Article by Adam Singleton

The music industry has evolved considerably over the past ten years. CDs, mini-discs and cassettes have stepped aside for mp3s, mp4s, AACs and countless other digital music formats. But what are all these different formats all about?

The phrase ‘mp3 player’ has emerged as a sort of umbrella term for all digital music players, regardless of what format they play. So even if your digital media player plays AAC only as its native format, the chances are you’ll still call it an mp3 player. The all-conquering, ubiquitous iPod is often referred to as an mp3 player, even though its default format is AAC.

Furthermore, given that the mighty iPod is by far the most popular portable music player, its name is also often used synonymously with ‘portable music player’, regardless of what brand of player it is. It’s almost assumed that if you have a portable digital music box, it’ll be an iPod.

To discuss all the different formats in detail would probably bore everyone but the geekiest of geeks. However, it does pay to know a little about audio formats, as it can affect the quality of the music that you listen to on your mp3 player/iPod/digital music player or whatever you like to call it.

In a nutshell, the best quality digital audio formats are those that are uncompressed. So if you ever put a CD (remember those?) into your computer to ‘rip’ the music onto your hard-drive, and you want to maintain the original CD quality, then the resulting file format is likely to be WAV, AIFF, AU or raw header-less PCM. The main downside to maintaining CD quality formats, however, is that the file sizes will be huge and you won’t be able to fit nearly as much music on your portable music player than if you compress the songs first.

However, there is what’s known as ‘lossless’ compression formats, such as FLAC, which reduce the file sizes a little but maintain the original quality of the music.

Then, you have ‘lossy’ file formats such as mp3, mp4, WMA, AAC and countless others. You can often choose how much you want to compress your music by when copying music from a CD onto your computer. It’s unlikely you’d ever want to go lower than a 128Kbps bit-rate for your compression, as even the un-fussiest of ears will notice the difference then.

Alas, an mp3 music download, FLAC music download or any other digital music download format all points to the same thing: people simply love downloading music.

CDs may not be obsolete quite yet, but they certainly seem to be on their way out. With more sophisticated digital music formats, and advances in digital music player technology, people can carry an increasingly large amount of music around with them. And for many people, the format of their music doesn’t really matter one way or another… as long as it sounds good.

About the Author

Adam Singleton writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client of said agency. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.

Find More Digital Music Player Articles