Why to compress audio?
There is a simple reason to compress digital audio. High quality uncompressed digital audio
takes a lot of space. Just 1 minute of CD quality uncompressed audio takes around 10Mb and
needs around 50 min to be transmitted over a 28.8 modem! Digital audio coding tries to compress digital audio so as to take less space.
Modern perceptual audio coding techniques like MP3 (MPEG Layer 3), use the human ear perception of sound to
achieve compression factors of 12 with no pereptible loss of quality.
Audio compression consists of two parts.
1. The Encoding which transforms digital audio data into a highly compressed form called bitstream (or coded audio data).
2. The Decoding which reconstructs digital audio data from the bitstream. This is absoletely
necessary if you want to play the bitstream on your soundcard.
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