Say goodbye to the MP3 and hello to the future of audio codecs! As more and more manufacturers pull support for the widely known audio format, it’s time to explore what codecs are in the best position to become the new industry standard. In this article, we’ll dive into the basics of codecs, take a look at the big-name audio formats around today, and even take a speculative look into the coming decades of audio codecs.
Codecs, short for encode/decode, can be hardware or software that take the analog signal input and convert it to a digital format. There are three categories of codec: uncompressed, lossy, and lossless. Uncompressed audio files offer the highest quality and archival capability, but come at the cost of large file sizes and high latency. Lossy codecs throw away a considerable amount of information contained in the original sound waves, resulting in vastly smaller file sizes and lower latency playback. Lossless codecs stand as the middle ground between uncompressed and lossy, offering similar audio quality to uncompressed at significantly reduced sizes.
Since the first known audio recording in 1860, audio recording and playback technology has been in a constant state of flux. The 20th century introduced the era of professional sound recordists and engineers, transmission of audio across radio waves, massive advancements in audio quality and technology, and continued growth in the audio industry. The first ever digital audio format, the compact disc, was introduced in 1982 and sparked a new era of innovation for digital audio formats. Within a decade, recognizable modern codecs like MP3 and WAV were gaining traction.
Today, there are many audio codecs in heavy use across a myriad of industries. Some of the big-name codecs include AMR, FLAC, WAV, ALAC, AAC, DSD, and Opus. While each year brings new variations and flavors of new codec technology, what should we be looking for in a new standard for mass audio distribution?
In an ideal future audio codec, we’re looking for a codec that is secure, open-source and fully documented, has universal support, is fully lossless, multi-use, and has high resolution support. While most of these ideal parameters exist in codecs today, no single codec has united all of these specifications in a meaningful way.
In the coming decade, audio codecs that push the boundaries are going to become more commonplace. The underlying technology of encoding and decoding advances and evolves, merging with other sciences and disciplines as it goes. No matter what happens, the technological backbone of audio production and playback is past due for alignment. If current trends hold, there is a good chance the audio world will be unrecognizable in 10 years
Other Articles
