A STUDY ON AUDIO FILE FORMATS

Music which is an integrated part of the human life has to be stored so that it can be enjoyed wherever and whenever needed. The audio files can be stored in. uncompressed PCM signals or stored in compressed format to storage space. The compression can be lossless or lossy. The lossless format Wav and lossy format Mp3 are most popularly used. While storing audio, it needs to be indexed, annotated and organized. It's easier to add the metadata to a compressed file rather than uncompressed file which takes lots of space. The Mp3 (MPEG-1 Layer III) formats stands out by being the most used format for streaming music through online and in storing in various cloud platforms. It seems the obvious choice to research on Music information retrieval and Content-based audio identification.