Why it matters

Codec choice affects delivery bandwidth and quality. Understanding options informs delivery decisions.

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The architecture

Perceptual coding: transform to frequency domain; discard imperceptible components; quantize aggressively where masking occurs.

Bitrate: kbps. 128 kbps for good quality music with modern codecs.

Perceptual codec pipelineFrequency transformMDCT typicalPsychoacoustic modelidentify inaudibleQuantize + encodecompressModern codecs (Opus, AAC) achieve near-transparent quality at 128 kbps
Codec compression.
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How it works end to end

MP3: legacy but ubiquitous. Fine at 192+ kbps.

AAC: better than MP3. Standard for streaming (Apple, YouTube).

Opus: modern open standard. Excellent quality from 6 kbps voice to 128 kbps music.

Lossless: FLAC compresses without loss. ~50% of PCM size.