Audio File Formats and Quality Settings
There are many different audio file formats, and Audacity supports a lot of them. Let’s look at WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis. These well-supported, popular formats serve different purposes.
Understanding File Formats
WAV files are uncompressed, high-quality pulse-code modulation (PCM) files. They are large. One minute of a CD-quality stereo WAV recording consumes about 10MB of disk space. WAV is the best-supported format and is the quality standard by which other formats are measured.
MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, not MPEG-3) is a popular compressed, lossy encoding format; an MP3 file can be as small as one-tenth the size of a similar WAV file and still sound pretty good. This means you can cram a lot more music ...
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