Audio File Formats: A Rundown

Hi guys!

I write articles for a site called ComposerFocus and I wanted to share them here as well since the topics may pertain to all young composers, not just media folks. Feel free to leave comments here, or preferably right on the article.

The flood of file formats in today’s audio industry can be a headache for those who haven’t kept up with the developments. If you’re looking for a one-stop reference for what the major formats are, what all the terms mean, and when you should use each, then you’ve come to the right place. Let’s get started by clarifying some terminology...

Read the rest: http://bit.ly/a68T7c

I hope you learn something! :happy:

I would suggest you to also add two more audio compression formats to your article:

1. TAK (Tom's Audio Kompressor), which roughly combines the high compression ratio of APE with the speed of FLAC. This is perhaps the most advanced lossless codec, but for the moment it's rather exotic, not widely known and supported.

2. MPC (Musepack) is a lossy audio format with strong emphasis on quality. That's what I use for home listening since quite a long time. At 210 - 250 kbps it usually sounds transparent. Simply put, it's the best lossy codec quality-wise.

Awesome topic, I'm going to definitely give this a good read. Thanks Marius!

did the Yamaha VQF really failed on this industry ? I didn't have the chance to have many of those, but it looked better than MP3.

Simply put, it's obsolete and unsupported. But there are better formats than both MP3 and VQF anyway (OGG, MP4, MPC).

Thank you for the comments, guys! I'd only just heard of TAK so I felt it was probably not a good idea to include it in a rundown of common formats. Maybe if it takes off a bit then it'd be worth it, but for now my intention was to cover the formats that a general audience is most likely to encounter. :)