Exercise 1

Research and explain when you would use the following sound formats and why:

Uncompressed: wav, aiff, au, smp, voc.

• WAV: this sound format can be played by nearly all Windows applications that support sound. WAV files also always have little-endian byte order. Large in size. Would be useful for music files, since it also has high quality.
• AIFF: Commonly used for storing and transmitting sampled sound. It has a high quality of sound. Very similar to WAV, so this file is good for music because of the large size format and the high quality.
• AU:  the standard audio file format used by Sun, Unix and Java. Can be either used for music or simple sound fx, due to its size.
• SMP and VOC can be used for sound effects. Most applications and devices don't support these sound formats.

Lossy compression: mp3, ra, vox.

• MP3: this sound format has good quality and small size, perfect for storing music files. Since it cuts out parts of the file that are inaudible, this sound format is not good for voice storage.
• ra: Often used as a streaming audio format, so it's perfect for internet videos, or radio stations.
• VOX: good for storing voice files or simple sound fx. It's an old sound format, so nowadays it's not really used at all.

How can resolution and bit-depth constrain file size?

The bigger the resolution and the more bit-depth, so the bigger the size and quality, the bigger the file size will be.

Sample rate: The number of samples of audio carried per second on an audio file.

Mono: When you hear sound as if it's coming from one position.

Stereo: When you hear sound as if it's coming from 2 positions, left and right.

Surround: When you hear sound coming as if it's coming from multiple positions.