If you begin to dip your toes into the busy, crowded and confusing world of audio file formats, you'll quickly find yourself swamped with various different types of format, codec, compression system and so on.
Music on your computer, on the best music streaming services, or on physical media you might have lying around (on your old iPod Classic or one of the newer best hi-res audio players, for instance), all use different types of audio file format for different reasons. You don't need to know the difference, as modern-day platforms or gadgets are pretty good at working it out for you, but in some circumstances, you'll be able to get a little extra out of your music by knowing if you should go with FLAC, MP3 or WAV, or whether DSD, AAC or ALAC is a better fit.
