What is a "lossy" compression?
Term "lossy" relies on the fact that the portion of original data is lost during the compression. Data that is decompressed from a lossy compression IS NOT THE SAME as original source. You have encountered many examples of lossy compression, as most of the images, videos or music is compressed using this method.
This type of data is tolerant to losses as our senses are able to interpret resulting data to be same as original even when loss has occurred. In audio, the science of psychoacoustic is used to determine what is the range of sound that can be percepted by human ear and what sub-range of it makes the most importance for overall sound, and then applying that knowledge to compression algorithms.
What made it popular?
Lossy compression provides great compression ratios. Meaning you get smaller files. Smaller files are good because you can fit more of them on your MP3 player, or you can transfer them faster on the Internet.
Those start-up advantages made lossy compression widespread, so almost all new home media systems nowadays come with some support for lossy codecs, and if you have ever played any song on your computer it was most likely using one too, like AAC, AC-3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA or most famous - MP3.
Why we don't accept it?
It discards audio data. Meaning - your audio file loses quality. If your professional work makes you decompress such file and compress it again you would lose even more audio data, with even larger quality drop. This of course is unacceptable for any professional usage.
Our argument is that losing data is also unacceptable for personal music collection of any true music lover. The MP3 song you're listening from your portable player just ain't the same as artist recorded it. It doesn't matter much with modern and music with lots of noise, but with classical music and well produced pieces it is clearly audible. Some artists spend days just setting up the audio recording equipment to get most of the studio sound and atmosphere. In those cases, it's just shame to use inferior formats for storing such work, it's like taking a photo of Velázquez's painting to replace the original. If you finally understand how evil lossy audio compression is, please turn page and join us on our rant about lossless compression :)
