Glossary → Audio fundamentals
Audio fundamentals
Lossy compression
Lossy compression shrinks audio by permanently discarding information judged least audible — the approach of MP3, AAC and Opus — reaching a tenth of uncompressed size or less.
Modern codecs are perceptually transparent for speech at modest bitrates, and speech recognizers are robust to sane lossy encoding. The one rule is to avoid repeated lossy re-encodes, which stack artifacts.
Related terms
Lossless compressionLossless compression (FLAC, ALAC) shrinks audio while preserving it bit-for-bit — decoding restores the exact …
BitrateBitrate is the amount of data used per second of audio, in kilobits per second (kbps) — the main quality dial …
CodecA codec (coder-decoder) is the algorithm that encodes audio for storage or transmission and decodes it for pla…