Understanding Digital Audio

Before you consider which upgrades to make, it helps to know a little about digital audio. You see, there are many different ways to store, play back, and record audio on your computer system.

All computer audio files are digital in nature hence the umbrella term, digital audio. The two most popular digital audio formats are MP3 and WMA, and most digital media player programs can play and record files in either format.

MP3 was the first widely used digital audio format, and remains the most popular format today. It was the first audio file format that combined near-CD quality sound with reasonably small file sizes. Before MP3, a CD's worth of music took up 600MB or more on your hard disk. With MP3, the same amount of music might only use 60MB of hard disk space.

Of course, MP3 isn't the only digital audio file format in use today. Microsoft is waging a strong campaign for its Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, which offers similar quality to MP3, but with slightly smaller files. Unfortunately, WMA also offers something that you might not want copy protection. Files encoded in the WMA format can be configured to play back only on the system that recorded the files. This means you're likely to stumble onto WMA files that were recorded on other computers that won't play back on your PC or were recorded on your computer, but won't play back on your portable audio player.