They're all audio formats. An audio format is the way a piece of digitized music is stored on your computer. They're all different, but accomplish a similar goal. It's sort of like how you'd save your essay for a class in a Text File, Word file, or a Word 2007 file: they're just different.
Selecting a Format
Selecting an audio format to choose for your music library is a tough choice because so many exist. It's important to choose one that will work for what you need. For most people, that format is MP3. Audiophiles swear by OGG (vorbis) or FLAC lossless, however those audio formats aren't as compatible as the mainstream ones. The big difference between formats is hard drive space and quality of sound. If you need to store massive amounts of music, consider storing it as OGG files or something with a very high compression ratio. If you want the most playability, select MP3.
One note about MP3: It's a great format, but it's licensed. This means that people using Open Source/free programs may not be able to read it. If you're into distributing audio as an artist, consider distributing both MP3 and OGG versions of your music to appeal to both commercial and noncommercial products and systems.
Encoding
Different audio types are not directly compatible with eachother. One of the hardest things is changing types of audio from one to another. You may have a program on your computer that only plays MP3's, for example, but all of your music is in MP4 or M4A. You can't just rename the file, you have to re-encode it!
There's a lot of programs out there for reencoding music, but a well featured one is MediaCoder (Sourceforge). Here's a quick crash course on how to use it:
At the top, select Add, and then the option most closely matching how you want to locate your music files. Add file is used for one or two files, but Add folder can be used to import entire folders, and even the folder's subfolders! If you are reencoding an iTunes media directory, select Add folders recursively.
The next step is to select the General tab in the middle of the screen. You may choose to place the output files wherever you'd like. For ease of use, I'd suggest a different folder. Select the audio tab and set the encoder to whatever filetype you'd like to convert to. On the right side, select the tab for the encoder type you previously selected, and configure options as necessary. Some experience on audio types is required to select the right options, but for typical MP3's you can pick Custom / CBR / 128 / Channel: Stereo.
At the top of the program click Actions, then Transcode! It takes a few minutes to transcode each music file, so the process may take a few days to finish.
Review
That's most of the basics you need for managing audio types on your computer. For more information, check out the Wikipedia page on the topic!
Stay tuned tomorrow for another article about audio management!
Posts
0 people left comments. Add one?:
Post a Comment