Quick Overview of Audio Formats: couldn’t there be just one?

Today there are dozens of different audio formats. The reason of that I think lies in the attempt to create a better compression scheme. And they achieved amazing results in that. For example, mp3 can squash your song to 1/11 of the original size, still retaining considerable quality. The advantage of mp3 format is also its widespread acceptance. Most audio players including iPods support it.

To compete against mp3 Microsoft introduced WMA. This can also compress audio files with a loss in quality that many people will not distinguish. It’s the second widespread audio format today (thanks to Microsoft’s aggressive promotion).

WAV is another Microsoft’s format, which is sure to be supported by almost all PCs. The shortcoming of WAV is the large file size (often it’s the reason why people convert WAV to MP3).

RA is popular with internet broadcasting as it can be played at the same time as it’s downloaded. Many RA files are protected which means that they can’t be converted to other formats.

CDA format is common for commercial compact discs. The CDA files can be played only from a CD-ROM. The widespread mistake is the attempt to copy tracks from CD to hard drive and then try to convert them. The right way to do is to rip CD and then convert the tracks to the format you need. Total Audio Converter allows that in one step process. You just hit RipCD button and set the target format in the wizard.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Due to the lossless compression scheme FLAC is good for classical music and other things where the quality of sound is crucial.

APE is the main competitor of FLAC and is similar to it in features. It is another lossless audio compression format.

AAC is good at compressing music if the purpose it to get the least size. Most people find AAC the best solution used to compress music to listen to it on mobile phones. Others say that AAC sounds awfully compared to MP3.

The true audio format (TTA) is another good lossless format. Imagine that you can compress 20 audio CDs to one DVD without any loss in quality! Unfortunately, not many audio players support TTA.

So the truth is that every format is good for some particular purpose. Choose yours (and be sure you can always convert between all of them with Total Audio Converter)!

2 comments January 31st, 2007

5 easy steps to create a great avatar from a photo

Internet gave us a chance to completely hide our identity. You may speak out in numerous forums and nobody will know who you are. But only timid persons like that. Most people prefer to show who they are using avatars – small pictures near the user info. These pictures can be of all possible kinds: from animals to pretty faces of sexy models. And there are some very brave ones use their own photos:)

Do you belong to this small group of those who are not afraid of what they really are? Good, you are with us;) So how to create an avatar from your own photo?

So how do I make this avatar from this 3Mb photo below?

First, what shall I do: the photo should be of another format (gif intead of jpeg), another size (4kb instead of 3Mb), another picture (face only cropping all the rest beautiful parts of my body) and it should be rotated. I can transform my picture to the avatar with all the changes in one conversion with Total Image Converter!

1. I launch Total Image Converter and select the photo. Then press Convert to GIF.

2. In Wizard I select the destination path and go to Crop step. Here I use rectangle method (press Select option) – just show what I want to leave and do not bother about number of inches the tool should crop from each side.

3. Then I go to Resize step. All I have to do is to type in the width and height (50×60). Remember to check Constrain proportions checkbox to get a nice result;)

4. Ater that I go to Rotate step and select LeftSideTop as my current orientation. The program will rotate my image itself.

5. I can also set transparency and apply some text or logo as a watermark but I will skip these options and go directly to the final step – Finish Conversion. I press Start! button and in ten seconds I get the result:)

As you see the process is quite simple and all the settings are done within one conversion. Most convenient.

2 comments January 18th, 2007