If you use iTunes or if you buy and download digital music, you’ll have come across a number of terms and abbreviations that describe digital audio files. This alphabet soup can be quite confusing.

Thanks to the ability of digital audio to be perfectly copied, transmitted, and carried in small packages, we may be surrounded by more music and human-made audio programming than at any other time in ...

Digital sound is nothing more than numbers. What separates one container from another is how those numbers are packed, how much data (if any) is thrown away, and which devices understand the result.