Audio Formats

Similar to video, there are dozens of audio compression formats that have been used over the decades. Historically, the most widely known has been MP3, but this has hardly ever been used in video, and is now antiquated for music as well. The following are the current most widely used formats for audio in videos. (This guide is not intended to cover encoding music tracks, although much of the advice here will still apply similarly.)

Lossy Encoding

AAC

TODO

Vorbis

TODO

Opus

TODO

Lossless Encoding

The use of lossless encoding is a bit more common with audio, due to the fact that a losslessly encoded audio track is relatively small compared to a losslessly encoded video track. The distribution of lossless audio is still relatively rare, but it will occasionally be seen, whereas it is incredibly rare for lossless video to be distributed.

FLAC

TODO

Formats you may need to decode

TODO

PCM

TODO

DTS

TODO

Dolby Atmos

TODO