TechStuff Listens In On Sound Files

Show us what you're made of. Let us know how creative you are. You can go to www dot how stuff works dot com, slash upgrade your tech and upload those photos. Now we want to see what you got. Get in touch with technology with tech stuff from house stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone, and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com. Standing across from me. Actually it's sort of cat corner as usual.

As senior writer Jonathan the pre show puns they burn guys. You you should be thankful that you missed out on that one. What a gem that was it. I'm reeling is what I am. You know, I love puns, but Chris takes his love of puns to a level that I thought was unattainable by humans, and yet somehow he has managed it. You all take that as a compliment. That's neither here nor there for this particular podcast, other than the fact that you guys know we love puns. Waca, waca.

And we're gonna talk today about sound files and why there are so many different why are there so many sound files, never mind sound file formats, and also, um, just kind of get into the particulars of various popular sound files. Maybe we'll talk about some of the more rare ones that you can encounter too. Um and and if this any of this sounds familiar, then you're probably a long time listener of tech stuff. We did an episode many many, many moons ago on the MP three format.

I was just a kid then, yeah, boy, when we had stars in our eyes and and and uh and lunch and our belly. Uh. That's back when we used to record in the afternoon. Anyway, so we do this in the mornings now. We want to talk about different types of sound files. And before we get into specifics, uh, talk a little bit about categorizing sound files. There's really a couple of different ways you can look at it.

One is digitized sound files versus synthesized sound files. Now, digitizes where you're taking you're you're creating sound files out of bits, out of zeros and ones that are little tiny pieces of information that essentially tell a speaker how to move in and out to create whatever the sound is. And there are a lot of different factors that go into determining how well the speaker can recreate any particular sound. Basically involves how much information you're able to put within

that particular kind of file uh and uh. For one of the more most popular sound files of this type is the wave type of sound file. And so as a digital sound file or digitized version of a sound file, um and so, there are a lot of different things that make up the quality of that sound. Synthesized is a little bit different. Synthesized is a type of sound file where the file contains information in it that says something along the lines of play this note as if

it were played by this instrument. So play a c as if it were on a tenor saxophone, right, and then the software itself, and the hardware is able to take that instruction set and uh send out the appropriate information. So it's a little bit different. It's not looking at zeros and ones and saying, all right, move the speaker out this much this quickly in order to um create this sound. It's more like, all right, here here's what here's the sound we have to make. Now let's do

what needs to be done to make it. So it's it's kind of two different perspectives. And a very very popular version of the synthesized type of sound file would be the mini yes files and mini files are uh not just for PCs that those were really I mean the mini files really made so that synthesizers could communicate

with each other. Um so no, no, I was just going to say, so, if you're thinking of a digitized, digitized uh sound file, you might play an actual guitar and record it into a digital file and play it back, versus uh plugging um a USB keyboard into your computer, uh, you know, and using software and saying, oh, I want this to sound like a grand piano and hitting a c and it you know, makes the approximation of that sound, rather than taking an actual instrument and digitizing it right,

and in general, a digitized file is going to be larger than the synthesized files. Synthesized files, like I said, are just giving general instructions to recreate a sound. Digitized has to hold all that information in it. Now, um, you could have a pretty small digitized version of a sound file, but the means that you don't have as much information there, which means the sound you're going to get is not necessarily going to be that um nice. The fidelity will not be high low fi actually um

although it is not the same. It reminds me of the differences between h vector and raster graphics files. You know, with the with a photo being made up of individual pixels and um, you know vector file line drawings being uh more manipulative. You know, you can do more with it, and it has less information in it because it can

be manipulated like that. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of just the just the very basic analog versus digital, right, because with analog you've got this continuous signal that can

change and pitch and in volume. But it's it's you know, if you look at a an analog like a sound wave from an analog source, it's this curvy wave that you know that that's unbroken, right, whereas a digital one is either on or off, and you know, it's a little more complicated than that, but it looks like I feel like it, it looks different from an analog sound wave. So um, those two different approaches define the characteristics of

that sound file. Now, the other big way of dividing up the sound files, and the one that I think is UH is one of those that most people have heard about, UM, and it's mainly applies to the digitized form I means synthesize as well, but digitized is really where a lot of the sound file discussion revolves around uncompressed, lossless, and lossy file formats. So let's talk a bit about

what those means. So uncompressed it is probably the easiest, sure, because it just means it's a sound file that doesn't you haven't compressed it at all, You haven't lost any information. Whatever information was in that sound file UH at the very beginning, or or the sound being recorded into some sort of device, is is replicated as close as possible, depending upon the the abilities of that file format. Yeah, if you if you take a musical instrument. Um, you know,

like a like an actual musical instrument. And uh, let's say a guitar string. You luck the string and it's going to play reverberated a certain frequency. UM. But there there is more to it than that, I mean, is it uh slows it starts to to change somewhat. Um. Some guitars hold pitch better than others, and you can kind of hear it fluctuate somewhat. Um. But as you play a song or you know, with a band or an orchestra for example, UM, you're going to hear a

richness of sound if you're right there. Um. And that's because there are It covers a wide range of frequencies um. In some cases frequencies that we can't actually hear. But sometimes those high frequencies we can't hear interact with what one another and create harmonics that we can here. And sometimes it's it's something that you can feel, um, and that that adds to the depth of the music. Like well, I mean we've we've sort of talked about bone conduction

before too. UM. So what what the compression does essentially is determined whether or not you know, it should include all the different frequencies and the amount of compression that someone would use to create a file basically says well, I'm going to cut out this much of the info in this file. Um, and you can dial that up or down as as you decide to compress that file. Right, So a lossless file would be compressed, but would not You don't lose any of the actual information there. So um,

it's the compression level. Your mileage may vary. You might it might not be a significantly smaller file than an uncompressed file, but it does mean that you have found ways to try and uh minimize that file size. For one, here's an example. In an uncompressed file, Let's say that

you have a minute of silence between sounds. All right, An uncompressed file is going to encode that minute of silence the same way it would as if there were sound present, So that file size is going to reflect the the total amount of time of the recording, not just the time when something is actually happening. A lossless one may encode that same file, but use a an algorithm that that doesn't encode that minute of silence, so

that that makes the overall file size smaller. M okay, Um, yeah, that that's you think about that that could result in a in a huge savings of information because you know, if you're you're trying to capture the depth of sound that is present with an entire orchestra and there's literally nothing there, then you've recorded a lot of nothing and that that takes up space. So then then you have the lossy formats. And this is what you were kind of an into with the whole the frequencies that are

outside the range of human hearing. Um, I wanted to explain what it was there that you would lose. Yeah, ideally, with a lossy format, the only things you lose are things that we could not perceive. So, in other words, any frequency that's below or above the range of human hearing, which is about twenty hurts to twenty killer hurts. Anything outside of that range of frequencies, UH is outside the

range of normal human hearing that hurts and UH. And so the the idea is that if there are any frequencies that are either above or below that range, those would get cut out, they would not be encoded in the file, and that would decrease the size. There are other ways that lossy formats tend to compress files, and there are things that you can choose to do when you're creating a lossy file format that will affect the

quality of the recording to some extent. Yeah, and there are a lot of different factors, and I'll talk about them in just a second, but Lawsy definitely has more of a stigma against it because the idea is that, you know, there are ties where you will listen to music and you think, wow, that that really does sound like it's a lot different from that that that live performance I saw. Like you you might go to a live performance and then get a digital copy of that

live performance. Some bands do that, you know, where they'll record their their shows and then the fans can end up buying a digital copy of something that they saw, and depending on the encoding, it may not really reflect

what you experienced. For instance, there might not be a four pound guys standing next to you stepping on your toe every five minutes, um right as so they might be giants show owen too anyway, So the idea there being that that depending on how they're encoding it, you might not have as rich a listening experience as you otherwise would with an uncompressed or lossless format UM. Now, the way that the audio is compressed and stored is called a codec. Now, codec and file type are two

different things. You should not confuse the two. It's easy to to get confused. But Kodak is Uh. They are related, but not the same. Right. There's some some codex and file sizes that tend to go together all the time, but they are not one and the same. And some of the things that can affect how that sound file will sound include things like the sample rate. Sample rate

is when you're converting analog audio into digital information. Uh, you use an analog to digital converter or a d C, and this is what takes that signal, that continuous signal and converts it into a bunch of zeros and ones and uh, it kind of chops the signal up into segments and does this conversion. So the higher the frequency is of your sample rate, in general, the closer to the original sound it's going to be. Uh CD audio. If you guys, you may not remember these, There were

these things called compact discs. I have to I remember when compact discs were a new thing. I remember thinking this will never take off, and let me listen to back cassette um or vinyl album or wax cylinder or this bard that I hired to follow around and sing sagas to wire recorder. Yeah anyway, Uh so the CD audio is something like forty four point one killer hurts as I recall something like that. That that's the frequency for their sample rate. Um. And in general, you want

to sample rate that's about um. Well, that that's high enough that you're going to get a good experience when you get playback. And depending on your application, you may not need a very high sample rate. So, for example, for telephone uh fidelity, when you're speaking on the phone to someone else, that simple rate is much you know, and we're talking about digital phones. They're doing the same thing.

They're converting an analog signal into a digital information and transmitting it and then decoding it and putting it back into analog. Uh, their simple rate is much lower. Because in general, we've become used to the idea that a telephone quality conversation does not need to have high fidelity. And if you've ever spoken on the telephone with me, you know the quality of my conversations is quite low. Well, um, that doesn't really have that much to do with this

sound quality. Oh, you're right, You're right, I got off on a little tangent there. Well, no, if you if you take a I'm speaking in general terms here, but if you take a podcast file, maybe a half hour podcast file, um from an audio store, and you buy a five minute song from that same audio store, that the song is probably going to be a larger file because there is a greater range of sound um that they are trying to preserve to create that audio file

than to to or that music file. Then for the voice because um, you know, the voice files don't really need to convey the same range of frequencies to just and still sound good and beyond the sample rate. There are other factors that also informed the quality of a particular sound file and digitized sound file. The resolution, it's just you know, sound files can have resolution, just like an image file. It's um. Essentially, it comes into the how how the a d C measures the incoming um

signal voltage and converts it into digital code. So the accuracy of that is dependent upon how many bits are you in the process. So in other words, the more data you include about the sound, the more accurately you can recreate the sound when you play it back. So in other words, if and this makes sense, it's it's just like any other kind of experience where you're trying to recreate something that you've seen. The more data you have,

the better chances you have of recreating it accurately. So if I'm in a room and you were to give me a stone tablet and a chisel and a hammer and tell me to take notes, those notes would be very very limited. If you gave me a pen and paper, there would be a little bit better. If you gave me a a computer with a working keyboard unlike mine, um, I would be even better. If you gave me a

keyboard like mine, it would probably be back to stone tablet. Anyway, that's another part that determines another factor that determined sound quality, and then data rates. This is really anyone who's converted any sound file into P three format or format similar to the m P three format knows about data rates. You usually you have a choice of what what UH data rates speed you can pick to UH convert a sound file into an MP three, and generally higher is better.

It means that you're going to have a higher fidelity experience. It also means the file size that's going to be larger. And uh uh, I'd say, you know, a lot of the sound files you would find, at least until fairly recently, we're around the nice six kill a bit per second or kill a bit per second range. We're starting to see that get bumped up now, which is nice. Um. Those are a lot of the cloud services have higher bit data rates for their encoding. Um, and in general

that should translate to a higher fidelity experience. Yeah, I mean you get right down to it. Well, frankly, everybody here is sound differently, and that's that sounds strange probably um, probably because you're hearing it differently than I am. Now, um, because you know, it sort of depends on the range

of hearing. Now, I say that that kids can hear a different range of sound than adults, um, and that uh you know, they have studies that have been done that that show that women hear different ranges of sound than men do. And you know they're there are always people who, um, listen to a Vinyl record for example, and they'll they'll say, Wow, that sounds so much better

than a CD. And then other people prefer the sound of C d s, which typically are are compressed uh pretty pretty significantly at least too to get it to uh, you know, the the audio file that that you hear on the on the disc. Um. So you know, everybody is different. Let's let's use that as a caveat. But um, it's important to note that in general, the file size the the information. You want more information encoded on there because it's going to provide a richer sound, But it

does depend on the Kodec used to to create the file. Um. And that is that is one of those things that to paraphrase the song, it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. Um. And I think that's probably where we're getting ready to go. But uh yeah, I mean you you when MP three's became the popular standard, uh, the popular bit rate for those was you know, k um and um. You know that a lot of people who can hear the difference in in sound files would say,

you know, that's crummy. It sounds terrible, but it was acceptable for a lot of people, acceptable enough that they would say, you know what, I'm willing to fork over money for an MP three player, or I'm willing to listen to my music at this bit rate. And now that we've become more sophisticated in our tastes and have more bandwidth available to us both an MP three player audio players, let's say that, and UH in our internet connections, UM,

we're having more choices available to us. We also had an era where the speakers that were available to us, unless we were really spending a lot of money on our our computer systems or what you know, our music player systems, we're not really capable of playing at a high enough fidelity for it to make a huge difference.

So you could even have two versions of the same file, one recorded at a much faster data rate, and have a hard time telling the difference, simply because the hardware you were using to play back the music wasn't capable of capturing those subtle differences or even not so subtle differences. Because let's let's face it, some of the speakers that came out years ago, we're pretty well they were definitely sub standard compared to some of the ones you can

get today. Not saying that today's speaker are, you know, the height of human achievement. We definitely have a huge range on the market, and UH and it's not always a case if you get what you pay for either. That's a totally different podcasts how Uh, it just means that that it wasn't as important back then. And also we should talk about why there are so many different types, so we know the ones people tend to hear about a lot are wave files, uh MP three's, UM, A

A C files for some folks. Uh, there's the A lack files A L A C sometimes flak for a few people out there anyway, um, and then there are a lot of other ones, but those are those are some of the ones that are the most popular, But there are If you were to look at a list of every type of audio file that has had any sort of traction out there, it would be incredibly long. I mean, the different types of them are. Um, there's

easily easily over a hundred. Now some of those are project files, not audio file formats, and the project files really just have information about an audio file as opposed to having any actual audio information in it itself. But you know, you might say, well why are there so many?

And there are several different reasons for that. One is that as time has gone on, we've created more sophisticated computers and sound chips that are able to do more than earlier ones, so they were suddenly able to support a greater number of features. But the older file formats didn't necessarily have that built in, and so new file formats emerged that we're able to take advantage of the technical abilities of the new stuff that we were building.

In some cases, there were file formats that were designed to work specifically with particular types of hardware. So if you were back if you had a computer back in the old days of the of the sound card boom, you know, when you had like Ruland and sound Blaster and all of those coming out, you might be familiar that there were certain files file types that could play on some cards but not on others. And this could

get really frustrating as a user. I remember going out and looking at computer games and looking at a computer game and saying, Wow, I'm not gonna have a very good experience with this because, uh, the sound file type that they went with was for a different sound card than the one I had, So I'm going to have the more basic, you know, array of sounds that is sort of the baseline for this game. I'm not gonna have any of the advanced stuff because they decided to

back this other sound card. So there was a division in the market, right, I mean, there wasn't a lot of standards. There was no standardized format, so you had a lot of proprietary formats, and we still have those as well. There's still some proprietary formats, some of which are actually used fairly widely. I think most people try to get away from those because it's UM. It limits you,

it limits what you can play that file back on. UM. It also means that a lot of these proprietary file formats were designed so that you could have digital rights management built into the file format. So DRM, that's uh, you know, that's something else that determined the different types of files. Another is the change in how we listen to these files, all right, so UM listening to it on a computer or on a on a sound device,

you can have a certain type of file format. Back in the earlier days of the Internet, when you want to listen to music that was going to be coming over uh an Internet connection, you couldn't use those file formats. They just the files were too big, So that meant that you had to design a different standard to be able to stream music, usually at a lower fidelity, and uh so that the file size was manageable, and that you could have a specific type of software to play

back those files, so things like real audio. Do you remember the old real audio days right? Unfortunately? Yeah, dark times before the empire. So yeah, there are there's a lot of different reasons. So some of the reasons are technological, some are based upon the limitations of that technology somewhere kind of you know, let's face it, some of them

are a little greedy. These are you know someone Some file types were designed by companies saying if we design the hardware and we designed the file type, we lock people into this because they won't be able to go and buy some other piece of hardware because their hardware is not gonna be able to play our file. Yeah. And then there were some that were sort of political, as in, uh, I'm thinking specifically of og vorbis, which was was created as an open standard. Are you down

with O g G? You know me? Um, mostly because of the MP three file format taking off, but um the codec used to create it. The primarily the Fraudenhofer UH Institute that came up with the the MP three file standard. Um, the CODEK you had to license that. Um, so if you wanted to create software that would make MP three files, you were supposed to license the official

codec to do that. And then the people who started uh OG, we're saying, you know what, if you want to use our standard to create our audio files, then you can do with it what you like, open source, unlicensed. So the that was an attractive alternative for for people who didn't want to have to, you know, go through the red tape of an official licensed piece of software. Not that that ended up being much of a problem in the long run, but you still and then there's

still a license fee that has to be paid. But but yeah, it was so I had so much weight behind it that that people just went with it. Yeah, So that was, um, you know, that's a good example. But then let's let's go ahead. We'll touch on MP three. Even though we have done a full episode about m P three's before, it would just take a lot of digging for you guys can get that episode. It's hard not to mention it anyway. I mean, it is sort

of the pound gorilla in the room. Yeah, And so IMPEG stands for moving picture Experts Group, which is exactly what you would expect out of a sound file. Uh. It's which was working under the direction of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electro Technical Commission. Yeah and uh. The idea was that they wanted to create a standard to avoid this proprietary problem. Oops. Um. Yeah, Actually, it's the funny thing is it's not like it's it's

not MPEG three, it's MPEG one layer three. Just complicating things. And then there and there are a lot of different UM file extensions that fall under the impact audio form. It's not you know, MP three is one of the

more common ones, but it's not the only one. Um. It's a lossy format, so you do end up losing data when you convert to MP three as part of the compression, and the CODEC you use to create your MP three sort of helps determine what it is that it loses because it has a different algorithm behind it. Right and uh, and again you change depending on the data rate. You can make the file larger, smaller, and

thus have more or less information about the sound file. Um. Another thing we should something else I should have pointed out. With the different types of sound files, some of them support metadata, some do not, and metadata turned out to be really important. UH. Metadata of course, is information about other information. So metadata for a sound file might include things like the artist's name, the album name, other information. It could also include things like who uploaded it, who

who encoded it. It all depends on the code dec it all depends on the file type. So some of these file types are essentially digital fingerprints. Like if you were to download one of these files and then you were actually open up the code and look at it, you could potentially, depending on the file type, determine who it was that originally UM encoded it and uploaded it, or at least who encoded it. You might not know who who uploaded it UM, so that's kind of an

interesting thing. And not all the files, of course, support metadata, but a lot of really popular ones do because it's a useful way to get information in UH in a music um management software. So that way, because you think about music management software like iTunes, that's one of the most popular ones, so it's easy to talk about UH. iTunes has all the information about the artists, the album, the song title, all that kind of stuff, and that

lets you sort your albums through various ways. UM, without the metadata, you wouldn't have that information. You would have the name of the file and what kind of what type of file it was, and that that would be about it. So that's something else that I wanted to point out. So, so along with MP three, you know, you've got the wave files, which are uh again pretty

pretty popular. That's a format that was created by Microsoft and IBM and it kind of takes and it creates an arbitrary sampling rate uh and a number of channels in the sample size. UM. It's uh one of the first audio file types that were developed for the PC UM and it's defined as being lossless. So this is the wave files are lossless files. They tend to be much larger than MP three files. Uh, not necessarily as large as an uncompressed version of that file, but still

pretty big. And UM. Yeah, so those are the those are two of the main ones. But then and you can have either digitized or synthesized wave files. And then there's uh the the A C files UM, which again another lossy compression format. UM. That's depending on who you ask. I've heard people say that they prefer a C over MP three's and that they think a C compression leads

to less loss of fidelity. Yeah, yeah, they were. Apple adopted it for for the iTunes store a long time ago as the music format, and you know, they the company really pushed it as being a superior format to the MP three. UM. You know, again it depends on whom you ask, um, but you know, they then they

started with a tight k uh digit digitization rate. Hey, y set it UM, and you know they they semi recently, it's not recent recent, but it's UM over the past while here they've they've upgraded that UM too, so you know that that has been a thing. But um, yeah, some people feel that that A A C is a better um. You know, an A C at K sounds better than an MP three at K encoding. UM. Another

Apple file format. There was an earlier one developed by Apple as the Audio Interchange File Format or ai f F. Yeah, basically a long time ago. I would say, in the mid nineties, if you ran across a wave file, you'd say, oh, that's a Microsoft file, And if you ran across an A I F you'd say, oh, well, that's a Macintosh file. It's not so clear cut these days, but they, you know, it was sort of the this is what we use on our operating system and that's what they use on

their operating system kind of thing. Right. And then there was the Apple Lossless Audio Codec or a L A C A LACK uh. And that was one that in Apple kind of surprised folks by by converting it into open source and royalty free, uh, which for people who were big followers of Apple was something of a shock.

They and and ALAC file or Apple Lossless Audio Codec file is stored in an MP four container with the file extension of M four A. So uh, if you see an M for a file, then that's that's a potential uh pointer that that's what you're looking at in a LACK file. Um. But there's so many more. Uh. There's like A said, there was FLAK, which is the free lossless audio codec very similar to a LACK except that it's um it was started off as open source

and free. UM. Yeah, A lot of people who are are real audio files and and still download music because a lot of them won't because of the lossy nature of a lot of the audio files online. UM. A lot of people prefer the FLAK files. And I've seen artists who sell their music files from their websites offer UH MP three or A A C and and FLACK as an option, so you know, if you want to pay a couple of extra dollars, you can get the

fancy hi fi audio files. Well, there's the Sun Audio format, which is dot AU UH that was specifically created for Unix systems. That's another reason why there's so many different file types out there is because there's some that were

designed with specific operating systems in mind. UH. There's Windows Media Audio O w M A UM again developed as a competing my guess standard is the wrong word, but a competing file format tow MP three and UH designed to play in within the Windows Media Player, and UM UH supposedly had a much more efficient compression algorithm than

MP three. Also designed with DRM protection in mind, and that was one of the other reasons why Microsoft was really interested in developing its own file format sound file format beyond wave UM was to try and protect intellectual property. Yeah yeah, yeah. Basically, DRM is just another layer of information encoded. It's it's essentially metadata, but it's metadata that explains UM who essentially who owns the file. So if if Jonathan buys a song from um, you know, a

an online music store that has DRM embedded in it. It It will say, well, this this belongs to Jonathan. UM, he paid for it, and he is allowed to listen to it on his registered machines, but only on his registered machines, or um, you know, it might say he's allowed to listen to this file for free for three

weeks and three weeks only. And so when the audio player tries to go back and says, oh wait, it's past three weeks, you know, it might disappear or twenty plays, or or he's allowed to loan it to somebody that that's um, that's how they determine those uh, those free preview things will say oh, yes, you can download this and listen one time for free, and you can listen to the entire song. And then the d r M

information encoded in the track. UM, when the player tries to read the file again, and it will, it will check the information, It says, oh, well, it has been played one time and therefore I will not allow you to play it again. Sucker, go away. So all of these, all of these files are all meant to do essentially the same thing. It's again, just depending depended upon the equipment you're using and the software you're using, and whether or not it's an open approach or if it's a

proprietary approach. Uh. You know, there's nothing necessarily that says one sound file is better than another, uh, because it all depends on what you value. Do you value a manageable file size? If storage is a is an issue, then that might be very important to you. Do you value as close to the original performance as possible, like that experience. If so, then the quality, the actual sound

quality is going to be the most important. UM. Do you use a specific type of device, because that will also help determine which file size is best or file type is best for you. Uh. So, you know you can't I don't think you can just necessarily come out and say, ah, you know, AC files are better than MP three's, period always, etcetera. It all depends on your

particular situation and the equipment that you have. UM. I guess one other thing we can talk about before we sign off is the fact that there there has been for a long time, for years, really uh, a discussion within the music industry about how the MP three file format, in particular, because it's so popular and so dominant has changed the way music sounds because there's a discussion that it kind of flattens the highs and the lows of of what you can get out of a piece of music.

And so a lot of the music is starting to sound similar to each other because you can't reached those dynamics that you could without that you know know, lossy compression format. That is part of it. There's also a human element involved in that, and it has to do with the

way the music is produced. UM, because I have seen examples of songs that were produced antal and you know, in a complete analog environment before it became so popular to have louder songs recorded on digital equipment in digital and and reproduced on digital equipment. And in a lot of cases the materials that now that that loudness is being has become somewhat of a priority. UM. A lot of the music is reproduced loud, and then that the high end and low end are trimmed off to create

a digital file. So it's almost in some cases like a solid block of sound and in the highs and lows, and there is less dynamic range. UM. And again this is this, this is a human element element, and you know what people are listening for? What do I want from? Uh? This new CD that I'm going to buy? So I want to crank it up in my car and go driving down the boulevard and have people notice who I am and associate this music with me. Um. The answers

always yes, yeah, yeah, um, polka all the time? People Okay, funny, that's also the disco sound. Um but um but yeah, I mean, And this is a this can be a problem, you know, because then you don't have the same you don't get that dynamic range, and you say, well, is this something that's important to me or not? Again, it's it's partially a matter of choice, but it's also partially what the market is asking for, and people are producing

and putting out to the market as well well. And there's also the argument, and this becomes a circular argument, but there's also the argument that the equipment that people are using to listen to music is incapable of distinguishing some of the subtleties that we might associate with earlier types of music. Therefore, since the playback equipment cannot handle it, why would you put it in there? Why bother to do?

That when you can take this other route, which is exactly what the equipment can handle, and that thus you also get to a more homogenized sound across various industries or various genres. I guess I should say. Is it also pasteurized? It can be, It can be pasteurized rarely. Do you have vitamin D added? Yeah, there's a lot of vitamin D deficiency in the music industry. So it's a scandal. It's about it's poised to break wide open. Yeah,

there's also florid. Yeah. Well, fortunately they did lick the scurvy problem, so that was good. Not literally that would be gross. So anyway, my earbuds are wet. Is there anything else in particular? You want to talk about sound files? I mean, like I said, there are literally hundreds of different types of sound files, some of which are really obscure and haven't been used in more than a decade

except on legacy systems. Yeah. The we had we had a couple of people write us in and ask us to do this, and I'm wondering if we actually, uh, this is not the kind of thing that we can wrap up in a nice package and tie off because

it is such a diverse thing. And it's not it's probably not going to end because even once we standardize, we get closer to standardizing on maybe two or three audio standards, um, somebody will still be working on coming up with a better way to reproduce sound, and thus we'll introduce a new file format for us to consider, right, And and plus just with new equipment coming out, things like video game systems, like handheld video game systems, they

have their own proprietary sound file extensions too, like the Nintendo ones have their own proprietary sound file extensions. So and then we still have people going back and trying to reproduce the eight bit sound, right. So yeah, it's it's one of those things that I do not expect us to ever reach a point where we're going to have the one standard audio file and some of them, some of them will become kind of de facto standards, just because the fact that so many people are using it.

But that's not the same thing as to say we've all settled on one particular file format, and with with things like DRM in the picture, I mean that obviously is a big issue. Driver. Yeah, they're there are companies that famously got out of it, you know, Apple being one of them, uh saying that you know what, we have come to the same conclusion that our listeners have been, uh saying, which is that, um, this is a negative impact on their experience, and we don't want to do

it anymore. Um, it's a good business decision for Apple at the time. Uh. There's other companies that are still for really behind DRM and they say that that is the good business decision for them in their in their particular situation. And maybe maybe that's true. Uh. Personally, Uh, if the DRM is is intrusive in any way, I just find it awful. Yeah. If there's if there's a requirement, yeah, like you must have an Internet connection to listen to

your music. Like really that doesn't seem right. Even better when he goes, you must have an internet connection your listeners music, but I have an Internet connection. Why aren't you playing? Right? You must have the band in your living room to listen to this music, but they're sitting right here. Yeah, Marian Call, she can't play anything for me until after I run the actual foul and then

then she starts playing. That's totally not true. Uh. And if you guys don't know who Marian Call is, you should definitely look her up and listen to her music. It's awesome. So we're gonna wrap this up. There are so many things we could say about sound files. We could do an episode about each type of major sound five, and then do episodes where we would group ten more obscure sound files together, and we would still be recording episodes.

Well passed episode five for tech Stuff. So we are not going to do that because some market research tells us that you would all leave, So we're not going to do that. But but if you have any questions about sound files in general, or any sort of tech topic you would like us to address in a future episode, please let us know. Send us an email or I addresses tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, or send us a message on Facebook or Twitter, or handle it both

of those as tech Stuff. Hs W and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. See guys, I told you we talked to you again really soon. That really soon is right now. I'm just reminding you that we have our photo upload widget live on the site at www dot how stuff works dot com. Slash upgrade your heck. Toyota is giving us the chance to let you share your creativity.

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