The Audio Compression Standard

What is the standard compression? In reality, nothing! This term describes the basic compression software used to encode audio files produced from CD tracks.

Whatever the platform used to create your audio files, simple freeware or shareware programs will do the job perfectly. SoundApp for Macintosh or the light version of CoolEdit for Windows will allow you to easily reduce the size of any audio file.

These software programs work on the sampling rate and the resolution only. They restrict their actions to a few threshold values beyond which the quality would be too low. These limiting values are as follows:

• a 8-bit sampling resolution;
  
  
• a 22.050 kHz sampling rate;
  
  
• and, naturally, the mono mode (an obvious minimum!)
  
  

Beyond these limits, the playback quality will not be the same as that of the original file. There is an exception for files containing dialogue or spoken comments that accept an 8 bit/8 kHz compression without lowering the final quality too much.

Any so-called multimedia computer will be able to carry out such audio handling, which requires only a few processor resources.