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The 'Music' category is merely a guideline on commercialized uses of a particular format, not a technical assessment of its capabilities. For example, MP3 and AAC dominate the personal audio market in terms of market share, though many other formats are comparably well suited to fill this role from a purely technical standpoint.
FLAC is specifically designed for efficient packing of audio data, unlike general-purpose lossless algorithms such as DEFLATE, which are used in ZIP and gzip. While ZIP may reduce the size of a CD-quality audio file by 10–20%, FLAC is able to reduce the size of audio data by 40–50% by taking advantage of the characteristics of audio.
The most widely used audio coding formats are MP3 and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), both of which are lossy formats based on modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) and perceptual coding algorithms. Lossless audio coding formats such as FLAC and Apple Lossless are sometimes available, though at the cost of larger files.
Audio file icons of various formats. An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, often using lossy compression.
FLAC, M4A, MP3, OGG, WMA AIFF, ALAC, WAV None Maximum file size: No Limit No Limit 300 MB 200 MB or 2 hours [16] 250 MB [17] Free Bitrate: Original Quality
MP3 MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III is a patented encoding format for digital audio which uses a form of lossy data compression. PCM Pulse-code modulation is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard method of storing audio in computers and various Blu-ray, DVD and Compact Disc formats.
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According to Apple, audio files compressed with its lossless codec will use up "about half the storage space" that the uncompressed data would require. Testers using a selection of music have found that compressed files are about 40% to 60% the size of the originals depending on the kind of music, which is similar to other lossless formats. [3] [4]