RECORDING FORMATS

Formats are the types of encoded audio signal data that a recording device can convert an audio signal into. There are plenty of encoding formats. An audio codec is a program inside the audio recording device that changes the audio signal into the different file formats.

These formats can be compressed and uncompressed. The compression factor deals with the quality of the audio format. A couple of popular codecs are:

• Compressed formats: Mp3, WMA, and Vorbis; and
• Uncompressed formats: WAV, AAC and OGG.