Audio News

A Codec as the name indicates is a combination of Coder-Decoder. The main function of Codec is to convert an audio signal to digital bits or bytes and vice versa. A Codec encodes an analogue audio signal for storing on the digital medium such as computer files and CDs. Audio codecs are also used for transmitting audio over digital transmission lines, such as SPDIF.

An audio codec is a software program or a hardware device that is used to compress or decompress digital audio data to a given audio file format. Audio codecs fall in two categories, codecs that use lossy compression and those that use lossless compression.

Lossy compression is a method where the data when retrieved after compressing and decompressing, is then quite different from the original. Repeated compressing and decompressing will cause the file to gradually lose its quality. Lossy compression is generally used for compressing multimedia data (sound, still images and video).

Lossless compression is a method where the data retrieved after compressing and the decompressing is quite similar to the original data. Lossless compression is required for data and text files, such as text articles, bank records etc. The quality of the data does not change even after repeated compression and decompression.

Audio codecs are most commonly used by broadcasters for streaming the data back to office. Popular audio codecs for audio devices like music players include MP3, WMA, WAV and many more. Practically all media players today, such as the Archos 605 80GB, support a wide variety of codecs for audio, video and picture data. An audio codec has the unique ability of reducing the audio data so that it can be easily transported over a low bandwidth.