Introduction to 6 Common Audio Formats

You may have discovered that sometimes you can't play your audio on a device, but you can play it on another device. Why does this happen? It's probably a matter of format. Last time I introduced you to common video formats, today I'm going to introduce you to some common audio formats.

MP3

MP3 is an audio compression technology, whose full name is Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer III, or MP3 for short. It is designed to greatly reduce the volume of audio data. Using the MPEG Audio Layer 3 technology, the music is compressed into smaller files at a compression rate of 1:10 or even 1:12, and for most users, the playback quality is not significantly lower than the original uncompressed Audio. It was invented and standardized in 1991 by a group of engineers at Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a research organization based in Erlangen, Germany. Music stored in MP3 format is called MP3 music, and machines that play MP3 music are called MP3 players.

WAV

WAV is a standard digital audio file developed by Microsoft specifically for Windows that records sound information in a variety of mono or stereo channels without distortion. But a fatal drawback of WAV files is that they take up too much disk space (about 12 megabytes per minute of music).It conforms to the resource interchange file format (RIFF) specification for storing Windows platform audio information resources and is widely supported by the Windows platform and its applications. Wave format supports MSADPCM, CCITT A law, CCITT law and other compression algorithms, supports A variety of audio bits, sampling frequency and channel, is the most popular PC sound file format; But its file size is large, and it is often used to store short sound clips.

WMA

The full name of WMA is Windows Media Audio, an Audio format pushed by Microsoft. The WMA format is designed to reduce data flow but maintain sound quality to achieve a higher compression rate, which can be up to 1:18 and produce files half the size of the corresponding MP3 file.

M4A

M4A is an extension of the mpeg-4 audio standard file. In the MPEG4 standard, the common MPEG4 file extension is ".mp4 ".The ".m4a "extension has become popular since Apple started using it in its iTunes and iPod to distinguish between MPEG4 video and audio files. At present, almost all software that supports MPEG4 audio supports.m4a.

OGG

OGG is an audio compression format, similar to MP3 and other music formats. OGG is completely free, open and without patent restrictions. The extension of the OggVorbis file is ".ogg". The OGG file format allows for constant size and sound quality improvements without affecting older encoders or players.

FLAC

FLAC is a famous free audio compression coding, its characteristic is lossless compression. Different from other such as MP3 lossy compression coding and AAC, it won't destroy any original audio information, so you can restore music CD quality. Since 2012 it has been a lot of software and hardware of audio products, such as CD, etc.) are supported.

How to convert one format to another？

If you want to convert between two different formats, I recommend Leawo Video Converter. Leawo Video Converter is a professional video and audio converting program, offering solutions for people to convert video and audio files between 180+ formats. Besides, Leawo Video Converter allows converting normal 2D video to 3D movie. In addition, Leawo Video Converter enables users to edit video for output.