Digital sound is nothing more than numbers. What separates one container from another is how those numbers are packed, how much data (if any) is thrown away, and which devices understand the result.

If you use iTunes or if you buy and download digital music, you’ll have come across a number of terms and abbreviations that describe digital audio files. This alphabet soup can be quite confusing.

Charnita is a wife, pet mom, tech enthusiast, and part-time freelance writer with over 14 years of experience. She's done countless app roundups, product reviews, and tutorials! In her free time, she ...

I regularly get questions about lossless audio files, or files compressed in a lossless format, for my Ask the iTunes Guy column. These questions come from people who seek to listen to the best ...

MP3 file format (short for MPEG Audio layer 3) is a lossy audio data compression format, developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This format is used to compress normal ...

If you stream music (and who doesn't these days) you've obviously come across abbreviations at the end of the audio files. The acronyms reading WAV, FLAC, MP3 and so on, are called audio codecs. You ...

Audio files come in different formats, sizes, and quality. Many media players cannot play every type of format, and there are certain functionalities that are limited to a few audio formats. Thus, it ...

Digital music comes in many different formats – almost everyone knows MP3 thanks to Napster at the end of the last century, but what about OGG, AIFF, MQA or DSD? Confused? Don't worry, we're here to ...