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Digital Music File Formats
AudioTron plays music files stored in the MP3, WMA and WAV formats.
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WAV
format preserves CD-Quality audio, which is sampled at 16 bits 44.1kHz. Although this
is the purest form of audio, it also takes up a significant amount of hard drive space (a typical
three-minute song consumes more than 30MB of hard disk space.)
•
MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer III)
format uses a compression process that implements psychoacoustic
principles to reduce the file size while preserving a high level of sound quality. Digital music
files encoded using MP3 technology ("MP3 files") are very popular on the Internet, due to their
combination of good sound quality and small file size (a three-minute song can be reduced to
less than 3MB—a factor of 10 reduction as compared to WAV format.)
•
WMA (Windows Media™ Audio)
format was developed by
Microsoft as an alternative to
MP3 for compressed digital audio. Similar in many ways to the equally common MP3 format,
WMA offers equal sound quality in an even smaller file size.
MP3 and WMA
compressed audio formats reduce the size of an audio file by removing some of the
sounds determined to be “inaudible”. Although the playback quality of these compressed audio
formats is good enough for most listeners, some audiophiles can hear the difference between
compressed and uncompressed audio. For this reason, AudioTron is capable of playing true CD-
Quality audio in uncompressed WAV format when used with an Ethernet network.
Playback of uncompressed WAV audio will be most important for audiophiles who can discern the
loss of dynamic range and other limitations of compressed audio formats. For these listeners,
maximum fidelity will be achieved when playing WAV files through AudioTron’s S/PDIF optical
digital output.
In most cases, the MP3 or WMA formats offer acceptable listening quality, especially when
recorded at the higher sample rate options. However, the following table lists some of the issues to
consider when deciding which format to use for storing music files:
WAV format benefits
WAV format drawbacks
Preserves all of the qualities of the original CD
recordings by maintaining the original 16-bit,
44.1kHz standard used for CD recordings. MP3 and
WMA formats remove audio information that is
determined to be “inaudible” in order to compress
the file size.
The highest fidelity is achieved when using
AudioTron's optical digital output with uncompressed
WAV format.
WAV format lets you burn high-quality custom CDs
from your music library (using third-party programs.)
Although some programs will create a CD from files
saved in MP3 or WMA format, these compressed
formats must be converted to uncompressed WAV
format prior to creating the CD. This process will
reduce the audio quality of the resulting CD.
Typically, WAV format does not include song tags as
do MP3 and WMA formats. So, AudioTron will only
display the file name and can’t display or sort songs by
title Artist, Album, Genre, etc.. However, the
AudioStation 4.1 program lets you add tag information
to WAV files so that they can be sorted and displayed
just like WMA and MP3 formats.
WAV files cannot be transferred to portable digital
audio players. Typically, these players are only
compatible with MP3 and WMA formats.
WAV format can take up more than 10 times as much
hard drive space as MP3 and WMA formats.
AudioTron does not support WAV format on an HPNA
network. Ethernet network is required for playback of
WAV files.