Playing and Creating Lossless Audio

Dennis writes, I have noticed a lot of lossless format items being posted in the binaries.mp3 groups on usenet. What exactly is lossless and what do you need to play or create these files? Lossless audio files are compressed audio files that are smaller in size than uncompressed WAV audio without any loss in quality from the original file. Compression formats like MP3 actually remove detail from the original audio in order to reduce file size. Lossless audio stores audio details in a more efficient way, reducing the space required to store the audio information contained in the file, without changing the quality of the audio. Lossless audio formats can be thought of as similar to the way zip files reduce the space required to store a document, without actually altering a document. Playing back lossless audio files and creating lossless audio files varies depending on which specific lossless format you are referring to. There are a number of lossless standards, including a lossless ...

14:43:23 March 3, 2006, Friday (PST) Source: Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

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