What is the difference between compressed and uncompressed .wav files?
The WAV format is a container format for audio files in Windows.
The WAV file consists of a header and the contents. The header contains information about the size, duration, sampling frequency, resolution, and other information about the audio contained in the WAV file. Generally, after the header is the actual audio data.
Since WAV is a container format, the data it contains can be stored in various formats. One of which is uncompressed PCM, but it can also store ADPCM, MP3 and other formats, and can be read and written if an audio codec for the format is available.
The difference between compressed and uncompressed WAV files is that the data contained within the WAV file is either uncompressed raw audio samples, or it is compressed using an audio codec, in which case, it must be decompressed before it can be played back.
Further reading:
Wikipedia: Audio compression (data)
Wikipedia: WAV
Wikipedia: Codec
There's a great explanation here. The basic difference is that an uncompressed wave file has just the raw bits in it as they "appear". There is nothing done to compress or shrink them. A compressed wave file uses some sort of codec to shrink down the data before putting it in the file.
The difference between these two things is basically in the size of object, the compressed one might have low size compared to uncompressed basically the content are the same.
You have to be very careful when using the word "uncompressed" when talking about media.
Basically ALL digital media is compressed in some way. Audio, or video. No matter what it is, it is compressed in some way. Its intrinsic to converting from analog to digital.
The problem isn't really technical, its lingual.
People think that uncompressed means "nothing done to it" when in reality there really isnt any way you can do this. There is always some kind of compression done when you convert the analog signal coming out of the mic and going into a file...Its essential.
What uncompressed means is very high quality. And different "Uncompressed" codecs do things differently.
I know more about video codecs, so i will base my example in those.
Black Magic (A company that makes video Out Cards) has an Uncompressed Codec. Its very good. Makes Beautiful images.. But its not really "uncompressed". Sure its big. But compare it to a DPX of TIFF image sequence...and it aint that big, and is quite compressed. Its only 10 bit, but something like an OpenEXR image sequence is like 32 bit...and coming from film, that is still technically compressed. It has to be.
Its just the nature of the beast.
Related
I have tens of thousands of png images that are very similar to each other and I would like to archive them and compress them in the process. I am aware that png files can barely be compressed because it already is a compressed file format. In my case though, these are similar to each other which is why I thought that there may be some program out there that takes advantage of that. Any hints?
EDIT: example image: https://imgur.com/a/N9csZZH
Video compression also tries to take advantage of similar images to compress smaller. You should try a lossless video compression codec such as WebM.
I think it does not matter for PNG or other lossless formats how similar they appear for humans when you want to compress them (in a single tar for example). Only a few bits or pixels difference make each image mathematically a totally different object. When a high compression of zstd cannot do the trick, you won't need to search anymore. You cannot outperform entropy. There is a mathematical limit on compression, and zstd comes close to that.
I am using moviepy to generate MP4 files from sets of shorter clips, each with their own audio. The problem is that the resulting MP4 often has a very high dynamic range from one clip to the next and I would like to apply audio compression to make it easier on the ears. In Google I can only find results about audio information compression, but not about audio compression from the audio engineering perspective.
I would like to know if there is some way of doing this with moviepy, or with some other library. I have no issue with invoking (non interactive) command line utilities either.
Thank you.
sorry for this not being a programming question directly, but more indirectly as i try to batch convert audio files, which is proving difficult.
I have an audio file which i exported from a package. This audio file is of the RIFF WAVE format. As far as i have read up on headers, normal headers are 44 bytes long. Which contains the sub parts "fmt " and "data". However, this header shows all kind of weird junk, which i cannot actually place anywhere.
If anyone is an audio guru of sorts, please help me out on how to make this audio file accessible for most audio players? i do not care to lose some of the header data as long as it plays the actual content.
Here is a screenshot of my current header data unaltered:
Thanks in advance.
44Bytes is the size of a minimal Wav File header. The format allows for other data chunks in the header in addition to the Riff, fmt and data chunks.
It looks like you have some cue information in your file. This is not a problem, most audio players should accept a wav file with these chunks.
How to write cues/markers to a WAV file in .NET discusses how to add a cue chunk to a file.
http://www.sonicspot.com/guide/wavefiles.html covers some of the additional chunks a wav file can have.
Mike
Turns out this WAVE thing is just a container, and it actually contains a .ogg. I used ww2ogg 3rd party tool to get out these .ogg files as wave. Thanks for all the help though!
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV there is a table of wave files with different comperssion. You can just investigate in HEX editor a value of AudioFormat field of fmt chunk, to get a list of most common codecs used for compression.
Recently i have been trying to convert an audio file from one format to another through ffmpeg. i was trying to do some google but results made me a little confused about the difference between encoding and decoding an audio file and converting from one format to another.
Let me describe it this way: There are several different file formats for video files (sometimes also called "wrappers"). There are also several different codecs which can be used to encode (or compress) the audio and video. Audio and video use different codecs - and the encoded formats can be sorted in different file types/formats.
So when you talk about "encoding" vs. "converting" a couple of things come into play.
"Encoding" would be the act of taking audio/video and encoding them into a given codec(s). "Converting" implies having stuff in one format, but wanting it in another. There are two ways of looking at this:
Often called "repackaging" - this is when the video (for example) has been encoded correctly (let's say h264, with a bunch of parameters), but you want it in a different file-type - maybe it's an .AVI and you wanted it in an .MP4. This doesn't involve changing the actual video - just re-wraping the h264 stream in a new "wrapper", and is thus a fast operation.
Re-encoding. Let's say your audio was in a MP3 format, and you wanted it in an AAC format. This would require decoding the entire MP3 stream, and re-encoding it into AAC.
Obviously you can also do "1" and "2" together.
Refer Formats and Codecs for detailed information.
Hope it helps!
Does all audio format has a header for audio length (in second)?
If not, what kind of audio format has that information embedded in the header.
Thank you.
Not necessarily. Typical wav files will have a wave format chunk (WAVEFORMATEX if you're coding on Windows) which contains the sample rate and number of bits per sample. Most of the WAV files you'll tend to come across are in PCM format where you know that there is always the same number of samples per second and bits per sample, so from the size of the file and these values you can work out the duration exactly.
There are other types of WAV file though which may be compressed (though these are much rarer) and for those you'll need to use the 'average bytes/sec' field of the WAVE header to work out the length.
If you're using AIFF (largely used on macs) then this has similar data members in the header.
Getting the length from an MP3 file is more difficult -- some suggestions are in this other question