Digital audio files can be split into two groups: lossy and lossless audio formats. Lossy music files are suitable for most digital audio players, software applications and do not occupy a lot of hard drive space on your computer. Lossless files maintain the original audio quality of your music CD's.
In other words, you can shift your CD tracks to the computer without any sound quality loss. Among the most popular lossless audio formats, we can name WAV, FLAC, APE, WV, lossless Real Audio files and WMA lossless and many others. These files preserve every bit of audio information, so they cannot be small like MP3 or AAC. But, with the availability of fast online MP3 converter, you can convert all your digital formats in a matter of seconds.
Compressed or lossy audio is small and convenient for practically any digital audio player, they do not need a lot of disk space, are easy to upload and share. The most popular compressed files that we deal with are for sure MP3, WMA (Windows Media Audio) and AAC (iPod audio).
During the compression process, the audio files lose important audio info like very high and very low frequencies. In the result, the files sound a bit shabby. That's because most audiophiles prefer listening to music in one of the lossless formats.