Audio Glossary

WMA - (Windows Media Audio) is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. It can be played by Mplayer, RealPlayer, Winamp, Windows Movie Maker, and the Microsoft Zune media management software supports most WMA codecs. It’s audio quality is better than mp3 when the bitstreams is below 128kbps, but won’t get much improvement when the bitstreams gets higher. Ralated software: WMA Music Converter , WMA to MP3 Converter

WAV - (WAVE), short for Waveform audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing audio on PCs. It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw audio. The most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio and uncompressed WAV files are quite large in size, so, it has declined in popularity. Ralated software: MP3 WAV Converter

AAC - (Advanced Audio Coding) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format It has better sound quality and smaller size than MP3. Many mobile devices support AAC format like SonyEricsson's W890i, Sony's Walkman, Apple's iPhone, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, BenQ-Siemens and Philips, BlackBerry, , Nintendo's Wii, Creative Zen Portable, Microsoft Zune, (PSP) with firmware 2.0 orgreater. Ralated software: AAC Music Converter

APE - (monkey’s audio) Monkey’s Audio is a lossless compression file format for audio data compression. It can be compressed and reverted without lossing quality. And we can only convert the CD and unpressed WAV to APE for the moment, MP3 is not available. Officially, Monkey’s Audio is only available for the Microsoft Windows platform.Ralated software: Digital Music Converter

M4A -  Audio-only MPEG-4 files generally have a .m4a extension. It is used to differentiate the mp4 audio files(M4A) and mp4 video files(M4V). The common but non-standard use of the extensions .m4a and .m4v is due to the popularity of Apple’s iPod, the iTunes Store.Ralated software: M4A Music Converter

MP3 - (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3) more commonly referred to as MP3, is a digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression.It is famous for its large constringent rate which can up to 10:1. And at same time the good audio quality can be reserved on the whole. So the small sized MP3 file can be easily organized and transferred between computers or other devices such as MP3 players.Ralated software: WMA to MP3 Converter , Digital Music Converter

AC3 - (Dolby Digital ac-3) is the common version containing up to six discrete channels of sound, with five channels for normal-range speakers (20 Hz – 20,000 Hz) (right front, center, left front, right rear and left rear) and one channel (20 Hz – 120 Hz) for the subwoofer driven low-frequency effects like explosion and hammerblow. Batman Returns was the first film to use Dolby Digital technology.Ralated software: Digital Music Converter

Ogg - is a free, open standard container format. The Ogg format is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia. ‘.Ogg’ is the extension name of the Ogg Vorbis file. It’s a very flexible format which can be improved constantly upon the size and qulity and played by any future players. Supported softwares include Sonique、FreeAmp、Winamp、XMMS and kmpg.Ralated software: Digital Music Converter

M4P - (Protected AAC File) The M4P extension is AAC purchased from Apple's Music Store (iTune) and is protected by a Digital Rights Management scheme. AAC is the audio layer from the follow-on format to MP3.Ralated software: Digital Music Converter

 

M4B - (MPEG-4 Audio Layer Bookmarkable File) is, like .m4a, an audio file wrapped within MPEG-4 container format. The audio encoding can be virtually anything, but most commonly used encoding for both .m4a and .m4b files is the AAC. Ralated software: Digital Music Converter