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Audio Formats
With the growth of the online music industry and the economies of selling music digitally online either through downloading or streaming, there has been a myriad of new audio formats developed. From uncompressed audio, used for CDs and PCs, to compressed audio, such as mp3s and RealAudio, the features that these formats encompass vary greatly. Bitrates, encoding, sampling rates, security, compression rates, and more might seem like far off technical terms, but they are integral to the performance and quality of these digital music formats.

  Topics
  What is Uncompressed Audio
  CDs and Redbook Audio
  Compressed Audio
  Audio Sample Rates
  The World of MPEG Audio
  The Future: MPEG-4 & MPEG-7
  Windows Media Audio & Liquid Audio
  VQF, ATRAC3, & ePac
  Audio Output Levels for PC
 

  FAQs

  How do I learn about uncompressed audio in terms of streaming bytes, CD rate, and bit depth?
  How do I learn how audio is compressed?
  How do I learn about the specific features of VQF audio?
  How do I locate and troubleshoot audio distortion from overload?
  How do I locate and fix audio distortion caused by software?