SOUND FORMATS

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SOUND FORMATS

Men and Women are born different. They think different. They act different. Result ! They design things according to their taste and wish.. Sound files used in the modern computers by various designers are so very different from each other, that formats have become exclusive.

Given below are the sound file extensions used.

.au	Old lenix
.aiff	Audio interchange file format
.swf	Flash
.mov	Quick time player
.ra or .ram	Real player
.rmf	Beatnik player
.swa	Shockwave
.asf or .asx	Windows media player
.wav	Original designed by MS and IBM
.mp3	Most popular now.Mpec1,2,3 layer compressed.
.midi ,.mid or .smf	synthesizer

Designers and programmers burnt their candles to arrive at reasonable file size and acceptable quality. MP3 format has become famous now on this score. WAV formats were designed originally by Microsoft and IBM when computers started merging multimedia with pure computing. Since the original sounds are transferred totally, the WAV files are too big , one simple song of 3 minute duration may take from 25 to 35 MB. That is why an audio CD of 750 MB capacity contains only 12 to 16 tracks. Hence these original WAV formats are compressed, filtered and resized to get different formats of lower size. MP3 is one format done at high sample rate to boost the quality after cutting down so many sounds.

Nowadays programs are available to convert WAV files to other formats. Details given in the tables were the answers to these conversion. If you are concerned about file sizes, reduction can be done by simple editing also. The sound can be changed from Stereo to mono cutting the file by half, by changing the size from 16 bit to 8 bit , by reducing the sample rate from high value to around 15 to 20 khz. Etc.