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WAV n. A file format in which Windows stores sounds as waveforms. Such files have the extension .wav. Depending on the sampling frequency, on whether the sound is monaural or stereo, and on whether 8 or 16 bits are used for each sample, one minute of sound can occupy as little as 644 kilobytes or as much as 27 megabytes of storage. Visit WavCentral.com!

MP3 According to PC Webopedia the textbook definition of mp3 (An abbreviation for MPEG Layer 3) is "A type of audio data compression that can reduce digital sound files by a 12:1 ratio with virtually no loss in quality" Essentially, mp3's turn digital audio into data. It's like digitally lifting a song from a digital audio CD (these digital audio sound files are termed as .WAV files), placing it on the hard disk of a computer and compressing the sound file into readable data. What this means is that large amounts of digital sound can be compacted into a smaller space. With this ability to compress audio comes the capacity to store more music using a smaller amount of physical space.

One of the cornerstones of mp3 is the quality associated with it. When converting, or compressing from digital audio to mp3 there is only a slight loss in sound quality. As noted by Springwater Records, mp3 retains 99% of the digital audio quality of the song. The 1% loss in quality is in the highest treble and lowest bass sounds that are essentially inaudible to the human ear. This quality preservation makes it nearly impossible to tell the difference between the original digital audio from a Compact Disc from the sounds contained in an mp3 file. The Fraunhoffer Institute, a pioneer in the MPEG-3 format states that "MPEG Layer-3 is a perceptual audio coding scheme, exploiting the properties of the human ear, and trying to maintain the original sound quality as far as possible."

Another angle to mp3 is the storage capabilities it provides the user. Compared to digital audio, mp3 has a significantly smaller size. It is this size that allows the user to store more music using less space. An audio CD's storage capacity maxes out at approximately 650 MB. This amounts to about 74 minutes worth of music that can be packed into a single digital audio CD. With an average song length of about five minutes a single song takes up approximately 40 MB of space. This enables a digital audio CD to hold about 15 songs.

mp3 paints a drastically different picture. With mp3 the average file size for a five minute song is approximately 3.5 MB. This allows over 180 songs to be stored on one data CD. This amounts to over 15 hours of music that can be stored on one data CD. In terms of entire albums, one data CD of mp3 files can hold 13 entire albums as opposed to one album of digital audio.

MIDI n. Acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. A serial interface standard that allows for the connection of music synthesizers, musical instruments, and computers. The MIDI standard is based partly on hardware and partly on a description of the way in which music and sound are encoded and communicated between MIDI devices. The information transmitted between MIDI devices is in a form called a MIDI message, which encodes aspects of sound such as pitch and volume as 8-bit bytes of digital information. MIDI devices can be used for creating, recording, and playing back music. Using MIDI, computers, synthesizers, and sequencers can communicate with each other, either keeping time or actually controlling the music created by other connected equipment. Click to learn more about MIDI