Bringing Yourself Up to Speed with AAC, MP3, and Digital Audio - Understand Other Digital Audio Formats
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For most of the music you store on your Mac and enjoy via iTunes or your iPod, you’ll want to use AAC, MP3, or whichever combination of the two you find most convenient. Both iTunes and the iPod can also use WAV files and AIFF files.
AIFF files and WAV files are basically the same thing—uncompressed PCM audio, which is also referred to as “raw” audio. AIFF files are PCM files with an AIFF header (the header is a section of identification information contained at the start of the file), while WAV files are PCM files with a WAV header. AIFF tends to be more widely used on the Mac than on Windows, which favors WAV. If you want the ultimate in audio quality, you can create AIFF files or WAV files from your CDs and store them on your computer or iPod. The problem with doing so is that each full-length CD will take up between 500MB and 800MB of disk space compared to the 50MB to 80MB it would take up compressed at 128 Kbps.
CAUTION: When you put uncompressed audio files on your iPod, you run into another problem: the battery wears out much more quickly. This is because the uncompressed files tend to be too large for your iPod’s memory to cache effectively, so the hard disk is used much more often than for compressed audio files.
For you as a digital-audio enthusiast, other formats that may be of interest include the following:
- WMA is an audio format developed by Microsoft. It’s the preferred format of Windows Media Player, the Microsoft audio and video player included with all desktop versions of Windows.
- mp3PRO is designed to be a successor to MP3, as its name implies. It delivers higher audio quality than MP3 at the same bitrates. For example, mp3PRO files encoded at the 64 Kbps bitrate are similar in quality to MP3 files encoded at the 128 Kbps bitrate. Like MP3, mp3PRO requires hardware and software manufacturers to pay royalties to Thomson Corporation.
- Ogg Vorbis is an open-source format that’s patent free. It’s relatively new and has yet to catch the public’s attention. You can get an Ogg Vorbis plug-in for QuickTime (from www.illadvised.com/~jordy) that enables iTunes to play Ogg Vorbis songs.
 This is chapter three of How to Do Everything with Your iPod & iPod Mini, by Guy Hart-Davis (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, ISBN 0072254521, 2004). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
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