AIFF - WAV - MP3 - WMA - RA

Audio Interchange File Format	WAV	MP3	Windows Media Audio	RA
It is  a common format for storing and transmitting sampled sound. The format was developed by Apple Computer It is the standard audio format for Macintosh computers and used by Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI). AIFF files generally end with a .AIF or .IEF extension AIFF format does not support data compression so AIFF files tend to be large	The format for storing sound in files developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM. Support for WAV files was built into Windows 95 making it the de facto standard for sound on PCs.  WAV sound files end with a.wav extension and can be played by nearly all Windows applications that support sound.	The name of the file extension and also the name of the type of file for MPEG, audio layer 3 The result in real terms is layer 3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD (with a bit rate of 1411.2 kilobits per one second of stereo music) by a factor of 12 (down to 112-128kbps) without sacrificing sound quality. Because MP3 files are small, they can easily be transferred across the Internet.	A Microsoft file format for encoding digital audio files similar to MP3 though can compress files at a higher rate than MP3. WMA files, which use the ".wma" file extension, can be of any size compressed to match many different connection speeds, or bandwidths.	The de facto standard for streaming audio data over the World Wide Web.  RealAudio was developed by Real Networks and supports FM-stereo-quality sound. To hear a Web page that includes a RealAudio sound file, you need a RealAudio player orplug-in, a program that is freely available from a number of places. It's included in current versions of both Netscape Navigator anMicrosoft.