Ultimate Guide to Audio Formats: MP3 vs WAV vs FLAC vs AAC

Audio formats are divided into two main categories: lossy and lossless. Lossless formats like WAV and FLAC preserve full acoustic detail, whereas lossy formats like MP3 and AAC compress file sizes dramatically for web streaming.

Lossy compression removes acoustic frequencies outside human hearing to reduce file sizes by up to 90%. In contrast, FLAC uses lossless compression (similar to zip files for audio), preserving 100% of the studio recording master while reducing size by 50%.

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