Music Streaming Infrastructure: Encoding to Playback
Music Streaming Infrastructure: Encoding to Playback Encoding is the bridge from raw audio to smooth, scalable playback. In practice, streaming teams choose codecs, sampling rates, and container formats that balance quality with bandwidth. The encoding path affects storage costs, network load, and how listeners experience music on phones, desktops, and smart speakers. Common codec choices for music are AAC and Opus. AAC works widely and sounds good at mid bitrates, while Opus shines at lower bitrates and in noisy networks. Most deployments use stereo at 44.1 or 48 kHz and offer several bitrate ladders to adapt to varying networks, device capabilities, and listening contexts. ...