This is intended as
a simple guide to explain a little
about the different audio formats
commonly in use today and how to
play them.
Wave
WAV – The Wave
file format developed by Microsoft
is the industry standard on PCs.
It is a high quality format, particularly
when uncompressed, but consequently
it is also quite large in size.
This is the format ultimately used
by CD burning software for burning
onto Audio CDs. Compression for
WAV files is available, such as
MS ADPCM, but it only provides around
4:1 compression at best.
MP3
Mp3 stands for Mpeg
1 Layer III, it is the most popular
audio format in use today. The sound
quality of an Mp3 is dependant on
what encoder has been used to create
the file, LAME provides the best
quality at bitrates above 128kbps,
Fraunhofer provides the best quality
at bitrates below 128kbps.
Ogg Vorbis is a fully
open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free,
general-purpose compressed audio
format for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz,
16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music
at fixed and variable bitrates from
16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places
Vorbis in the same competitive class
as audio representations such as
MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar to, but
higher performance than MPEG-1/2
audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ),
WMA and PAC.
WMA
WMA – Microsoft
being Microsoft, they developed
a format which has excellent quality
and compression levels even better
than MP3 (WMA version 8 and above).
Technically speaking, WMA audio
is great, but it has much less compatibility:
Windows Media Player is the main
tool used to play WMA. There are
also protection aspects to WMA,
as MS tries to enforce digital copyright
by making WMA protected files difficult
to copy and burn.
