If you do that, you've got a higher resolution file that's much closer to the original performance or recording: so instead of 44,100 sixteen-bit samples per second you might have 96,000 twenty-four-bit ones. But you can sample even faster, and you can record more information in each sample. Without getting too technical about it, CD quality isn't identical to the original: it scans the original 44,100 times per second to create a digital version that sounds as close to the original as possible.

(Image credit: Shutterstock / Antonio Guillem) That delivers quality even better than CD. Some streaming services and many portable audio players go even further, with support for high resolution audio. Lossless audio essentially takes the original CD quality file and uses a more efficient file format to deliver it. Cut your lossesĪs the name suggests, lossless audio means the original musical information isn't tampered with – so if the original was CD quality, the lossless version is also CD quality.įiles are much bigger than the best quality MP3 but they are audibly better – and with today's fast internet, fast mobile data and large storage capacities the file size doesn't really matter any more. That's still the case for some streaming services today, so for example the standard Spotify service streams music in MP3 format because it's good enough for many listeners.īut Spotify also offers lossless audio, as does Apple Music and many other services – and lossless is the format of choice for today's portable audio players too. So for many people – most people – the benefits of MP3 outweighed the downside, which was poorer sound quality. That was important in the early 2000s because our internet connections were slow, mobile internet was hopeless and our devices had limited storage: even the mighty iPod only had 5GB when it launched. The smaller you make the file, the less musical information it contains but the faster you can download it and the less room it takes up on your device.

This is called 'lossy compression', because it involves reducing the amount of musical information in the file.

Portable lossless music players