Windows 8 In Depth

Specifying the Quality of the Recording

The tracks on an audio CD use the CD Audio Track file format (.cda extension), which represents the raw (uncompressed) audio data. You can’t work with these files directly because the CDA format isn’t supported by Windows 8 and because these files tend to be huge (usually double-digit megabytes, depending on the track). Instead, the tracks need to be converted into a Windows 8–supported format (such as WMA). This conversion usually involves compressing the tracks to a more manageable size. However, because the compression process operates by removing extraneous data from the file (that is, it’s a lossy compression), there’s a tradeoff between file size and music quality. That is, the higher the compression, ...