E-Z Guide to a Digital Revolution
- What is Digital Music?
- Where Can I Find Digital Music?
- How Do I Play Digital Music?
- How Should I Manage My Digital Music?
Starting more than two decades ago, the audio compact disc unleashed a revolution in how we listen to music. It brought about a whole new way to store and listen to sound with digital files that use patterns of zeroes and ones. Slowly, then quickly, analogue music on large vinyl records that had spun at a warped and wobbly 33, 45, or 78 rpm began a march to extinction. Meanwhile, this digital music revolution has accelerated and branched into a dazzling array of 21st-century innovations. Today, the Internet, along with software that lets you enjoy digital music directly through your computer, has taken music collections from the bookshelf and converted them to bytes on computer hard drives and devices that fit in your hand. But as music products and services have become married to the computer, they often result in some serious head scratching. Spend a few minutes with this E-Z Guide for answers to some fundamental questions.
What is Digital Music?
It’s music – or other types of sound, including audio books or dialogue on a DVD – encoded as bits of information similar to how computers store, retrieve, and transport other kinds of data. These bits reside on a compact disc or a computer hard drive in a handful of file types.
| Popular Digital Music Files | |
|---|---|
| File Type | What It Means |
| MP3 | This stands for the popular MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, a standard format. |
| AAC | Advanced Audio Coding is the audio type that Apple favors. |
| WMA | Windows Media Audio is a Microsoft audio format. |
| CDA | Compact Disc Audio, this CD track type is the music format found on commercial CDs. |
| RealMedia | This file type is used by Real, a company that makes software to put audio and video on web sites and to stream music. |
