10MM138 Audio File Formats

If you’ve surveyed the growing crowd of file formats with a touch of apprehension and confusion, you’re almost certainly not alone. Mark Cousins gets packing.

The days of tape-based storage and playback are long gone – the world of media is now firmly entrenched in the digital age, with music being recorded, edited, mixed and archived on hard drives. However, because tape was once a relatively universal standard (assuming the tape width and track count were the same) the recordings were largely compatible between playback systems. This isn’t the case in the digital age, though, with a multitude of different file formats currently available to essentially do the same job.

This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 67
Filed under General Features, Ten Minute Masters, Features

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