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NLA Format guide

Committed to meeting your requirements Next Level Audio are able to deliver your master in pretty much any format or combination of formats you require.

For example, you may require a WAV & CD master with an MP3 version that you can distribute over the Internet - whatever your needs we can deliver!

 

Audio file formats are available in many types, so which one should you choose?

This question is easily answered; you should send it to us in the highest definition possible. The guide below should help you to determine what type of Audio file you should choose. If you need our expert guidance contact us and we will be pleased to help.

There are 3 basic types of audio files:

Uncompressed, e.g. WAV, AIFF, and AU.

Lossless, e.g. FLAC, APE, Apple Lossless and WavPack.

Lossy, MP3, VORBIS and AAC.

Click here for a full list of acceptable formats and file information

Uncompressed

Lets deal with the Uncompressed files first as this is the best format for compatability and audio quality.

WAV or Wave and AIFF formats are widely accepted as the professional industry standard because there is no loss of quality and they are easily edited and manipulated by most software packages.

The downside of these formats is that the file sizes are large meaning that for data transmission purposes (i.e over the internet), they offer the slowest transfer times.

If disk space and transfer time are not a problem for you should choose these formats.

Lossless

Lossless file formats are smaller in size then uncompressed audio files without any loss of audio quality. These offer an ideal solution to the data storage and transmission problems that occur with the uncompressed formats but they only achieve a compression ratio of about 2:1 which is not as small as the lossy formats which we will deal with shortly.

As lossless formats are not widely known home users may not have any method of playing or transferring them. To play and transfer these formats you require codecs.

If you do have codecs, lossless formats are very good method of dealing with audio files.

Lossy

Many companies who offer mastering services will gladly take your money to master your MP3 files, this does not constitute real mastering.

We won't refuse to master an MP3 file but you should be aware that the results will not be as good as mastering from other formats. You should also be aware that converting from MP3 to WAV or formats will not cure this problem.

Lossy file formats such as MP3 are extremely popular, mainly due to there compression rates which offer ratios of about 10:1 therefore making them ideal for storage on your computer and sending over the internet.

The problem with these formats from a professional viewpoint is that to achieve the very small file sizes is that you lose considerable audio quality often loosing a large part of the frequency range.

This is due to the way they encode the sounds you are listening to, for example at the encoding stage they "chop" the high end frequencies (treble) off the file without restoring them at the decoding stage. From a mastering point of view this is less than ideal as we cannot put back what is not already there.

Common formats

The table below lists the most common audio formats. NLA can work with near enough any file format so if you yours is not listed below don't worry, we'll still be able to work with you.

 

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