Digital Audio Formats and MP3 - All About MP3 Music, Files, Downloads and Digital Music

As has been mentioned, there are other digital audio formats which can be used to store your
music. Here are a few of them, and a brief explanation of what they are:

AAC - Stands for Advanced Audio Coding, and is used mostly by Apple on it's iPods, and for
songs downloaded from their iTunes music store. The sound is similar to MP3, although Apple
claims it is better.

FLAC - Stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. This is an encoding process that doesn't lose
any sound quality over the original, yet uses a compression algorithm to reduce the size of the
resultant file. This is a codec free of royalty payments, and is developed by the user community.
It is catching on slowly.

OGG/Vorbis - Ogg stands for nothing really, but it is a codec similar to MP3, although to most
peoples ears, it sounds better than MP3. It is another royalty free codec that is supported by the
user community, and is catching on a bit as well.

WAV - This is the standard digital audio format developed by IBM and Microsoft, which stores
music in an exact digital representation, which means no loss whatsoever. It's cons, are that it
uses almost 10 times as much space as MP3, and has no standard for tagging the song.

WMA - Stands for Window's Media Audio, and was developed by Microsoft. Some say the
reason was that Microsoft did not want the expense of licensing the MP3 codec. It also has
provisions for Digital Rights Management (DRM), which requires the user to have a license to
play it on their computer, or portable audio device. It is not nearly as popular as MP3 (much to
Microsoft's chagrin), mostly due to the licensing requirements, and the lack of ability to easily
move the songs from one computer or player, to another.

There are other digital audio formats available as well, but the ones listed above, are the ones
you are most likely to encounter these days.