Audio FormatsRussell Taylor

Audio File FormatsThere are three major groups of audio file formats:

Uncompressed audio formats, such as WAV, AIFF, AU or raw header-less PCM;

Formats with lossless compression, such as FLAC, Monkey's Audio(APE), WavPack (WV), Shorten, Tom's lossless Audio Kompressor (TAK), TTA, ATRAC Advanced Lossless, Apple Lossless, MPEG-4 SLS, MPEG-4 ALS, MPEG-4 DST, Windows Media Audio Lossless (WMA Lossless).

Formats with lossy compression, such as MP3, Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, ATRAC and lossy Windows Media Audio (WMA).

PCM – Pulse Code ModulationPCM is an uncompressed audio format which is usually

stored as a .wav on Windows or as .aiff on Mac OS. WAV and AIFF are flexible file formats designed to store

more or less any combination of sampling rates or bitrates. This makes them suitable file formats for storing and archiving an original recording.

More information on Audio file formats can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_file_formats

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