Audio standards



Acronym

Full Name

Purpose

Description

Reference

MP3

MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3

Standard for Audio Data Encoding

Perceptual audio coding scheme, exploiting the properties of the human ear, and trying to maintain the original sound quality as far as possible. Actually, Layer 3 it is a particular audio coding scheme inside the MPEG standard that uses the same basic structure as Layer 1 and Layer 2.

http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/techinf/layer3/index.html

WAV

Microsoft wave format

Audio format to store digitised sound

Audio uncompressed format used by Windows to store digitised sound. Since it is uncompressed, a WAV file can be very large (10MBytes per minute of audio approximately) to get a good audio quality. But this size and the quality can be controlled by different parameters. Among others it is possible to choose sampling rate, the number of channels, transfer rate and block alignment.

http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/default.asp

RealAudio

RealAudio

Real-time audio delivery over the Internet

A RealAudio encoding tool uses a codec to compress the original sound file and create a RealAudio clip. RealPlayer uses the same codec to decompress the streamed RealAudio clip for playback. There are two criteria to choose a codec for compression in the RealAudio clip: Bandwidth and Audio Quality.

http://www.real.com