5 Reasons You Should Use Lossless File Formats
Multimedia is increasingly being stored on computers. Audio on the computer has been around for years. Digital cameras have drastically overthrown film in popularity. So does it matter how you store those files on your computer? I think it does. Lossless compression formats, while larger, are often superior to their lossy counterparts.
But what does lossless mean?
When files are stored on your computer, the digital bits are typically compressed to take up less space. A lossless compression will keep all bits and squeeze them together. Think about a deck of common playing cards all laying face up so you could read the numbers and suits. If you were going to store those cards, you wouldn’t store them laying side by side face up. You would pick them up, stack them on top of each other, and store them. This is a lossless compression. When you are ready to view the cards again you would simply take them out and line them up again. All of the data, the faces of the cards, would still be there for you to see.
Now if you were short on room and you couldn’t store a full deck of cards, you might discard some of the cards. At first you would get rid of the instruction card, then maybe the jokers. That would save you a little bit of room. This is how a lossy compression works. It takes the information that it thinks you probably won’t need, and gets rid of it permanently.
What type of file formats are available?
Photos and music are the two big media types that people store on their computers. Movies and video are becoming more popular, especially with Apple’s iTunes store becoming more popular. But the limited ability to get video from a PC to a big screen television limits the usefulness of keeping video on your computer.
audio
For music fans there is a wide variety of lossless audio codecs. The two big ones though are FLAC and Apple Lossless. If you are using iTunes and an iPod then Apple Lossless is your go to file format. If you are using a program other than iTunes for ripping your CDs and playing music I highly suggest using the open source FLAC. For more about lossless audio codecs, check out my prior post Protect and Backup Your Music Collection.
photos
The major type of lossless photo format is RAW, which is a family of formats used by camera makers for storing the RAW information on a file before being formated. Most cameras take a picture and then process it in-camera to pop out a jpeg. The theory behind RAW is that a home computer has much more processing power than a computer, so processing a photo on the computer should produce a better picture than doing it in-camera. If your camera can shoot in RAW it can be a great way to create quality photos. If you mess up a shot due to an incorrect exposure or an incorrect white balance, it can often be saved in post processing.
And without further ado, here are the top 5 reasons you should be using lossless formats to store data on your computer:
1. Hard Drive Space is Cheap
New hard drives holding a terabyte of data can be found for close to a hundred dollars. One terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. That’s a lot of data. If one song stored in Apple Lossless averages around 25 megabytes, a one terabyte drive can hold 40,000 songs. Compared to the cost to actually acquire that much music, the storage space is fairly insignificant.
For photos, if your camera is capable of shooting in RAW, a 12 megapixel RAW photo is about 15 megabytes. If you shoot mostly in RAW you could shoot over 66,000 photos before you fill up a 1 TB drive. If you’re using jpegs (not a lossless format) it’s going to take a long time before you fill up that much space.
2. There’s a Huge Difference in Quality
mp3 files are compared by their bit rate. The most common rates are 128 kbps (kilobits per second), 256 bps, and 320 kbps. 320 kbps is typically considered the best bit rate by most. Newer formats, such as AAC, store files in a similar file size, but promise better performance from similar compression ratios. Lossless audio files on the other hand are using bit rates close to 1000 kbps.
For most picture takers, jpeg will be the only file format you ever use or need, since most consumer cameras only use jpeg. The problem with jpeg is the the loss of quality every time you edit the photo. So if you’re using the jpeg file format and doing a lot of editing you should try to save your files in another format such as TIFF or PSD.
3. Digital Media Lasts Forever
Once you store your files on a hard drive, they could theoretically last forever with proper backup. If one hard drive fails, you can quickly recover your files from a backup drive and have everything ready almost instantly.
I have heard stories of people losing precious photos of loved ones in fires. A 1 TB external hard drive takes up almost no room and could be left at a friend or family members house as an off-site backup to prevent against loss in a fire. You could also keep it in a safe deposit box, a small fire proof safe, or even back up online using a service like Amazon’s S3. Compare this to trying to store a copy of 66,000 actual photos. I don’t know anyone that would let me keep that much stuff at their house, just in case.
The same can be said for CDs. If you were to lose your CDs in a fire, it could be very costly to replace them. A more likely scenario is someone stealing your CDs out of your car. A solution to this is to rip all of your CDs using a lossless format, and then if your CDs are stolen or damaged they can be easily replaced.
4. It Can Save You Time
Technology is always advancing. There is always going to be new software that can do something better. In the audio world mp3 is a standard file format, even though other lossy codecs like AAC can sound better. If you choose to follow these types of things, you could spend a lot of time ripping and re-ripping your CD collection for better sound. Or suppose you upgrade your music player and decide that you want to re-encode all of your CDs. If you had maintained one master collection on your computer’s hard drive, upgrading would be as easy as making a second lossy copy of your lossless files. Unfortunately that does require you to maintain two separate libraries, but as we saw above, space is cheap.
5. The Best Tools All Use Lossless
Common music software like winamp, iTunes, or Windows Media Player, all have support for lossless files. Even the iPod can use Apple Lossless, although you may be better off maintaining a lossy copy of your library since hard drive space on the iPod is significantly more expensive, or even impossible to get if you’re looking at something like an iPod Touch or an iPhone.
For photos, if you have a camera that uses RAW files, you probably received a converter tool that can read and edit RAW files. If you are on a Mac, iPhoto can store and edit RAW files also, so there’s no need to upgrade to an expensive tool like Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture. Unless you want to of course.
So there are 5 good reasons you should start using Lossless formats to store your digital files. As storage gets cheaper, and especially as online bandwidth gets cheaper, you will see increasing quality in your digital files. It may seem a little strange that a personal finance author is encouraging you to spend money on hard drives to store your digital files. But for me the cost of storage is worth the peace of mind and convenience of having all of my files stored on my computer.
Stay tuned though, in the works is 5 reasons you shouldn’t use lossless file formats. I’ll update with a link when that’s ready.
3 comments
I agree, but not 100%. There are some good reasons against usage of lossless formats. First - what does it means lossless. There is always some loss. If you use 8bit .wav vs. a .mp3 you can still be at disadvantage. Lossy formats are more effective at storing the useful information and throwing away the less useful part. There is never too much space. If you have spare space and a good enough source, using a lossy format with higher quality might be the right way. If you can afford to store the original “lossless” information, the why not? But if you can acquire the information at higher precision and compress it using lossy algorithm, that would be the way to go. For example, imagine, you have a 1 *giga*pixel image, but only want to 100MB to store it. You can resize it and store as .png or you can compress it using without rescaling it as .jpg. Which is better a 30000×30000 pixels .jpg or a 8000×8000 pixels .png?
With images, the situation is similar. The main problem with .jpg is not that it is lossy, but that there is an incremental loss of quality after opening it and re-saving in cycles. Though there are applications that can work around it by copying unchanged parts from the original photo without re-compressing it. I happen to be developing one of them.
Hi Vlasta,
Thanks for the comment! You are correct that a lossy format can be superior to a lossless format if you choose the wrong compression.
You are also right about .jpeg files losing quality incrementally. One work around I have used has been to use layers in Photoshop for non-destructive editing. Looking at your blog though it looks like you’re well versed in that though.
Hi Rich, using layers can help in many situations, .psd is a lossless format and can help you avoid the incremental loss of quality. But you’ll eventually have to convert the image back to .jpg for example for web publishing and there the problem jumps in again jpg->psd->psd->psd->psd->jpg. But it is there only once and that is a big advantage when compared to jpg->jpg->jpg->jpg->jpg->jpg, where the loss would occur multiple times. In my software (and there are others addressing the same issue) I am trying to eliminate even this single loss and thus making even the jpg->jpg->jpg->jpg->jpg->jpg sequence used by (ignorant?) users bearable.