File Formats
As this is a site about music and video dowloads, how about an article about the actual file formats of these downloads. So in no particular format:-
Music Formats
- MP3 - (MPEG Audio Layer-3) - One of the most popular music formats, due to it being able to be played or nearly all portable music players. Commercial online music distribution services usually prefer other music file formats that support DRM. MP3 is a lossy format, designed to remove parts of the music that the human ear find hard to hear. A number of techniques are used to allow ~10:1 compression compared with uncompressed audio. MP3's allow encoding at a range of 'bit rates', these are typically between 128 and 256 kilobit per second. Variable Bit Rate (VBR) is now also commonly used, here the bit rate alters through the music depending on the demands of the music.
- OGG Vorbis - Vorbis is an open and free audio compression which normally goes under the name format of OGG (OGG being the container much like WMA is to ASF (see below)). Due to the free nature, Ogg Vorbis format has proved popular among the open source communities, along with its claimed best quality lossy audio codec (at certain bitrates).
- AAC - (Advanced Audio Coding) - AAC was designed as an improved-performance codec relative to MP3. File format is typically .mp4 or .m4a (audio only). AAC is the format used by iTunes (along with their DRM addon 'Fairplay'). When DRM is used the file extension .m4p.
- FLAC - (Free Lossless Audio Codec) - Unlike lossy codecs, such as those mentioned above, it does not remove any information from the audio stream and is suitable both for everyday playback and for archiving audio collections. The FLAC format is currently well supported by many software audio products, and is the only free lossless audio compression format that has any hardware support. Compression is of course no where near that of lossy compression, but thats not the aim. Rates of less that 2:1 are common.
- ATRAC - (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding) - is sony's audio compression algorithm used to store information on MiniDisc and other Sony-branded audio players. Nearly all ATRAC files contain DRM, and this is its sole purpose due to its inferior quality compared to other lossy formats.
- WMA - (Windows Media Audio) - WMA is Microsoft's audio file format. A WMA file is almost always encapsulated in an Advanced Systems Format file. The resulting file may have the Filename extension .wma or .asf (.wma being used being used if audio only). Windows Media Audio supports DRM which has led to itself as a competitor to the AAC format used by iTunes.
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