I'm sure that many of you like downloading music from the Internet, and then listening to them! Well, special software is used for this task. This software can be used to first download the music, and then to let you listen to it!
However, in order for the software to work, the music has to be in special formats. Below are a few of the most popular music formats:
MIDI:
MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Songs can be stored in MIDI format as relatively small files. This makes it easy when you want to download a song off the Internet.
Basically, MIDI files contain information about when to start or stop playing a specific note, what the volume of that note should be, and what the pitch of that note should be. The quality of MIDI files depends on the sound card that your computer system has. Thus, MIDI files might sound differently on different computers. MIDI files all have the extension .mid (for example, music.mid).
The two most common devices that can be used to play back MIDI files are the Microsoft Windows Media Player (for Windows operating systems) and the Apple QuickTime Player (for Apple OS computers).
.WAV:
This is the Waveform-audio format. It has the extension .wav, and can store data originally in analog form in digital form. The .WAV format is often used for music files that have been inputted into your computer by a microphone or other device.
.WAV files always sound exactly like the instrument that produced the instrument. However, the bad part about this format is that the files are generally very large.
MP3 (MPEG):
MPEG, or the Moving Picture Experts Group,
supports both analog and digital recording formats. It is popularly used because
the files are of good quality, but are not nearly as large as those stored
in the .WAV format. This is because MP3s compress the files to either near-CD
quality or CD quality. The CD quality files generally take up 1 MB per 1 minute
of the song, while near-CD quality is .6 MB per minute.
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