2. Music file formats

Music can be stored as a digital file to be played back through a suitable medium.

The most popular file format is the highly compressed MP3 format because it retains almost all the quality of the music and yet keeps file size right down.

For example a typical music track lasting 4 minutes or so will be around 3 Megabyte in MP3 format.

However if the recording needs to stored with all its original data intact then a lossless format needs to be used such as WAV or AIFF.

This will be a far larger file. But it does make editing the music much easier within an editing application because one part is entirely independent of another part - unlike the compressed version which makes clever use of patterns within the whole file.