When I was studying Cocoa Audio Queue document, I met several terms in audio codec. There are defined in a structure named AudioStreamBasicDescription.
Here are the terms:
1. Sample rate
2. Packet
3. Frame
4. Channel
I known about sample rate and channel. How I was confused by the other two. What do the other two terms mean?
Also you can answer this question by example. For example, I have an dual-channel PCM-16 source with a sample rate 44.1kHz, which means there are 2*44100 = 88200 Bytes PCM data per second. But how about packet and frame?
Thank you at advance!
You are already familiar with the sample rate defintion.
The sampling frequency or sampling rate, fs, is defined as the number of samples obtained in one second (samples per second), thus fs = 1/T.
So for a sampling rate of 44100 Hz, you have 44100 samples per second (per audio channel).
The number of frames per second in video is a similar concept to the number of samples per second in audio. Frames for our eyes, samples for our ears. Additional infos here.
If you have 16 bits depth stereo PCM it means you have 16*44100*2 = 1411200 bits per second => ~ 172 kB per second => around 10 MB per minute.
To the definition in reworded terms from Apple:
Sample: a single number representing the value of one audio channel at one point in time.
Frame: a group of one or more samples, with one sample for each channel, representing the audio on all channels at a single point on time.
Packet: a group of one or more frames, representing the audio format's smallest encoding unit, and the audio for all channels across a short amount of time.
As you can see there is a subtle difference between audio and video frame notions. In one second you have for stereo audio at 44.1 kHz: 88200 samples and thus 44100 frames.
Compressed format like MP3 and AAC pack multiple frames in packets (these packets can then be written in MP4 file for example where they could be efficiently interleaved with video content). You understand that dealing with large packets helps to identify bits patterns for better coding efficiency.
MP3, for example, uses packets of 1152 frames, which are the basic atomic unit of an MP3 stream. PCM audio is just a series of samples, so it can be divided down to the individual frame, and it really has no packet size at all.
For AAC you can have 1024 (or 960) frames per packet. This is described in the Apple document you pointed at:
The number of frames in a packet of audio data. For uncompressed audio, the value is 1. For variable bit-rate formats, the value is a larger fixed number, such as 1024 for AAC. For formats with a variable number of frames per packet, such as Ogg Vorbis, set this field to 0.
In MPEG-based file format a packet is referred to as a data frame (not to be
mingled with the previous audio frame notion). See Brad comment for more information on the subject.
Related
I'm trying to better understand how samples are aligned in the audio file.
Let's say we have a 2s audio file with sampling rate = 3.
I think there are three possible ways to align those samples. Looking at the picture below, can you tell me which one is correct?
Also, is this a standard for all audio files or does different formats have different rules?
Cheers!
Sampling rate in audio typically tells you how many samples are in one second, a unit called Hertz. Strictly speaking, the correct answer would be (1), as you have 3 samples within one second. Assuming there's no latency, PCM and other formats dictate that audio starts at 0. Next "cycle" (next second) also starts at zero, same principle like with a clock.
To get total length of the audio (following question in the comment), you should simply take number of samples / rate. Example from a 30s WAV using soxi, one of canonical tools used in the community for sound manipulation:
Input File : 'book_00396_chp_0024_reader_11416_5_door_Freesound_validated_380721_0-door_Freesound_validated_381380_0-9IfN8dUgGaQ_snr10_fileid_1138.wav'
Channels : 1
Sample Rate : 16000
Precision : 16-bit
Duration : 00:00:30.00 = 480000 samples ~ 2250 CDDA sectors
File Size : 960k
Bit Rate : 256k
Sample Encoding: 16-bit Signed Integer PCM
480000 samples / (16000 samples / seconds) = 30 seconds exactly. Citing manual, duration is "Equivalent to number of samples divided by the sample-rate."
I have recently read that uncompressed CD-quality audio has a bandwidth of 1.411 Mbps in case of stereo, does it mean a CD can be played to output audio at the rate of 1.411 Mbps, i mean does it play 1.411 Mbits of stereo audio every second..?
Two channels, each with 44,100 16-bit samples per second. That is 2 x 44100 x 16 = 1,411,200bps. That is 1.411Mbps. (176400 bytes per second)
Each second requires 1.411Mb. If you reduced the sample rate by half, you would double the number of seconds that can be recorded on a CD. Same if you dropped it to one channel, or 8-bit.
To imagine the impact of reducing the sample rate, lets suppose a technology that sampled every 1 second. This would be like pressing mute over and over, you would only catch parts.
Reducing the channel to one is easy to imagine, that's monaural.
Reducing to 8-bit is harder to describe. Imagine we reduced it to 1-bit. That would essentially mean the speaker has two states, fully centered and fully driven. That is not much variation. 16 bits gives 65536 positions.
I am trying to understand the meaning of "rate" as it applies to ALSA. It is always reported in units of Hz, and is often expanded in text as "sample rate". However, usage seems to indicate that it is actually frame rate or, possibly, byte rate of an audio stream.
The confusion may arise from what exactly is referred to by "sample". If each channel is sampling at a particular frequency, then that is the frame rate of the overall stream.
So, for example, if I have a rate of 44100 Hz on a 3-channel, 16-bit audio stream, am I processing 44,100 bytes per second, 88,200 bytes per second (44,100 samples per second), or 264,600 bytes per second (44,100 frames per second)?
Question rather related to [1] and [2], and was probably the motive behind [3].
Elaboration of ALSA's meaning of "frame" and "sample" at Introduction to Sound Programming with ALSA.
In ALSA, the rate is the frame rate.
Historically, this value is called "sample rate" because it is the rate at which samples arrive at each DAC. This view is correct only if each channel has its own DAC. Nowadays, most DAC chips have at least two channels, so the actual sample rate does not really occur anywhere in the system.
I am currently streaming audio (AAC-HBR at 8kHz) and video (H264) using RTP. Both feeds works fine individually, but when put together they get out of sync pretty fast (lass than 15 sec).
I am not sure how to increment the time stamp on the audio RTP header, I thought it should be the time difference between two RTP packets (around 127ms) or a constant increment of 1/8000 (0.125 ms). But neither worked, instead I managed to find a sweet spot. When I increment the time stamp by 935 for each packet It stays synchronized for about a minute.
AAC frame size is 1024 samples. Try to increment by (1/8000) * 1024 = 128 ms. Or a multiple of that in case your packet has multiple AAC frames.
Does that help?
Bit late, but thought of putting up my answer.
Timestamp on Audio RTP packet == the number of audio samples contained in RTP packet.
For AAC, each frame consist of 1024 samples, so timestamp on RTP packet should increase by 1024.
Difference between the clocktime of 2 RTP packets = (1/8000)*1024 = 128ms, i.e sender should send the rtp packets with difference of 128 ms.
Bit more information from other sampling rates:
Now AAC sampled at 44100hz means 44100 sample of signal in 1 sec.
So 1024 samples means (1000ms/44100)*1024 = 23.21995 ms
So the timestamp between 2 RTP packets = 1024, but
The difference of clock time between 2 RTP packets in rtp session should be 23.21995ms.
Trying to correlate with other example:
For example for G711 family (PCM, PCMU, PCMA), The sampling frequency = 8k.
So the 20ms packet should have samples == 8000/50 == 160.
And hence RTP timestamps are incremented by 160.
The difference of clock time between 2 RTP packets should be 20ms.
IMHO video and audio de-sync in android is difficult to fight if they are taken from different media recorders. They just capture different start frames and there is no way (as it seems) to find out how big de-sync is and adjust it with audio or video timestamps on flight.
I am developing a directshow audio decoder filter, to decode AC3 audio.
the filter is used in a live graph, decoding TS multicast.
the demuxer (mainconcept) provides me with the audio data demuxed, but does not provide timestamps for the sample.
how can I get/compute the correct timestamp of the audio?
I found this forum post:
http://www.ureader.com/msg/14712447.aspx
In it, a member gives the following formula for calculating the timestamps for audio, given it's format (sample rate, number of channels, bits per sample):
With PCM audio, duration_in_secs = 8 * buffer_size / wBitsPerSample /
nChannels / nSamplesPerSec or duration_in_secs = buffer_size /
nAvgBytesPerSec (since, for PCM audio, nAvgBytesPerSec =
wBitsPerSample * nChannels * nSamplesPerSec / 8).
The only thing you need to add is a tracking variable that tells you what sample number in the stream that you are at, so you can use it to offset the start time and end time by the duration (duration_in_secs) when doing linear streaming. For seek operations you would of course need to know or calculate the sample number into the stream.
Don't forget that the units for timestamps in DirectShow are typed as REFERENCE_TIME, a long integer or Int64. Each unit is equal to 100 nanoseconds. That is why you see in video filters the value 10,000,000 being divided by the relevant number of frames per second (FPS) to calculate timestamps for each frame because 10,000,000 equals 1 second in a REFERENCE_TIME variable.
Each AC-3 frame embeds data for 6 * 256 samples. Sampling rate can be 32 kHz, 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz (as defined by AC-3 specification Digital Audio Compression Standard (AC-3, E-AC-3)). The frames themselves do not carry timestamps, so you needs to assume continuous stream and increment time stamps respectively. As you mentioned the source is live, you might need to re-adjust time stamps on data starvation.
Each AC-3 frame is of fixed length (which you can identify from bitstream header), so you might also be checking if demultiplexer is giving you a single AC-3 frame or a few in a batch.