More About These Formats

MP3 is the digital audio format that popularized consumer music downloading and portable music players in the 1990s. It is still the most common format for digital music sharing, live audio streaming, and podcasting on the Internet. AAC was designed to be the successor to MP3 and achieves better sound quality at similar bit rates. Today, AAC is the digital format of choice for portable music players (iPod, Zune), smartphones (BlackBerry, iPhone), and gaming systems (Wii, PSP). MP4 is a popular AAC container format. M4A is an alternative MP4 extension introduced by Apple for iTunes audio files. FLV is a container format introduced by Macromedia to deliver video over the Intenet using Flash Player. Today, FLV is the format of choice for embedding video on the web (YouTube, Google Video, Reuters) and on many desktops as well. F4V is emerging as the successor to FLV and achieves better quality at similar bit rates.