Today, most of the music is listened to digitally. Or listen to your favorite songs directly through various streaming services or the files are dragged to your own mobile phone or laptop. In the second case in particular, it often happens that different music formats are used, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.
Because all music and sounds can be saved on devices in many different formats. Strictly speaking, these are audio formats that offer different sound quality and take up different amounts of storage space. Therefore, you will find below which audio format should be used and when.
MP3 is well known
Anyone who has anything to do with digital music will be familiar with the MP3 format. Even the MP-3 player bears the name of this format in its day. Not surprisingly, MP3 is the most popular music format in the world. It is a lossy format that removes sounds that are inaudible to humans, so to speak, to reduce the size of the rest of the file. This means that, as a mere mortal, you won’t hear any difference in quality, but the file has gotten up to 90 percent smaller.
WAV is a proprietary Windows format
WAV is a Windows container format that saves music uncompressed. On the contrary, this means that a lot of storage space is required to save all the songs, radio plays, etc. on your devices. Therefore, this format is not recommended for large music collections.
But you can use a special program to convert your WAV files to MP3 in a few minutes and thus save and play them on all your devices without any problem. The software is free and can be used without any prior knowledge; check here.
ALAC is Apple’s music format
This format can also be saved as “.m4a” or “.m4p” and is the predominant music format in the iTunes Store. With the ALAC format, compression is lossless, ensuring that the final file has very high audio quality, but it also requires a relatively large amount of storage space. Also, files that end in “.m4p” have some copy protection measures, which is why this format is often used for commercial purposes.
Free formats like FLAC or Ogg-Vorbis
Ogg-Vorbis is an alternative audio format, which is a combination of current “Vorbis” music compression technology and the “.ogg” container. The advantage of this format is, among other things, that less storage space is used than with MP3 files and, at the same time, the quality is usually even better. However, the big problem is that the format is very little known and therefore only a few devices can reproduce this format.
With FLAC, the advantage is elsewhere. No major corporation has the threads in the background here. Therefore, there is no copy protection for any files. Furthermore, the format offers similar quality and also takes up little storage space. But even with this format, compatibility issues with many devices can quickly arise.
MP3 offers the best overall picture
It should be clear that MP3 has been the best audio format to use for years and still is today. Especially in private use, the advantages are enormous and no other format can match it. To do this, an overview again of the most important aspects of the MP3 format:
High quality
Low consumption of storage space.
Compatible with virtually any device
High level of consciousness
