There are various digital audio file formats, including uncompressed WAV, lossless compression, and lossy compression like MP3, AAC, and Vorbis. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, with MP3 being the most popular due to its smaller size, while AAC has higher quality sound and DRM capabilities. Vorbis is a lesser-known but popular open-source alternative to MP3.
There are many different formats for digital audio files, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Some formats have been around for many years, while others are new and improved. The world of audio changes almost daily as more and more people are turning to portable music players, digital home audio systems and digital music for their cars.
There are three basic types of digital audio files: uncompressed or “common” systems, such as the WAV format; formats that use a compression technique, but lose absolutely none of the data in the compression, known as lossless compression; and formats that lose some of the original data, but retain a fairly high quality, known as lossy compression.
The WAV format is the most common of the common digital file types. It’s an older format, made as a joint effort between IBM and Microsoft as a way to put audio files on personal computers. WAV files tend to be very large, since they’re not compressed at all, so they’re rare to find where space is at a premium. They are used where space is not a major issue or where compression is not possible for other reasons – standard compact discs, for example, use an uncompressed file using pulse code modulation (PCM).
The MP3 format is probably the best known digital audio format and is a good example of a lossy compression system. The MP3 format was developed in the late 1980s and had a huge spike in popularity in the mid 1990s with the popularity of the internet as a means of sharing files. MP3 files are ideal for sharing online or in any setting where space is at a premium because they can be compressed down to a much smaller size than WAV formats. Quality is degraded: most MP3s are encoded at between 160 and 320 kb/s, compared to 1411.2 kb/s for a WAV file, but for many people the loss of sound fidelity is imperceptible, especially with cheap speakers.
AAC, or Advanced Audio Coding, is another audio format that has seen huge popularity in the internet age. It is a newer compression system and is generally thought to have higher quality sound at the same compression levels as MP3. AAC is also capable of accepting digital rights management (DRM) systems, which limit how files can be used or transported. The best example of this is Apple’s use of the AAC format, which wraps it in its own DRM system, FairPlay, and places it in its own container, with the .MP4 extension. While regular AAC files are compatible with a wide range of operating systems and devices, AAC files in an .MP4 wrapper are only compatible with Apple software and devices.
The Vorbis format is a lesser known but still widely popular digital format similar to MP3 or AAC. It was conceived as an alternative to MP3, when there was a threat that the file type would become a paid license format. Vorbis files are suffixed with the .ogg extension, and are known in this wrapper as Ogg Vorbis files. Vorbis’s quality is comparable to that of MP3 – and some would argue that it works better in some situations – but its success comes from the fact that it’s not patented. This format usually sees the most popularity among supporters of the open source movement.
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