D-Link DSM-320 manual Glossary Music

Glossary (continued)

Music

AIFF is short for Audio Interchange File Format, an audio format that was developed by Apple Computer and is the standard audio format for Macintosh computers. AIFF use a .AIF or .IEF extension.

M3U is a playlist format and is the default playlist format of WinAMP and most other media player software. It allows multiple files to be queued in a program in a specific format.

MP3 is the file extension for MPEG-1, audio layer 3. Layer 3 is one of three coding schemes (layer 1, layer 2 and layer 3) for the compression of audio signals. Layer 3 removes the redundant and irrelevant parts of a sound signal, which the human ear does not hear. It uses Modified Discrete Cosine Transform to implement a filter bank, increasing the frequency resolution 18 times higher than that of layer 2.

OGG or OGG Vorbis is an open source audio compression format. The name OGG is derived from term in a network game and Vorbis from a character in a novel. OGG is used for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel.

PLS is a proprietary playlist format used for playing Shoutcast and other audio streams.

WAV is the file extension for PC sound files and was developed by Microsoft and IBM. WAV sound files end with a .wav extension and are compatible with Windows applications supporting audio.

WMA is short for Windows Media Audio and is an audio format that was created by Microsoft. It is similar to MP3, although WMA can compress at a higher rate than MP3.

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