In the world of digital audio there are number of audio formats and compression algorithms that are used to produce and reproduce music. This is not intended to be a discussion on the merits or shortcomings of all of the options availble. We just want to help everyone understand why we decided on a file format (.wav) that makes our downloads rather large. In a nutshell, we believe there is nothing like the original so that is what we provide. To fully understand we need a quick lesson in audio compression.
Lossless or Lossy, what's to lose?
All Audio files fall into one of two categories, Lossless or Lossy. Lossless means that the file format is essentially an exact copy of the original. There is "no loss" of audio quality. These file types are of the the highest possible quality and are most commonly .wav files. High Quality, 16 Bit Stereo is produced at a bitrate of about 1400kbps. Compare that with a typical .mp3 that is encoded at anywhere from 128-320kbps and you can see that there is big difference in the two formats. The trade off for that quality is that there is little or no compression on the file so they are rather large in size. A single song in a lossless format will typically be in 30-50 MB range. We certainly could have chosen a lossless format that would have allowed at least some compression. However, going with .wav makes it easy for our customers to get the music, burn it, use it with a digital audio player (or anything else) without having to convert files or download and learn new software.
Lossy audio formats are those files where compression algorithms are used to shrink the file size while attempting preserve as much of the music quality as possible. Basically, during conversion the file is checked for places where data can be removed with some level of surety that it will be undetectable or nearly undetectable to the human ear. In short it loses data from the track. Lossy audio dramatically decreases file size, and depending on the bitrate used, leaves behind a very good duplicate of the original. It continues to be topic of much heated debate as to which formats are best and whether or not our ears are actually capable of telling the difference between the original and a high quality version of any of the lossy formats.
...and?
Yes, we understand that this is a very basic explanation of how this all works. There is certainly much more information available on the internet if you'd like to learn more. In the end, we wanted to provide you essentially the same product for download that you would buy in a store. We'll leave it up to you to decide what you do with it from there. Enjoy the music!
