Audio is stored on your computers in the form of digital files. An audio file on a computer is analogous to any other file, and similar rules apply to them. Consider an example of a text file. Just as a text file can be stored on a computer as a simple text file with a .txt extension, a word processor document with a .doc extension, an HTML file with a .htm extension, or even without any extension at all; similarly audio file can be stored in different audio formats and obviously with different extensions. Audio formats can be roughly defined as different ways of keeping the audio data according to our needs. Different audio formats have different methods of compressing or enhancing the audio files. The major audio formats are briefly discussed below.
This is the default audio format of Microsoft® Windows. By "default", I mean that it is the main format used in Windows. The sounds that Windows plays (like the sound when you start Windows) is in PCM Wave format. This format is uncompressed. This means that you will get a large file size. A 5 min track usually weighs around 50 MB. However, it's not all bad! PCM Wave is a Lossless format, which means crystal clear sound and no dropping of frames. When you record audio through sound recorder, it is stored as a wave file (by default). The extension for such files is .wav
Audio is recorded on a simple audio CD as .cda files. This is a special kind of audio format, and that is why audio CD's cannot simply be "downloaded" on a PC like MP3's. Whenever you use a standard CD Burning program like Nero Burning Rom or Windows Media Player to burn an audio CD, tracks are first converted to the .cda format and then written on the CD.
Windows Media Audio 9 Series is a lossless format, very much like Wave, but the resultant file size is strikingly low. Windows Media 9 Series features WMA 9, WMA 9 Professional and WMA 9 Lossless. The Lossless format supports extremely high bit rates, but the resultant file size is relatively large. For streaming purposes, Windows Media Audio 9 Series is an excellent choice. You can download Windows Media Encoder 9 Series from Microsoft's Website. Also, another high point of this format is the creation of "High Mat" CD's. These are audio and video CD's created by the Windows Media Player 9 which can also be played back on some Panasonic systems. These are similar to MP3's and feature great quality. Please note here that unlike MP3's, WMA also supports video. Depending on their content and purpose, Windows Media files use a variety of file name extensions, such as: .wma, .wme, .wms, .wmv, .wmx, .wmz, or .wvx.
This format is also known as MP3. First of all, it is extremely suitable for compressing audio files. Secondly, an extremely large number of hardware companies manufacture products which support this format. However, it is not all so sweet. It is not an open source format, which means you will have to buy expensive encoding software to make your MP3's. Also, some loss of quality is inevitable when you convert to MP3. As everybody knows, the extension for this format is .mp3.
This is a relatively lesser known audio format. It is also a kind of a lossless audio format, though not perfectly one. It is open source, which means there are freeware which can encode to Ogg Vorbis. Compression is good, and file size is relatively smaller than comparative MP3's. The extension for Ogg Vorbis files is .ogg.
VQF is yet another open source audio compression technology. It is extremely easy to implement VQF files into web pages. VQF files are also much smaller than comparative MP3's. However, not many audio players, both software as well as hardware, support this format. The extension for this format is .vqf. The only problem with this format is encoding. Very few encoders are available, and even with most of them the speed is painfully slow.
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