LD Systems - Audio Terms Glossary

Audio Glossary

Electronic Formats:

By David Murphy

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) Apple's answer to Microsoft's WAV. Encoding a file in AIFF is about as uncompressed as you can get. To save some space, try encoding your files in Apple's new Apple Lossless format instead, which offers identical quality at nearly half the size.

ATRAC3 (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) Sony's proprietary audio format for compressing audio for use on its portable audio and MiniDisc players. ATRAC3's quality is comparable to an MP3 recorded at a bit rate of 128 Kbps.

Audible Audible.com's proprietary format for its audio books. Audible comes in four different formats. The first three vary in size, depending on the quality of the recording, while the fourth uses MP3 compression. The formats are also digitally protected.

AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) A proprietary compression codec that Apple uses for its iTunes music store. AAC also supports Apple's own DRM; purchased tracks from the iTunes Music Store are copy-protected. AAC also produces smaller file sizes than MP3 at the same quality.

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) Files compressed using the open-source FLAC suffer absolutely no quality loss—perceptible or otherwise—from the original recording. FLAC is not compatible with many players out there, though iAudio and Rio make compatible devices.

MP3 The most popular compressed music-sharing standard. Developed by the Fraunhofer IIS, MP3 uses psychoacoustic theories to achieve smaller file sizes. The higher the bit rate, the higher the quality. Files encoded at a bit rate of 160 or 192 Kbps sound close to CD quality.

MPC (Musepack) A lesser-known lossy audio compression codec. MPC offers superb quality when encoding audio at higher bit rates. Very few if any portable audio players support it, however. It's designed mainly for listening to music on a PC.

OGG (Ogg Vorbis) A lossy audio format similar to MP3. It's an open-source format that can produce files with better results than MP3. Although hardware support for this codec isn't as widespread, the format is quickly gaining popularity.

WAV A format developed by Microsoft and IBM for storing high-quality, uncompressed audio. WAV became the standard on PCs, but because of the large file sizes it requires (about 10MB per minute of music), most people convert WAV files to compressed formats (MP3, WMA, and so on) for transfer to portable audio devices.

WMA (Windows Media Audio) Windows' answer to MP3. Meant primarily as a streaming format, WMA uses smaller file sizes. Some WMA files contain built-in digital rights management to check the legality of your purchased music.

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