Introduction
The following tables compare general and technical information for a variety of audio formats and audio compression formats. For listening tests comparing the perceived audio quality of audio formats and codecs, see the article Codec listening test.
General Information
Notes
- First public release date is first of either specification publishing or source releasing, or in the case of closed-specification, closed-source codecs, is the date of first binary releasing. Many developing codecs have pre-releases consisting of pre-1.0 versions and perhaps 1.0 release candidates (RCs), although 1.0 may not necessarily be the release version.
- Latest stable version is that of specification or reference tools.
- If there happens to be OSI licensed software available for a particular codec, this does not necessarily permit one to use said codec free of charge. Likewise, if there is only proprietary licensed software available for a particular codec, one might be able to use the codec free of charge.
- MP3 licence and patent status: The MP3 format is patented and therefore subject to license (expires latest: 2017). However with multiple contenders for the patent, it is far from certain in the market who is the patent holder with the right to set pricing and royalties. A sample of prices for one patent-holder is available. In practice, there is a wide range of MP3 authoring software and MP3 encoding worldwide is often performed on a private basis and unpaid, with patent rights unenforced against end users. See MP3#Licensing and patent issues.
Operating System Support
Multimedia Frameworks Support
Technical Details
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