Audio Recording format

i-Sound recorder support few popular output formats including MP3, WMA, WAV, APE and OGG. There are three categories of audio formats - uncompressed, lossless and lossy.

• Uncompressed Audio Formats

  WAV - (WAVE), short for Waveform audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing audio on PCs. It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw audio. The most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio and uncompressed WAV files are quite large in size, so, it has declined in popularity. WAV files are probably the simplest of the common formats for storing audio samples. Unlike MPEG audio and other compressed formats, WAVs store samples "in the raw" where no pre-processing is required other that formatting of the data. The WAV file itself consists of three "chunks" of information: The RIFF chunk which identifies the file as a WAV file, The FORMAT chunk which identifies parameters such as sample rate and the DATA chunk which contains the actual data (samples).

  Players Supported: iPod, iPhone, Creative Zen, PSP, Blackberry, Cowon, iRiver


• Lossless Audio Formats

  APE - (monkey's audio) A file with the extension .ape, is an audio file compressed using Monkey's Audio. Monkey's Audio is a lossless compression, which means it does not permanently discard data during compression. It achieves compression rates of around 40%. Since it is lossless, the quality of the audio after compression will be the exact same. And we can only convert the CD and uncompressed WAV to APE for the moment, MP3 is not available. Officially, Monkey's Audio is only available for the Microsoft Windows platform.

  Players Supported: Zune, Cowon, iRiver.


• Lossy Audio Formats

  MP3 - is an acronym for MPEG-1 (or MPEG-2) Layer 3 audio encoding (it is not an acronym for MPEG-3). MP3 is a popular compression format used for audio files on computers and portable devices.

  Players Supported: iPod, iPhone, Zune, PSP, Creative Zen, Blackberry, Archos, Cowon, iRiver

  
  

  WMA - (Windows Media Audio) is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. It can be played by Windows Media player, RealPlayer, Winamp, Windows Movie Maker, and the Microsoft Zune media management software supports most WMA codec. Its audio quality is better than mp3 when the bitstream is below 128kbps, but won't get much improvement when the bitstream gets higher.

  Players Supported: Zune, Creative Zen, Blackberry, Cowon, iRiver, Archos, PSP

  
  

  OGG - Ogg is the name of an open source multimedia project maintained by the xiph.org foundation. OGG Vorbis refers to the lessee general purpose audio compression format that surpasses mp3 in quality and rivals new formats such as AAC and TwinVQ (a.k.a. VQF).

  Players Supported: Zune, Cowon, iRiver

Bit Rate - Bitrate or Bit rate is the average number of bits that one second of audio data will consume. Higher bitrate means bigger file size and generally better audio quality while lower bitrate means lower file size but worse audio quality.