Wav, mp3, aiff

Wav: 
WAV is an audio file format that was developed by Microsoft. It is so wide spread today that it is called a standard PC audio file format. A Wave file is identified by a file name extension of WAV (.wav) This allows content developers to freely move audio files between platforms for processing, this file format stores information about the file's number of tracks (mono or stereo), sample rate, bit depth, as well as the uncompressed raw audio data.


mp3:

The name of the file extension and also the 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 unnecessary information . It also adds a 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.

Aiff:
Short for Audio Interchange File Format, a common format for storing and transmitting sampled sound. The AIFF format does not support data compression so AIFF files tend to be large. However, there is another format called AIFF-Compressed (AIFF-C orAIFC) that supports compression ratios as high as 6:1.

Decibel

The decibel (abbreviated dB) is the unit used to measure the intensity of a sound. also known as a logarithmic unit of sound intensity; 10 times the logarithm of the ratio of the sound intensity to some reference intensity

Hertz

Abbreviated as Hz is a unit of frequency of electrical vibrations equal to one cycle per second. The Hertz is named after Heinrich Hertz, who first detected electromagnetic waves.

Frequency

Audio frequency represent the range of signals that are audible to the human ear. The range of audio frequencies is usually considered to be in the region between 20 and 20,000 hertz. It is the property of sound that most determines pitch.

Track

A track is a single stream of any audio which contains channel(s) Digital audio tracks let you store audio data as digital sound values rather than as musical symbols.A digital audio track works like a recording tape that you can include in a musical document and on which you can record whatever you want for subsequent playback.

Channel

Channel is one individual audio track. A channel is just one separate stream of audio information. There is only one channel in mono audio sources. More commonly, there are sources that hold two channels - stereo sources. Sources with more than two channels are referred to as multichannel.

Stereo

Audio stereo means sound which is divided into two separate channels. These two channels are played back at the same time through separate speakers. The effect is to create a fuller sound, and provide the ability to mix certain sounds between channels.

Some examples:

• Spreading the instruments in a music track from left to right. Often the tom-toms in a drum kit provide great stereo panning, as do some guitar effects.
• Following the action in a video, e.g. a car speeds across the screen as the audio pans with it.