Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/CommonHTML/fonts/TeX/fontdata.js

Transcodology

Transcoding is the conversion of one digital data format into another digital format. Most of the time, transcoding is an attempt to convert the source material into a smaller material by means of compression. Transcodology is the science that observes and analyses the different actors involved in transcoding. A sub-discipline of transcodology is compressology. Anyway, lets have a look into the world of transcoding.

For our experiment today, we need a high-quality source material. Therefore, we are now looking for a good cat meow in the freesound library. freesound is a community-run sound library with more than 500k Creative Commons sounds. Because of the licence used in the freesound library, we don't have to worry about copyright infringements in this transcolodgy exercise *wink smiley*

Alright, the cat meowing uploaded by the user nekoninja in very good quality (wav-format, samplerate 44100.0 Hz, bitdepth 16 bit, channels stereo) is our selected source material. The user nekoninja mentions in the description that the cats name is sushi. Thank you sushi and nekoninja!

Lets see what info we can get about the file (called "cat-meowing-original.wav" with the following command:

And we listen to the sound file with the following command:

Now we are going to create a spectogram of the file with the following ffmpeg-command:

In the next to steps we will transcode the original wav-file to a high quality mp3-file and a low quality mp3-file!

First the compression into a high quality mp3-file with 128kbps:

And now the spectogram of it:

Lets make a really low compression of the original file:

What we can see from the image and hear from the audio is that the mp3 compression cuts already a lot of the high frequenies! Lets compare the file sizes of the three different files:

In the next step we will transcode the 'cat-meowing-128k.mp3'-file 100 times and listen what kind of glitches will appear :D

Alright that goes into a good direction and even the spectogram looks good. Lets trey it now with 400 times :D

From nowadays perspective mp3 could be considered as old and outdated. A current state of the art compression is called opus!