SizeCompressionQualityBit rate
There are several formats for digital music files. Perhaps the best known of these is MP3, popularized by portable MP3 players like Apple's iPod and Microsoft's Zune. Another important audio file format is WAV, the default format for songs on a CD, but it differs from MP3 in many fundamental ways.
Size
The reason MP3 files have become so popular today is because they are small in size, allow fast downloads, and require little storage space. On the other hand, WAV files, always larger, require more time to download and take up a greater amount of space on the hard disk. This difference in size in the files influences the other important differences between them.
Compression
If you have a large image file, one way to reduce it is to convert it to a lower resolution, for example 100 dots per inch instead of 300. Reducing the resolution of the image and letting it occupy the same physical space is known as compression . Similarly, although WAV and MP3 files of the same song have identical playback times, the latter files are smaller in size as they contain a smaller amount of digital information. Another way of defining compression is that WAV files are essentially original recordings, while MP3 files are copies.
Quality
The obvious implication of an MP3 file that is compressed is that its quality is lower than that of a WAV file, just as a 100-dot-per-inch image is less sharp and clear than one of 300. Sound lovers, for whom the small differences in audio quality are very noticeable, they generally swap and share music with WAV files instead of MP3 to preserve sound file complexities such as depth and dynamics between loud and soft sounds in a song.
Bit rate
Not all MP3 files are of poor quality. The extent to which the sound quality of an MP3 file is affected depends on the bit rate of the file. This refers to the amount of data transmitted per second when the file is played. As you might expect, 256 and 320 bit rates result in higher quality playback than lower rates like 96 or 128. For example, the difference between a 96-bit MP3 file and the original WAV file is very obvious. .