What are Different Types of Digital Audio Files?
There are many different formats for digital audio files, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Some of these digital audio formats have been around for many years, while some are new and improved. The world of digital audio changes almost every day, as more and more people turn to portable music players, digital home audio systems, and digital music for their cars. There are three basic types of digital audio file: uncompressed, or ‘common’ systems, such as the WAV format; formats which use a compression technique, but lose absolutely none of the data in the compression, known as loss-less compression; and formats which do 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 audio types. It is an older format, made as a joint effort between IBM and Microsoft as a way to put digital audio on personal computers. WAV files tend to be very large, since they are not compressed at al
