Lossy and Lossless audio formats

Overview of the main audio formats that can be found on PC:

For convenience we can divide the audio formats for PC as lossy and lossless (no quality loss). A conversion software (like avs4you ) can convert a normal audio file to any other format you can imagine.

The idea of lossy formats (the most popular among the casual user) comes from the idea that not all the sounds in the 44,100 samples per second content in a standard WAV files are correctly perceived by the human ear.

In this way (as is the case for the jpg image) we are going to cut the high frequencies, which are believed to be less distinct from the ear. The more you cut these frequencies the more space occupied by our audio file decreases (for example you can get 3MB instead of 6 MB for a song of a few minutes length). Also the decrease in the quality is not much because the frequencies that are cut are not so much 'audible'.

The conversion to WAV, starting from the lossy formats, does not bring any benefit (unless you must draw up the track and save it several times, in this case the loss of quality will be limited to the first step), and there are programs that are able to return to our original tracks some of these high frequencies, such as Steinberg Clean Plus or others (eg early versions of Easy CD Creator, or other more professional tools), however, while-doing a decent job is not much that can be done for reverting a lossy audio to an original wav.

The lossless audio formats, instead of trying to decrease the space occupied by the track, works without going to touch the sound. The compression ratio will be much lower compared to lossy formats, but there will be no loss of quality. If converted to WAV (perhaps to be processed), the sound will be the same as before.

Some lossy audio formats:

WMA (. Wma): Windows Media Audio format, compressed and very similar to an mp3. This is Audio compression format from Microsoft. Files compressed in this format are approximately 20% smaller than MP3
MP3 (. Mp3) is short for MPEG 1 Layer III and identifies the audio files using this algorithm. Its standard that eliminates sounds inaudible to human ears. In this way an MP3 song of 128 kbps occupies a space equal to 1 / 11 compared to the same format of the original Wav or audio cd.

Lossless Audio formats

WAV (. Wav) format. Wave formats is nothing but a digital recording of real sounds, sounds that have originated from a source external to the PC. In a WAV music, drums, piano, guitar, bass or voice are felt the same way regardless of the PC where the file is playing (with the same sound quality of the hardware, of course).