Music lovers are always looking for new services and formats that can provide their users with the best possible music quality. For many people, this is quite important. In such searches, users are often confronted with lossless audio. For some people, it isn’t clear what exactly this means.
What lossless audio means and why you need it
People have always been looking for a variety of entertainment for themselves. People used to go to theaters and operas, and then they went to the cinema and to different concerts of their favorite artists. Today, with the development of technology, you can have all the movies, shows, or music you want right in your pocket with your smartphone.
It’s very convenient to have all your favorite kinds of entertainment in one place. It gives you the opportunity to listen to your favorite music at any time. All you need is your smartphone or computer and headphones or speakers.
Modern people can hardly imagine their life without music. People listen to music all the time: while jogging, at work, in their free time, and so on. For this reason, hundreds of different services for listening to music began to be created. In these programs, you can get access to your favorite tracks for a fee, or for a monthly fee get access to the entire large library of tracks of the platform you want.
The main thing that people are guided by when choosing a streaming service is the quality of the tracks played and the number of these tracks in the service. This is the reason why services are trying to constantly expand their libraries and add higher quality audio tracks to their services.
For example, many modern streaming services offer their users to listen to lossless audio. Many people still don’t quite understand what this means and why such a format is needed, but it really is no problem to figure it out.
What lossless audio means
First of all, you should understand that audio files are essentially just a data stream that is encoded with a special codec, such as MP3. The most popular codecs used by modern audio editing software usually try to make your file as small and of good quality as possible. Usually in this case some data will be lost in the audio, which codec will consider as the least important. Usually, this will be in the high or low frequencies. If the audio is compressed too much, its quality can suffer noticeably.
It turns out that when audio files are compressed with regular codecs the sound quality suffers. This is usually not a big problem for users. However, if you’re interested in the purest possible sound, e.g. for archival purposes. You should pay attention to codecs that record audio files without loss of quality.
Since lossless audio files don’t discard data streams but are still compressed, such files can take up much less space than an uncompressed recording. At the same time, such audio files retain the same sampling rate.
Often such recordings can achieve studio quality, which can even surpass the quality of CDs.
Where you can find lossless audio recordings
The easiest way to get lossless audio is simply to copy your CD or any other audio source and encode it into a lossless format such as ALAC (Apple Lossless) or FLAC (open source lossless format). You will then get regular files on your hard drive with that very audio. You can play them back with any player which supports playback of this format.
In addition, some streaming services provide lossless audio playback. For example, services such as Apple Music or Deezer. Moreover, you don’t need to pay extra for listening to such audio, although sometimes you have to use special software.
For example, Apple Music uses the built-in Music app on the iPhone or Apple Music for Android to listen to such audio. Other services also have their own similar apps to play such audio.
