Lossless Audio Compression
Lossless audio compression allows one to preserve an exact copy of one's audio files, in contrast to the irreversible changes from lossy compression techniques such as Vorbis and MP3. Compression ratios are similar to those for generic lossless data compression (around 50–60% of original size), and substantially less than for lossy compression (which typically yield 5–20% of original size).

The primary use of lossless encoding are:

Archives

For archival purposes, one naturally wishes to maximize quality.

Editing

Editing lossily compressed data leads to digital generation loss, since the decoding and re-encoding introduce artifacts at each generation. Thus audio engineers use lossless compression.

Audio quality

Being lossless, these formats completely avoid compression artifacts. Audiophiles thus favor lossless compression.

A specific application is to store lossless copies of audio, and then produce lossily compressed versions for a digital audio player. As formats and encoders improve, one can produce updated lossily compressed files from the lossless master.

As file storage and communications bandwidth have become less expensive and more available, lossless audio compression has become more popular.

Formats

Shorten was an early lossless format; newer ones include Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), Apple's Apple Lossless, MPEG-4 ALS, Monkey's Audio, and TTA.

Some audio formats feature a combination of a lossy format and a lossless correction; this allows stripping the correction to easily obtain a lossy file. Such formats include MPEG-4 SLS (Scalable to Lossless), WavPack, and OptimFROG DualStream.

Some formats are associated with a technology, such as:

• Direct Stream Transfer, used in Super Audio CD
• Meridian Lossless Packing, used in DVD-Audio, Dolby TrueHD, Blu-ray and HD DVD

Difficulties in lossless compression of audio data

It is difficult to maintain all the data in an audio stream and achieve substantial compression. First, the vast majority of sound recordings are highly complex, recorded from the real world. As one of the key methods of compression is to find patterns and repetition, more chaotic data such as audio doesn't compress well. In a similar manner, photographs compress less efficiently with lossless methods than simpler computer-generated images do. But interestingly, even computer generated sounds can contain very complicated waveforms that present a challenge to many compression algorithms. This is due to the nature of audio waveforms, which are generally difficult to simplify without a (necessarily lossy) conversion to frequency information, as performed by the human ear.

The second reason is that values of audio samples change very quickly, so generic data compression algorithms don't work well for audio, and strings of consecutive bytes don't generally appear very often. However, convolution with the filter [-1 1] (that is, taking the first difference) tends to slightly whiten (decorrelate, make flat) the spectrum, thereby allowing traditional lossless compression at the encoder to do its job; integration at the decoder restores the original signal. Codecs such as FLAC, Shorten and TTA use linear prediction to estimate the spectrum of the signal. At the encoder, the estimator's inverse is used to whiten the signal by removing spectral peaks while the estimator is used to reconstruct the original signal at the decoder.

Evaluation criteria

Lossless audio codecs have no quality issues, so the usability can be estimated by

• Speed of compression and decompression
• Degree of compression
• Software and hardware support
• Robustness and error correction

Lossy Audio Compression

Lossy audio compression is used in an extremely wide range of applications. In addition to the direct applications (mp3 players or computers), digitally compressed audio streams are used in most video DVDs; digital television; streaming media on the internet; satellite and cable radio; and increasingly in terrestrial radio broadcasts. Lossy compression typically achieves far greater compression than lossless compression (data of 5 percent to 20 percent of the original stream, rather than 50 percent to 60 percent), by discarding less-critical data.

The innovation of lossy audio compression was to use psychoacoustics to recognize that not all data in an audio stream can be perceived by the human auditory system. Most lossy compression reduces perceptual redundancy by first identifying sounds which are considered perceptually irrelevant, that is, sounds that are very hard to hear. Typical examples include high frequencies, or sounds that occur at the same time as louder sounds. Those sounds are coded with decreased accuracy or not coded at all.

While removing or reducing these 'unhearable' sounds may account for a small percentage of bits saved in lossy compression, the real savings comes from a complementary phenomenon: noise shaping. Reducing the number of bits used to code a signal increases the amount of noise in that signal. In psychoacoustics-based lossy compression, the real key is to 'hide' the noise generated by the bit savings in areas of the audio stream that cannot be perceived. This is done by, for instance, using very small numbers of bits to code the high frequencies of most signals - not because the signal has little high frequency information (though this is also often true as well), but rather because the human ear can only perceive very loud signals in this region, so that softer sounds 'hidden' there simply aren't heard.

If reducing perceptual redundancy does not achieve sufficient compression for a particular application, it may require further lossy compression. Depending on the audio source, this still may not produce perceptible differences. Speech for example can be compressed far more than music. Most lossy compression schemes allow compression parameters to be adjusted to achieve a target rate of data, usually expressed as a bit rate. Again, the data reduction will be guided by some model of how important the sound is as perceived by the human ear, with the goal of efficiency and optimized quality for the target data rate. (There are many different models used for this perceptual analysis, some better suited to different types of audio than others.) Hence, depending on the bandwidth and storage requirements, the use of lossy compression may result in a perceived reduction of the audio quality that ranges from none to severe, but generally an obviously audible reduction in quality is unacceptable to listeners.

Because data is removed during lossy compression and cannot be recovered by decompression, some people may not prefer lossy compression for archival storage. Hence, as noted, even those who use lossy compression (for portable audio applications, for example) may wish to keep a losslessly compressed archive for other applications. In addition, the technology of compression continues to advance, and achieving a state-of-the-art lossy compression would require one to begin again with the lossless, original audio data and compress with the new lossy codec. The nature of lossy compression (for both audio and images) results in increasing degradation of quality if data are decompressed, then recompressed using lossy compression,