The Technology of Video and Audio Streaming, 2nd Edition

6Audio compression

Introduction

For many consumers, Internet radio was their first exposure to streaming media. The other driver for interest in compressed audio has been the universal acceptance of the MP3 format for low data rate audio files. Although not a streaming format (it is for download and play), many popular streaming architectures can be used to wrap MP3 files for streaming. Although MP3 gradually is being replaced with the more efficient AAC codecs, it still retains a very wide user base. There are several audio-only architectures that come from the Internet radio arena: Nullsoft’s Shoutcast and Winamp, and Audion for the Mac platform. The primary multimedia architectures – MPEG-4, Windows Media, QuickTime, and Real – all support ...