I was asked in the forum recently by one of our users, Luffy, to do a post on audio files. This is because I’ve been dropping a lot of formats recently, such as OGG, MP3, FLAC, WMA, etc, and it gets confusing which is which, which is the best, which could be considered garbage, and so on and so forth. I know there’s a multitude of formats out there, but this article can’t quite possibly cover all of them. What I am going to cover is MP3, OGG, FLAC, WMA, and WAV. Hopefully at the end of all this, you’ll have a base-line understanding of the different formats and can choose carefully between all of them and know each one’s strengths and weaknesses.

Let’s start with the one nearly everyone knows: MP3. It is considered a make-shift standard in the file sharing world, and most, if not all the music out there today is MP3 format. This is due to the fact that everything supports it. Linux, Windows, Macintosh, iPod, Cowon, even the kings of unsupported audio files, Windows Media Player and iTunes support it. And for good reason. It’s small file size comes from the chopping off parts of the music that our ears can’t hear, making it smaller and sound exactly how we’d suspect an artist would sound. The MP3 format is also known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, referring to how it is encoded. It is considered a lossy format, meaning you will loose audio data during data compression. You will also notice the audio quality loss when it is less then 80Hz and greater then 18KHz, but normally, you will not notice the quality loss due to most MP3s not being able to be found in those bitrates. While I admit I use the format at times, the majority of my music is in a different format, thanks to audio converters.

Ogg Vorbis is considered an open format by comparison to MP3. It is by default supported by Linux and some media players, such as AIMP2, but is not supported by Windows Media Player and iTunes, along with the mass majority of portable media players on the market today. However, I personally believe it’s perks are pretty good. Like MP3, it is a lossy format, but it is much smaller in size while sounding very decent. It can also be lossless, but I’ve heard reports that as a lossless format, it is not as good as FLAC. To give an example, my OGG music is encoded at 92 kps, the way you can tell it’s quality. With MP3, I’d have to use a 320 kps to have the same quality of music. And to boot, it’s also as I said above, much smaller. To look at an example, compare the Ogg download to the MP3 download of Brad Sucks. It is 51.81 mb to download the MP3 version, or about ten megabytes more if you download the OGG version which is a much higher bitrate version, meaning it should sound a lot better on your ears. It must be noted though, that Ogg itself is a container format, and if you look hard enough, you will find some video OGG files as well as the audio files.

If you really must have the best sounding music, and don’t care for file size, FLAC is the only way to go. My audiophile friends use this format, and I’ve heard a single track can run upwards of 100 megabytes. While it is huge, the bitrate reflects the truth: it is the closest thing to CD and Studio quality you can get. Only a few media players I know of, portable and installable support it, but when you hear the quality of it, you might not want to go back to your lossy music ever again. FLAC is a lossless format, and remains to this day the standard if you demand a top of the line music format. FLAC also supports what is called “Read-Write Compression”, and it’s default settings, from 1 through 8 control how large it is. A uncompressed FLAC file (1) runs usually at around 70 megabytes, while a highly compressed one (8) will run about 20 megabytes, with the average (4) compression coming in at 30 to 50 megabytes.

WMA is an unusual format, if you ask me. It is an audio format produced and nearly solely supported by Microsoft, and is a lossy format. It is a very hard format to find by many means but often is used as the format of choice by music stores that enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM for short). It is a decent sized format, and was developed as a competitor to MP3, however, never really took off in many circles. In all my music, I only have three WMA files, only due to the fact that they are DRM locked and I have to find a converter for them, which I have not found one yet for free. When I find one, I will certainly write about it though. Much like MP3, it is widely supported, though iPod and iTunes, as well as the Macintosh do not perfectly play all WMAs.

Finally, WAV is the last format that we will be covering in this post. It is a large file when it is uncompressed, and is rather hard to find in general, legally or not. It is mostly an lossless format usually used on your Windows computer as those system sounds, such as the Start Up sounds. Personally, I am of the believe that this format is dying out as time goes on, even though as a lossless format, it is of a decent size comprise between FLAC and MP3.

Now what would I recommend the common reader? Unless you have the dying need of top quality music and if your portable media player as well as the one on your computer supports it, I would personally use the OGG format. If you are just a normal user that needs something that works, MP3 would be the recommendation then, because it works everywhere I’ve ever tried. And if you have some dying need to hear everything that an artist had recorded on their CD, FLAC is literally the only way to go.