Digital audio formats: WMA
The name comes from the acronym of its name Windows Media Audio, which as we mentioned is the format of music files owned by the company Microsoft. One of the fundamental characteristics of this format is that those files that have been compressed in WMA format are smaller than MP3s, and therefore their quality decreases, although it retains certain parameters for the care of data integrity and quality .
That is why it is considered that Windows Media Audio is a lossy audio compression format, although it continues to be one of the main competencies of MP3, due to its wide spread, especially on the web.
It is usually a format that is often used on various websites for pre-listening or sampling of music, but it is also usually included in some models of portable digital music players.
On the other hand, for years it is the format par excellence in the tasks related to audio within the Windows operating system, which includes by default the Windows Media Player.
It should be noted that due to its frequent use, in recent years the majority of PC audio players include the necessary codecs to allow WMA playback.
However, the MP3 continues to be the market leader in digital audio formats, since WMA has not been able to capture the attention of users because it has a security infrastructure that protects copyright and Copyright, so it is not usually used for downloads on P2P networks.
On the other hand, it is important to mention that the WMA is closely linked to two other formats, the Windows Media Video, known as WMV, and the Advanced Streaming Format, more popular by its acronym ASF.
Digital audio formats: FLAC
The word FLAC refers to the acronym of the English name Free Lossless Audio Codec, that is to say, codec free of lossless audio compression, which indicates that we are facing one of the audio formats that prioritizes quality before the size of records.
Emerged within the community responsible for the Ogg project, FLAC has recently become one of the strongest competitors in the WAV format, due to its advantages in sound quality.
As it works by preventing loss of audio quality, the FLAC only manages to reduce the size of the original sound files by a third of the original size, because it retains the information contained in the original file, depending on the file that will be Processed by this method.
In this sense, it is important to mention that as with the rest of the formats without loss, in FLAC the final quality of the file depends largely on the musical style, its complexity and the sound variety, which characterize the own sound file
However, it should be noted that the FLAC system has been designed precisely to compress audio, so the resulting files tend to be smaller compared to the original files.
In short, what the FLAC compression system does is eliminate certain data from the source files, which are usually known as waste, without causing loss of quality.
Known for their “.flac” extension, files of this type can be played by a limited group of players that have the necessary codecs for it.
