It’s pretty common to hear someone refer to “using the MP3 codec,” or “FLAC is a better codec than MP3.” There’s a tendency to use “codec” and “file format” interchangeably. That saves a lot of room on a computer hard drive or in a smartphone’s memory, and it also saves on mobile data when you want to stream those songs from a music service. Here’s an example: If you take the audio on a CD and use a codec to turn those songs into MP3 files, you can reduce the size (in megabytes) of those tracks to as little as 10% of their original size.
The most common reason for using a codec is to reduce the amount of information needed to store an audio (or video) recording. What does a codec do?Ĭodecs let computer hardware or software change information from one format to another (encoding) and also provide a way to work with the new format (decoding). Any kind of sound that can be recorded - from music, to a TV soundtrack, to your favorite podcast, can be affected by a codec. But for our purposes, we’re talking about audio. It’s two terms smashed together into one word - in this case, en code and decode - thus, “codec.”Ĭodecs can apply to video, too.
