Name 

Description 

WAVE (Microsoft) 

 
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or more commonly known as WAV due to its filename extension) is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is an application of the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) bitstream format method for storing data in "chunks" It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw and typically uncompressed audio. The usual bitstream encoding is the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format.
 
WAV is compatible with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems. The format takes into account some differences of the Intel CPU... more 

MP3 Audio 

 
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented encoding format for digital audio which uses a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players.
 
MP3 is an audio-specific format that was designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as part of its MPEG-1 standard and later extended in MPEG-2 standard. The first MPEG subgroup – Audio group was formed by several... more 

OGG VORBIS 

 
Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation (formerly Xiphophorus company). The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis.
 
Vorbis had been shown to perform significantly better than many other lossy audio formats in the past in that it produced smaller files at equivalent or higher quality while retaining computational complexity comparable to other MDCT formats such as AAC or Windows Media Audio.... more 

MONKEY’s AUDIO 

 
Monkey's Audio is a lossless file format for audio data compression. Monkey's Audio does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as AAC, MP3, Vorbis and Musepack.
Data file compression is employed in order to reduce bandwidth, and/or storage requirements. A digital recording (such as a CD) encoded to the Monkey's Audio format can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. As with the FLAC and Apple Lossless format, files encoded to Monkey's Audio are typically reduced to about half of the original size, with data transfer rates and... more 

FLAC 

 
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how ZIP works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favourite player just like you would an MP3 file.
 

 
Architecture

Similar to many audio coders, a FLAC encoder has the following stages:

• Blocking. The input is broken up into many contiguous blocks. With FLAC, the blocks may... more 

WINDOWS MEDIA AUDIO (wma) 

 
Windows Media Audio (wma) is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The original WMA codec, known simply as WMA, was conceived as a competitor to the popular MP3 and RealAudio codecs. WMA Pro, a newer and more advanced codec, supports multichannel and high-resolution audio. A lossless codec, WMA Lossless, compresses audio data without loss of audio fidelity (the regular... more 

WAVPACK 

 
Features
 
WavPack compression (.WV files) can compress (and restore) 8-, 16-, 24-, and 32-bit fixed-point, and 32-bit floating point audio files in the .WAV file format. It also supports surround sound streams and high frequency sampling rates. Like other lossless compression schemes, the data reduction rate varies with the source, but it is generally between 30% and 70% for typical popular music and somewhat better than that for classical music and other sources with greater dynamic range.




Hybrid mode
 
WavPack also incorporates a "hybrid" mode which still provides the features of lossless compression, but it creates two... more 

TRUE AUDIO 

 
True Audio is a lossless compressor for multichannel 8, 16 and 24 bits audio data. .tta is the extension to filenames of audio files created by the True Audio codec.
 
True Audio compresses Compression ratios up to 30% of the original, broadly similar to FLAC and APE. It features a real-time encoding and decoding algorithm and hardware compression support. As with most other lossless codecs, plugins are available for most media players.
 
TTA performs lossless compression on multichannel 8, 16 and 24 bit data of uncompressed wav input files. The term "lossless" refers to the fact that... more 

MUSEPACK 

Musepack was developed using the MP2 codec as a starting point, but many features have since been added, including:
 
subband selectable M/S encoding (as in AAC)

• Huffman coding (as in MP3 and AAC, but more efficient). Since SV8 the bitstream is compressed by highly optimized canonical huffman tables that yields 2% smaller files and faster decoding
• noise substitution techniques (as in ATSC A-52 and MPEG-4 AAC V2)
• pure variable bitrate between 0 and 1300 kbit/s (when needed)

 
The psychoacoustic model of MPC is based on MPEG ISO model 2, but is extended by CVD (clear voice detection). The... more