Hands on - Sound - Nothing to lose. Some lossless audio formats mean you don't have to compromise on sound quality.

Publication: Personal Computer World

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COPYRIGHT 2005 VNU Business Media Europe

Many of us now listen to music on PCs in compressed formats such as mp3, wma or aac. In fact, many people have their music-playing software set up to automatically rip CDs into one of these formats every time they put a disc in their drive.

These compression formats have revolutionised the way we listen to music. Now we can have hundreds of albums stored on our PCs that we can call up with a mouse click. We can put together playlists spanning albums and, as these files are tagged with metadata, many software music players can even automatically select certain styles or moods of music to play.

The Ipod would not be the success it is now without compression letting us fit around 10 times as many tracks on the players as would otherwise be possible. With the Apple Itunes stores selling a combined total of about 1.25 million tracks per day, it seems CDs are going the way of the dodo.

However, some argue that music compression means we are now having to put up with poorer sound quality. With the move from tapes and vinyl to CD, most people felt they took a great leap forward in terms of sound quality. But now we seem to be going backwards, accepting lower-quality versions of our favourite tunes.

People feel this way because formats such as mp3, aac and wma use lossy compression. This means that during the compression process some audio information in the file is thrown away, and you are left with a representation of the original file that does not contain the same...

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