Audio file formats used for playback/recording

Marinatall_Ironside · July 29, 2019

Hey guys, first topic I made in a long time.

What are the popular file formats used in recording audio? I know we have FLAC/MP3/WAV/AAC/OGG/etc. but I just want to know which ones are popular in recording things like voice recording, sound effects, music, just about anything for video games and films.

Also is there a file format out there that supports 32 bit, 384 kHz sample rates? There's audio hardware (not the point of the topic) that supports it like my SupremeFX Hi-Fi, but I am not aware of any kind of file format that supports that sample rate.

Edited July 29, 2019 by Jurunce
added file format(s)

anothertom · July 29, 2019

For recording you want to be going to a lossless format. This allows the best opportunity for post-processing over a lossy format. Due to the real-time nature of recording it's also easiest to go to an uncompressed format (i.e. WAV) over a compressed lossless format (i.e. FLAC).

As for very high sample rates and bit depths, not sure what supports them but at a guess you'll end up with needlessly large files.

mariushm · July 29, 2019

For lossy audio Opus is probably the highest quality per bitrate these days. AAC is also missing from your list. There's some recently versions of AAC for ultra low bitrate (less than 8 kbps) which sound even better than Opus - some people use this version of codec for digital voice on amateur radio or using lora etc

In a lot of environments, they simply use mono wav tracks ... e 8 mono channels .. they then mix them or couple them to stereo , surround etc ...

I don't think there's much interest to use more than 192kHz as it won't really help much... human ears have difficulties hearing above 18kHz and even allowing up to 24000 ... you only need twice the sampling rate to store such frequencies.. hence why 48000 exists. 192 kHz is a simple 4x of the 48kHz value.

The 32bit may be more common, storing samples as floating point numbers... since modern processors use 32 bit and 64 bit registers , it makes it easier to perform operations on the audio without causing distortions.

As for interesting high bitrate formats, maybe check DSD 2.8 and 5.6 Mhz ... HDTracks has this as option : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Stream_Digital

This works a bit differently than the other codecs, not really using the concept of sampling rate... but you can estimate 100kHz or higher, and usually tracks are produced from 352-384 kHz masters.