Topic summary
Audio coding
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Audio coding format.
Lossless, lossy, and uncompressed audio coding formats
A lossless audio coding format reduces the total data needed to represent a sound but can be de-coded to its original, uncompressed form. A lossy audio coding format additionally reduces the bit resolution of the sound on top of compression, which results in far less data at the cost of irretrievably lost information.