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One of my big issues with downloading music online is that it is almost always in a lossy compressed format. I actually alluded to this in one of my previous editorials, iTunes, shmiTunes. I have come across legal downloads before that were in WAV (uncompressed) format or FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format, but practically all online downloads (e.g. iTunes, Amazon, Napster) are in MP3 or AAC format.
And what exactly is the difference between lossy and lossless compression? Well it’s quite simple. When an audio track is compressed to a format such as MP3 or AAC, data is lost - forever. There’s no turning back once it’s been compressed. Sure, you can convert it back to the original format if you want but there’s still no way to retrieve the data that was thrown out. On the other hand, lossless compression (e.g. FLAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey’s Audio) manages to compress the data in such a way as to not lose any information. It’s like Zipping a file - you’ve saved space but you can still unzip it to return the original file. My beef here isn’t with lossless compression; it’s with lossy compression. So to avoid confusion, from hereon whenever I say “compression” it’s meant in the lossy manner.
To me, compressing a musician’s audio track is roughly analogous to adding a little bit of white to every color in a painter’s palette, causing them to fade. The picture (or sounds) aren’t as bright or clear as before. This doesn’t have as noticeable of an effect on some types of music as it does on others. The more acoustically simple a song is, the more likely it can be compressed without a noticeable audible effect. What I mean by acoustically simple is that not a lot is going on at the same time - for instance a singer/songwriter like Jack Johnson. He just happened to pop in my mind, and I’ve got no problem with him, but most of his music I’ve heard is just him singing over his guitar with some percussion and subtle bass in the background. This is more compression-friendly than (again, first artist to pop into my head) Opeth - with their very wide dynamic range and complex layers that fill out the audible spectrum.
It turns out that 256kbps AAC compression (the iTunes standard) is actually pretty good at preserving the original fidelity of most songs, and it also helps if the original track to be compressed is a high quality recording. But I don’t think this nullifies anything I’ve said thus far.
If you have a digital music player with a limited amount of space and you want to fit your entire library on it, then understandably you’ll have a need for compressing your music - at least for that digital music player. But it just doesn’t make much sense to me to compress one’s entire music collection on their hard drive to accommodate for this in an age where computer storage space is so cheap (hell, my iPod has 120Gb, and it seems it’s hard to find a computer these days with less than 200Gb… even Terabyte storage is hardly a rarity). I always try to buy physical CD’s whenever possible, this way I can rip them to my hard drive in Apple lossless format, thus preserving the original quality of the recording.
Here’s a couple links I like that I think you should check out:
Analysis: Metallica’s Death Magnetic Sounds Better in Guitar Hero - A case study on how post-production compression can completely ruin an album.
SoundExpert.info - Cool site that compares the quality of different audio codecs at different bit rates.
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