked by another signal separated by time. Equal-loudness contours may also be used to weight the perceptual importance of different components. Models of the human ear-brain combination incorporating such effects are often called psychoacoustic models(SONY VGN-CR31S battery).

Time domain methods

Other types of lossy compressors, such as the linear predictive coding (LPC) used with speech, are source-based coders. These coders use a model of the sound's generator (such as the human vocal tract with LPC) to whiten the audio signal (i.e., flatten its spectrum) prior to quantization(SONY VGN-CR31SR battery). LPC may also be thought of as a basic perceptual coding technique; reconstruction of an audio signal using a linear predictor shapes the coder's quantization noise into the spectrum of the target signal, partially masking it(SONY VGN-CR21SR battery).

Applications

Due to the nature of lossy algorithms, audio quality suffers when a file is decompressed and recompressed (digital generation loss). This makes lossy compression unsuitable for storing the intermediate results in professional audio engineering applications(SONY VGN-CR21Z battery), such as sound editing and multitrack recording. However, they are very popular with end users (particularly MP3), as a megabyte can store about a minute's worth of music at adequate quality(SONY VGN-CR21S battery).

Usability

Usability of lossy audio codecs is determined by:

Perceived audio quality

Compression factor

Speed of compression and decompression

Inherent latency of algorithm (critical for real-time streaming applications; see below)

Product support(SONY VGN-CR21E battery)

Lossy formats are often used for the distribution of streaming audio, or interactive applications (such as the coding of speech for digital transmission in cell phone networks). In such applications, the data must be decompressed as the data flows, rather than after the entire data stream has been transmitted(SONY VGN-CR11E battery). Not all audio codecs can be used for streaming applications, and for such applications a codec designed to stream data effectively will usually be chosen.

Latency results from the methods used to encode and decode the data. Some codecs will analyze a longer segment of the data to optimize efficiency, and then code it in a manner that requires a larger segment of data at one time in order to decode(SONY VGN-CR11M battery). (Often codecs create segments called a "frame" to create discrete data segments for encoding and decoding.) The inherent latency of the coding algorithm can be critical; for example, when there is two-way transmission of data, such as with a telephone conversation, significant delays may seriously degrade the perceived quality(SONY VGN-CR11S battery).

In contrast to the speed of compression, which is proportional to the number of operations required by the algorithm, here latency refers to the number of samples which must be analysed before a block of audio is processed(SONY VGN-CR11Z battery). In the minimum case, latency is 0 zero samples (e.g., if the coder/decoder simply reduces the number of bits used to quantize the signal). Time domain algorithms such as LPC also often have low latencies, hence their popularity in speech coding for telephony(SONY VGN-CR11SR battery). In algorithms such as MP3, however, a large number of samples have to be analyzed in order to implement a psychoacoustic model in the frequency domain, and latency is on the order of 23 ms (46 ms for two-way communication) (SONY VAIO VGN-NR110E/W battery).

Speech encoding

Speech encoding is an important category of audio data compression. The perceptual models used to estimate what a human ear can hear are generally somewhat different from those used for music(SONY VAIO VGN-NR110E/S battery). The range of frequencies needed to convey the sounds of a human voice are normally far narrower than that needed for music, and the sound is normally less complex. As a result, speech can be encoded at high quality using relatively low bit rates(SONY VAIO VGN-NR110E/T battery).

This is accomplished, in general, by some combination of two approaches:

Only encoding sounds that could be made by a single human voice.

Throwing away more of the data in the signal—keeping just enough to reconstruct an "intelligible" voice rather than the full frequency range of human hearing(SONY VAIO VGN-NR110E battery).

Perhaps the earliest algorithms used in speech encoding (and audio data compression in general) were the A-law algorithm and the µ-law algorithm.

History

A literature compendium for a large variety of audio coding systems was published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), February 1988(SONY VAIO VGN-NR11S battery). While there were some papers from before that time, this collection documented an entire variety of finished, working audio coders, nearly all of them using perceptual (i.e. masking) techniques and some kind of frequency analysis and back-end noiseless coding(SONY VAIO VGN-NR11Z battery). Several of these papers remarked on the difficulty of obtaining good, clean digital audio for research purposes. Most, if not all, of the authors in the JSAC edition were also active in the MPEG-1 Audio committee(SONY Vaio VGN-CR11S/L battery).

The world's first commercial broadcast automation audio compression system was developed by Oscar Bonello, an Engineering professor at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1983(SONY Vaio VGN-CR11S/P battery), using the psychoacoustic principle of the masking of critical bands first published in 1967, he started developing a practical application based on the recently developed IBM PC computer, and the broadcast automation system was launched in 1987 under the name Audicom(SONY Vaio VGN-CR11S/W battery). 20 years later, almost all the radio stations in the world were using similar technology, manufactured by a number of companies.