music formats 101

i was out this afternoon doing errands and restocking my food supplies (indo mee.. the life of an overseas student). i browsed around and stopped at an electrical shop. my ipod has been busted for ages now and commuting around uk is not fun at all without a musical distraction. so, i've been looking around for a new media player. i have my sights on this little baby...

this tiny wonder is called the archos 605 wifi. it is the future of hand-held entertainment. it's a step up to the ipod video. this little miracle can do all what the ipod video can do but also can record shows from tv and surf the web via wifi. oh yeah.. so anyway, there i was looking for my future love but alas the guy said it would be in stores next month. but of course, sales people don't tend to let you go so easily. he showed me some other multi-media players (MMP), which they do have on their shelves.

"what about this one?" he began pointing to a not-archos 605 wifi. "it can play videos.. MP3s, MP4's, WMA's. you can scroll through your pictures. it's compatible with JPEG, BMP's, GIF's.."
i had to stop the man.. "haha! whoa! dude! stop giving me random acronyms here!"

the conversation went on for a while but the point i'm trying to make is that, i'm sure i'm not the only who completely cannot tell the difference between a true media format and a random 3-letter acronym being thrown at you. that's why i want to share the basic media formats with you.

welcome to music formats 101 everybody! okay, here are some of the basic formats that are out there and what their differences are.

MP3's - short for MPEG Audio Layer-3, is a digital music format which allows CD tracks to be reduced to around a tenth of their normal size without a significant loss of quality. therefore, it is a standard used for uploading/downloading music to/from the internet. it is compressed so that transfer times are faster. almost all media player can play this format. so, you can almost never go wrong with MP3s.

MP4's - just like MP3s work by compressing music and audio files without affecting the audio quality, MP4 files are compressed video files. MP4 is also known as MPEG-4 AVC, or advanced video coding. this new technology is going to make video files decrease in size so that they are easier to work with and support. what used to be massive video files of motion and audio are now compressed versions of the same material, called MP4s. now, some of you may suddenly remember that you have music files in MP4's and it works just fine. well, it is true you can play music in MP4's but it's just finicky. say your computer has loads of music.. some in MP3's and others in MP4's, then you want to burn an MP3 CD so that you can play hundreds of music on your MP3 CD player. you'll be gutted to discover some songs won't even be in your CD. also, some MMP's can't play MP4's.

WMA's - a.k.a Windows Media Audio. obviously, it's a format made by Microsoft's Media Player. it is an audio compression format similar to MP3, but with digital rights management (copy protection and usage restrictions) built-in, meaning, when you copy a music CD (original ones), the music file will come with information on it (artist's name, album name & cover, etc). it is cool in a sense that you don't have the monotonous job of naming each file, but this format has a major downside. WMAs can't be played on your ipods. just in case you didn't know, apple and microsoft aren't the best of friends and they're not sharing anytime soon..

AAC's - Advanced Audio Coding, is the WMA's competition. made as a standard format by Apple's ipod, iphone, itunes and, interestingly, also for Playstation 3. this format is a step up to MP3. it compresses the music file as much as MP3, except it doesn't lose almost any quality. like the WMA's it copies all the info on a music CD. i was once told by a friend that she doesn't use itunes anymore cause it kept changing her MP3s to AACs, which is a pain. personally, i think itunes is the best music player for your computer. why people still use WMP or Winamp, i do not know. if you are one of those people who are having the same problem and are thinking of changing to those other players, STOP! a short lesson on fixing the problem, next.

okay.. from your itunes,

• click edit -> preferences
• click on the advance tab
• then you'll see 3 more tabs in that menu (general, importing, burning)
• click on importing
• find the "import using:" option and just change it from "AAC encoder" to "MP3 encoder"

that's it! problem solved. all the music you put in your itunes from then on will convert to MP3s!

okay, that's it from me. i haven't even gone through picture formats yet. unless anyone is really interested, i'll leave that be.
hope you had a good read!