What are the different formats of audio files?
The different formats of audio files are mp3,flac,wav,wma,alac,m4a,ogg,mpc,aac etc.The most commonly used formats are mp3,m4a,flac&wav.
What is the difference between these formats?
The quality(bitrate&frequency), the amplitude (loudness,can be increased manually)& compression(lossy,lossless) are the factors which make difference between them. wav (.wav) is the best & old format for storing high quality audio. Flac and Alac are little compressed form of wav . Flac and Alac are lossless formats unlike others. Mp3 and Aac (successor of mp3) formats are lossy and only uses less amount of space.
What is the meaning of the term 'bitrate' in audios?
Bitrate literally means the number of bits in one(per) second. This means that if the bits per second is higher the size of the audio file will also be higher.
How does bitrate affect the quality of a audio file?
This is the place where most people are confused. As mention above bitrate literally means the number of bits per second in a audio file. The bit is the smallest unit of data. Small number of bits makes a byte and this goes on from bit to petabyte or more. This is a storage unit . mp3 formats are extremely compressed from orginal audio files. When compressing a audio file to mp3 a large amount of bits are being lost. These lost bits can make some parts of the audio horriable making the quality less. But if we consider Flac and Alac which are also compressed files but not too much the amount of bits lost will be lesser than that of mp3. This is why Flac and Alac are considered to have much higher quality than mp3. The size of Flac and Alac will be higher than mp3 as the compression level is lesser.aac is similar to mp3.
What do you mean by sampling rate ?
Sampling rate is often referred as frequency but its a little different from that. Frequency is the number of waves per unit time . I am not going deep into frequency as you can refer wikipedia. So coming to sampling rate.Sampling rate is the number of samples per second in a audio file . It is also measured by the unit Hz or KHz. The main difference is that if a audio is having a sample rate of 44.1 KHz the frequency will be only 22KHz. This is why humans can hear the sound of 44.1Khz.
What is bit depth?
Bitdepth is totally different from bitrate. You may have heard of color depth. This is similar to that. Bit depth means the accuracy of a wave in audio. This is measured by bits. Eg:-24bit,16bit. Unlike color depth audio doesn't have 32bit. This is because we are not that much advanced in technology.
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Audio