Ive heard that Vorbis is a “lossy” codec. What does this mean?
There are two broad classes of compression algorithms: lossless and lossy. Lossless compression algorithms produce compressed data that can be decoded to output that is identical to the original. Zip is a very common example of a lossless compression format. FLAC is a lossless compression format that is specifically designed for audio. The other type of compression algorithm is called lossy. This form of compression is very popular with multimedia data, like pictures, movies, and sound. Since these types of information are perceived by humans with imperfect senses, the original data does not have to be reproduced exactly. Some of the information in the original file can actually be discarded because we wouldn’t notice it even if it was there. Lossy codecs can achieve much higher compression than lossless codecs by intelligently discarding unneeded information. In most cases, some loss of quality can be tolerated, so even more data can be discarded, further increasing compression. MP3,
