Different music files

Thanks

Originally posted by fasterthanlight
mpeg audio file...... well, i guess thats just like, a movie without pictures
aac is the same as mp3, but better compression/file size

Did you even bother to read what you were typing when you typed that statement?

:D

I understand what you meant but I wonder if you do.

Anyways, AAC is a newer form of audio compression currently being paraded around by Apple on the iPod. AAC compression, while similar to MP3 in most respects, uses a different psychoacoustic modeling technique (jargon-speak for music compression) to store audio data in a format which requires less space.

A typical 5 minute song on a real CD that you buy, if ripped from that CD and stored on your hard drive as audio data would take up roughly 51MB of disk space as raw data. The concept behind audio compression is to shrink (or compress) the amount of data and still get something left over that (as accurately as possible) represents what you originally started with.

AAC and MP3 are ways of compressing/shrinking audio and music files to (typically) 10 times smaller and still getting audio/music files that, when played back, offer very similar quality.

The yardstick that people always say is "CD quality". CD quality audio requires the roughly 51MB listed above for every 5 minutes of audio/music. With an MP3/AAC file for the same audio/music that file size drops down to an average of 4-6MB usually. It can be a much smaller file than that also, it depends on the encoding bitrate.

I don't want this to turn into a lengthy discussion about audio compression so I'll end it here and suggest checking out this site:

Hydrogen Audio (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org)

and reading some of the information there about audio compression technologies.

Good luck!

br0adband