MP3 is quite possibly the world’s most popular format for music and for audio files in general as almost everybody is familiar with the format. The popularity of the WAV file format is far less and most persons would categorize MP3 with music but very few would have any idea what category WAV falls in.
The WAV file format was developed by Microsoft and IBM and was released around 1991 and may be considered a lossless format as it stores audio in a raw and uncompressed format. The disadvantage to this storage method is that WAV files are large and may be up to ten times bigger than an MP3 file with exactly the same content. Due to the huge size difference many people will opt to store their music files as MP3, here’s how to convert your WAV files to MP3.
In order to convert from WAV to MP3 one will have to acquire an application or a program for the PC platform that will allow the conversion to be done. There are many different programs available for download that will allow you to perform this task but it is highly advised that you choose from a listing on a reputable website such as www.download.com or another trusted website.
Once you have a program to carry out the conversion the process of converting from WAV to MP3 is usually as simple as dragging the WAV files into the program and then specifying that you would like the output to be MP3. After the conversion is completed you may utilize the MP3 files in whichever way you wish after locating them in the output directory which you specified or from within the default output directory.
The terms lossy and lossless refer to the way that the audio file is encoded and whether or not it retains all the quality of the original recording or if some of the quality is lost. Lossy formats like MP3 take advantage of the fact that human hearing cannot discern certain pitch changes and when these are removed from the original. In the resulting MP3 the listener may not be able to tell the difference in the original lossless format and the lossy MP3 format. The WAV file format on the other hand will be able to capture the entirety of the original audio file but at the price of being a substantially larger file.
As was stated before the MP3 format is a lossy format and as such it will lose some of the quality of the original file but changing the encoding settings to a higher bitrate will help in preserving more of the quality of the original file. Once your WAV has been converted to MP3 you may take it with you wherever you go and play it on numerous devices as the MP3 format’s popularity extends to many different players and devices ranging from MP3 players which can be worn around the neck to car audio systems which support playing the MP3 format.