How Audio Compression Works

Ahhh.... a computer geek-related article... it's been too long... :-)

Todd, nice sources man! I've been reading through many of them after reading the article. Digital audio is just one of those things that I've always taken for granted. It's cool seeing how it all works.

Does anyone out there use Ogg Vorbis encoding? I've read some things that say it has superior sound quality to MP3, and then other things that say you can't really tell the difference. I rip all of my audio at 160kbs(MP3) and I can't tell any difference between that and my CDs. I'm just curious if there is actually anyone who can hear a difference.

Also, I've heard of people converting their MP3s to Ogg. Am I wrong, or is this taking an already lossy file and applying yet another lossy encoding to it? Wouldn't this process just degrade your existing archive? It seems to me that the only way to switch and maintain quality is to re-rip your entire collection using Ogg.

Todd, thanks for your informative article. It gave me a better understanding of how digital audio works. As a computer user (not a computer understander) this is quite interesting, although I admit I don't understand the nuts and bolts.

The main thing I learned is how they have used psychoacoustics to figure out what the ear doesn't need to hear, then eliminated unnecessary sounds to make audio files relatively small.

Quite interesting. The progress could obselete music compression, though, couldn't it? I am sure this compression is still quite necessary for video games and movies, as Matt M. has discussed, but I wonder:

Now that hard drive space is cheap and plentiful, and Internet connections can handle huge amounts of data, is file compression necessary anymore for music? Why not have the whole 35MB song? In a year or two they'll have a 1GB iPod, I'm sure.

Also, words like "Ogg Vorbis" and "lossy" make this article especially cool for a lover of words...eh, Ryan Kistner? Words are fun...