Audio Management- Knowing Your Various File Formats

Put in simple terms audio management is nothing but downloading, organizing, searching your music contents and being able to play any of these files at any time and manipulate the functioning of these files without manual interaction. Today there are a number of software's available that serve all or more of these functions mentioned above. With the age of sophistication and development of technology one can find up gradation in software every now and then.
Before going in for a specific form of audio management software one needs to know about the various forms of file formats that music is available and is downloaded as well as conversion of one format to another. An audio or music file format is the way of storing your musical data on to your PC. It generally is a container or data format with storage layers being properly defined. On the other hand it can also be a raw bit stream format. One should at the same time know the difference between a musical file format and a codec. While the file format is the way of storing the data in the form of a specific file, codec refers to decoding and encoding of the raw musical data. In general many of the file formats support only a single type of audio data but some of the technically advanced multimedia container formats support multiple versions of video and audio formats. There are 3 main categories of file formats for audio files: Uncompressed audio file formatting - commonly referred as PCM formats they cannot be compressed at all. In other words the data is completely available and also runs the risk of large file sizes. Good examples of such files are the wav files, aiff/au formats, cda formats (got from musical cds), bwf formats (broadcasting formats) and the header less raw pcm forms. Loosless compressed file formatting - though more efficient in storage space management its processing time is longer when compared to uncompressed form. In this format the music takes very little space and the silence takes almost nil space. Compression does not lead to any data loss or change in quality of the digital musical file. Examples for this type are the wma lossless formats, flac formats, wavpack formats etc. they come with ratio of 2:1 compression. Lossy compression- this form may lead to some data loss as the process does away with the unwanted and redundant data. This leads to even smaller file sizes and hence has gained ample popularity with online music data files as transmission also becomes easy and less time consuming. Examples of this format are the mp3, mp4 file formats, wma lossy formats, real audio file formats, ogg file formats etc. Conversion factor between different file formats also becomes important while going in for software, given the wide range of musical forms available today. With the technical advancements available one can easily convert one form to the other and make it compatible. Many of the software offer standard tools for conversion and CD burning to create your own playlist and CD.