The audio format that’s making waves across geographical boundaries—MP3—is perhaps the most popular and prevalent of music formats. MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Layer 3. It’s a digital audio compression algorithm, which gives you a maximum compression factor of about twelve while still retaining superb sound quality. Due to this, it takes lesser hard disk real estate, unlike other audio formats.

MP3 encoding is able to achieve effective compressions as it works mostly on the range of frequencies perceivable to the human ear. It chucks out all non-audible frequencies and keeps others for high compression. Ever since International Organization for Standardization (ISO) formalized this standard, a number of other high-compression formats have followed. WMA (Windows Media Audio) is one such venture from Microsoft that’s pitted against the MP3 format. As an inherent part of Windows Me from Microsoft, WMA boasts of better compressions. People worldwide seem to differ in opinions, some in its favor, others against it.

AIFF format

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) was developed by Apple Computers, and is the standard audio format on the Macintosh. It’s parallel to the uncompressed WAV format on the PC, and is therefore meant for easy editing of audio on the Mac. The AIFF format encodes audio data in 8-bit mono or stereo waveforms. You can’t compress the data in AIFF, but another version of the same called the AIFF-C let’s you compress data by a factor of around six. Apple developed this for recording and storing high-quality sampled audio and musical instrument information. Apart from the Mac, Silicon Graphics (SGI) platform and several other professional audio packages use AIFF format for playing with the sound.

RealAudio

When it comes to streaming audio, Real Audio is the first thing that comes to mind. It’s a proprietary format of RealNetworks and is widely used on the Web. The format can be used over the Web or a company intranet. One advantage of RA is that its content can be customized depending upon the transmission bandwidth available.

Hardware audio storage

When we talk of music for homes, we have audiotapes and audio CDs as the storage media. In an audiocassette, data can be stored on the magnetic tape in primarily two tracks (for A and B sides) and two channels (stereo). The inherent disadvantage here is that data is accessible only sequentially as the tape passes under the magnetic head. On the other hand, data on an audio CD is stored in the form of crests and troughs via burning through a laser beam and accessed in a similar manner (remember old gramophones). The file format on an audio CD is raw WAV (CDA). Here, the advantage is that you can quickly jump from one track to another, so there’s no waiting time.