Audio Formats:
MP3 - MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III:
Name of the type of file for MPEG, audio layer 3. Layer 3 is one of three coding schemes (layer 1, layer 2, and layer 3) for the compression of audio signals.
Layer 3 uses perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information. It also adds an MDCT (Modified Discrete Cosine Transform) that implements a filter bank, increasing the frequency resolution 18 times higher than that of layer 2.
The result in real terms is layer 3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD (with a bit rate of 1411.2 kilobits per one second of stereo music) by a factor of 12 (down to 112-128kbps) without sacrificing sound quality.
3 - Southeast Asia, South Korea, Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Macau.
4 - Mexico, Central America, Caribbean, South America, New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea and much of Oceania.
5 - India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Africa (except Egypt, South Africa, Swaziland, and Lesotho), Central and South Asia, Mongolia, North Korea.
6 - People's Republic of China.
7 - Reserved for future use (found in use on protected screener copies of MPAA-related DVDs and "media copies" of pre-releases in Asia)
8 - International venues such as aircraft, cruise ships, etc.
ALL - Region ALL discs have all eight flags set, allowing the disc to be played in any locale on any player.
WMA - Windows Media Audio:
Short for Windows Media Audio, WMA is a Microsoft file format for encoding digital audio files similar to MP3 though can compress files at a higher rate than MP3. WMA files, which use the ".wma" file extension, can be of any size compressed to match many different connection speeds, or bandwidths.
WAV:
WAV is the format used for storing sound in files developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM. Support for WAV files was built into Windows 95 making it the de facto standard for sound on PCs. WAV sound files end with a .wav extension and can be played by nearly all Windows applications that support sound.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec:
Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an audio compression codec that employs a lossless data compression algorithm. A digital audio recording compressed by FLAC can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data.
Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced to 50–60% of their original size.
It can handle any PCM bit resolution from 4 to 32 bits per sample, any sampling rate from 1 Hz to 655,350 Hz in 1 Hz increments, and any number of channels from 1 to 8.
Channels can be grouped in cases like stereo and 5.1 channel surround to take advantage of interchannel correlations to increase compression.
