I am new to OS X and I was importing some songs to my library. Can someone tell me what the difference is between MP3, AAC, and AIFF?
Sure.
Do they create different sized files?
Yes.
Can they all be burned to a music CD?
Yes.
MP3 is mpeg layer 3 audio. It is compressed audio, the average song is about 1MB/minute. This varies depending on the bit rate you encode at. It is an Open Source format available to anyone.
AAC is another codec which was developed by Dolby I believe. At the same bit rate it creates a smaller file than MP3 but is widely regarded as maintaining better quality playback at that same bit rate. The result is that if you were going to encode a song at 128 bit rate then your AAC file would be smaller than a 128 bit MP3. This is also an Open Source format available to anyone.
I was wondering about AAC. I only just encountered it the other day.
One of my daughters received an MP3 player for Christmas. When she tried to download to it iTunes wouldn't let her drag any songs to it. After much thrashing about with it I discovered that the songs she was trying to transfer were AAC encoded and since the player is MP3 or WMA it wouldn't touch the AAC files. But it would have been nice to get some indication as to WHY!. So we converted all the stuff she imported and set the default to MP3.
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