File Formats

                       File Formats 

Mp3

By excellence the most used. Technology is used to 

reduce the file size by eliminating unheard noises.

Achieves high compression without much loss, but it 

all depends on the quality of the compression we use.

Although mp3 is the most used, especially for audio 

compression standard Web pages, the major drawback 

is its patent. So any player or editing software that wants 

to use it has to pay for it.

WMA

It is the alternative of Windows to compressed formats. It's like a WAV, but of smaller size and lower quality. While the mp3 and ogg files sound almost all players and editors, not so with the wma, so used very little.

WAV

Short for WAVE form audio file format is a digital audio format without data compression normally developed and owned by Microsoft and IBM that is used to store sounds on the PC, supports both mono and stereo files to various resolutions and sampling

AIFF

Short for Audio Interchange File Format, a common format for storing and transmitting sampled sound. The format was developed by Apple Computer and is the standard audio format for Macintosh computers. It is also used by Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI).

AIFF files generally end with a .AIF or .IEF extension.

The AIFF format does not support data compression so AIFF files tend to be large. However, there is another format called AIFF-Compressed (AIFF-C or AIFC) that supports compression ratios as high as 6:1.

RA

The de facto standard for streaming audio data over the World Wide Web. RealAudio was developed by RealNetworks and supports FM-stereo-quality sound. To hear a Web page that includes a RealAudio sound file, you need a RealAudio player orplug-in, a program that is freely available from a number of places. It's included in current versions of both Netscape Navigator andMicrosoft Internet Explorer.