Music catalogs & mp3 digital file formats – Song Director

Music file catalogs, formats and organization of which Song Director can be used.

Cataloging (or cataloguing) of all types of digital music files can be done easily with Song Director database software.   These music files can be in many different formats such as (MP3, M4a/AAC, iTunes, WMA, WAV, OGG and FLAC files) 

There is no better way to organize different music files than with Song Director Software.   And best of all it is free to download and use.  Song Director is also a music player and can create advanced playlists.

Below is a good article by Myongsu Park comparing music formats being used today:

Comparing  Music File Formats

A lot of people surf the Internet to find music. Many sites the Net surfers visit contain links to music or other listening material samples.
Unfortunately it is highly likely that the unwary surfers click a music file to find a very large music file downloading and the computer frozen due to the gigantic
music file size. There exist a variety of sound file formats among which an mp3 enjoys its high
popularity. MP3 files are ubiquitous on the Net and it is no exaggeration to say that the MP3 is now a household name in the world. People, however, enjoy an
mp3 music file without knowing what it is and its strengths and weaknesses in comparison other popular music file formats.
In this regard, I would like to provide background information and guidance about the most commonly used sound formats for music clips available on the Net and
to offer usability pointers for an improved Web audiophile experience.

Everything about MP3

The most popular sound file format these days is .MP3 for both Mac and PCs.
Other file formats include .AIFF (for Mac); .AU for Mac and UNIX; .WAV for the
PC; and .RA for Real Audio, a proprietary system for delivering and playing
streaming audio on the Web.
The MP3 format is a compression system for music. The MP3 format helps
reduce the number of bytes in a song without hurting the quality of the song’s
sound. The goal of the MP3 format is to compress a CD-quality song by a factor
of 10 to 14 without losing the CD quality ofthe sound. With MP3, a 32 megabyte
song on a CD compresses down to 3 megabytes or so. This lets you download a
song in minutes rather than hours, and it lets you store hundreds of songs on
your computer’s hard disk without taking up that much space.
To make a good compression algorithm for sound a technique called perceptual
noise shaping is used. The “perceptual” part in the name means that the MP3
format uses characteristics of the human ear to design the compression
algorithm. For example:
· There are certain sounds that the human ear cannot hear
· There are certain sounds that the human ear hears much better than
· If there are two sounds playing simultaneously we hear the louder one but
cannot hear the softer one.
Using facts like these about the human ear, certain parts of a song can be
eliminated without significantly hurting the quality of the song for the listener.
Compressing the rest of the song with well-known compression techniques
shrinks the song considerably — a factor of 10 at least.[If you would like to learn
more about the specific compression algorithms, see the links at the bottom of
this article.] When you are done creating an MP3 file, what you have is “near
CD” quality. The MP3 version of the song will not sound exactly thesame as the
original CD because some of the song has been removed, but it will be close.
MP3 is a widely accepted format ( 1 ) of downloading music today, and it offers
exceptional quality at 1:12 compression. This format is best played with
Winamp, although RealAudio Quicktime, and the new Windows Media Player,
and many others also support the format. MPEG is the acronym for Moving
Picture Experts Group. It is an encoded format for small efficient files true to the
instruments and studio conditions that produced the sound. MPEG supports both
analog and digital recording formats.
The size of the MP3 file depends on which compression routine was used, near-
CD or CD quality. As a very general rule, for CD quality you can assume 1MB =
1 minute of music in an MP3 file. For near-CD quality, a one-minute song takes
up only .6 MB of disk space, compared to 10 MB or more for an uncompressed
.WAV file.
The sound quality difference of analog recording compared with digital should be
minimal. The number of conversion errors you hear are primarily dependent on
your PC system. Factors that affect the sound quality are the sound card and the
required level of multimedia real time (or streaming) performance.
It can be broken up into pieces, and each piece is still playable. The feature that
makes this possible (headerless file format) also means that MP3 files can be
made to stream across the net real-time.
Best of all we can now easily transmit a song over the internet (a compressed 4
minute song is smaller than 4MB, while uncompressed would be over 40MB!)
Because of the high compression, it’s possible to download full-quality CD tracks
over the Internet in a reasonable time.
Remember, downloading or streaming music from the internet is illegal unless
the copyright owner explicitly allows free downloads. Please respect Intellectual
Property Rights.
Lots of processor power is required to encode and play files, also a
sound-card is required (16-bit sound card). And the main disadvantage
of the MP3 format is that it needs to be decompressed when played.
_ _ _

Other Preferred Music File Formats

The Microsoft .WAV file format is a technique for storing analog audio data in a
digital format. It is capable of storing waveform data in many different formats
and an array of compression types.
A *.WAV file is a digital recording of the sounds made by any instrument or
human voice. It basically cannot be modified. When a PC plays back a WAV
file, it converts numbers in the file into audio signals for the PC’s speakers. A
complete tune recorded in .WAV format is always very large.
A .WAV file is always true to the original instruments that produced the music.
WAV files are simple and widely used, especially on PCs. Many applications
have been developed to play WAV files and it is the native sound format for
Windows. Later versions of Netscape Navigator (3+) and Microsoft Internet
Explorer (2+) support the WAV format.
WAV is seen as a proprietary Windows format, although conversion tools
are available to play WAV files on other platforms. WAV files are not highly
Related resources:
Tucows/Hensa: Miscellaneous Audio Applications for Windows 95
.au (AU)
AU is short for AUdio, a common digital sound file format used on Unix
machines and the standard audio file format for the Java programming
language. The file has a very simple structure: the file header specifies the
basic parameters of the sound – sampling rate, sample size, number of
channels and type of encoding – followed by the sound data. AU files usually
employ the 8000 hertz u-Law encoding method.
A simple, well-established sound format which is the most commonly
supported browser sound file format.
AU files are relatively low quality and are not highly compressed. The format
is widely associated with Unix platforms, although they can be played on
other platforms without the need for browser plug-ins or helper applications.
Related resources:
Tucows/Hensa: Audio Editors for Windows NT
rm/ ram (RealAudio)
A mainstay of internet audio for many years, and a standard for streaming audio
and video. RealAudio has many quality settings. The RealAudio files are still
smaller than 128kb/s MP3 files, but the quality is also less. RealPlayer is the
best (and only official) choice for RealAudio files.
Standing for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, it is an even older format ( 1 ),
the standard by which many desktop musicians compose. These files are tiny,
and make quick downloads. Most multimedia audio players will support the
MIDI format. MIDI information tells a synthesizer when to start and stop playing
a specific note, and may include the volume and modulation of the note. For the
purposes of this discussion, the synthesizer comprises your PC’s sound card and
device driver.
Many tunes are available in MIDI format, and you can listen to these tunes using
the free players that are installed with your computer’s operating system. The two
common ones are Microsoft Windows Media Player for Windows (the newest of
which is for Windows 98, ME, and 2000) and the Apple QuickTime player for
Apple OS computers.
A*.MID file contains what the composer (or the person who played a tune) did at
his/her music keyboard. It keeps track of which note (key) was pressed, when it
was pressed, for how long, and at what pressure. Playing back a MIDI file
requires a device (sound card) that can generate the sounds of common
instruments (for example, Piano, Violin, Drum) on its own. The note data is sent
to the device, which then generates the sounds that were intended (or
sometimes not intended). A MIDI file is comparatively very small and can be
edited (including changing the instruments altogether).
The quality of the sound is dependent upon the quality of the synthesizer on a
PC’s sound card.
Because MIDI files are synthesized audio and not sampled audio, they play back
in audio quality only as good as your PC’s sound card. MIDI files sound different
on different computers.
The MIDI standard allows for musical pieces to exchanged and edited by
different computers on different platforms in a way that conventional
digitised sound (actual waveforms) cannot. MIDI produces much smaller file
sizes for musical events, compared to other sound formats.
Browsers require separate plug-ins or helper applications to play MIDI files.
Related resources:
· The Unofficial MIDI Home Page
· Tucows/Hensa: MIDI Players for Windows 95
· MIDI Tips for Webmeisters
· An Introduction into MIDI
_ _ _

AIFF (Macintosh Apple QuickTime format)

The AIFF format is associated with Apple QuickTime Player on Mac and
Windows computers. Even if you run under Windows, you will have no problem
playing these files so long as you have Apple QuickTime installed. The encoding
is similar to WAV and quality is true to instrumentation.
Brief explanation of utilities for Playing Sound Files
Microsoft Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player is included with the Windows operating system. Microsoft
updates its player frequently and adds codecs (compressor/ depressor) for new
or updated media standards.
Windows Media Player does not support RealMedia audio and video streaming.
Windows Media Player won’t work on the UNIX platform (yet).
RealPlayer for Playing .RM and .RAM Files
This is a popular utility, especially for artists who want to provide samples of their
work and for streaming media in real time.
These utilities support formats other than .RM and .RAM.
Download at,
Winamp is freeware by Nullsoft and supports MP3, CDA, and other audio
formats. One of the best features about Winamp is that it has no ads. does not
auto magically support .WAV.
Down load at
Macintosh Players
A music player for Macintosh is MacAMP. MacAmp is an MPEG Layer 3 (a.k.a.
MPEG-3 or MP3) audio player for the Macintosh. Find more information on this
player at
This research paper dealt with most commonly used sound file formats and their
strengths and weaknesses. Each audio file format has its own strengths and
weaknesses. However, among these audio file formats, the most popular sound
file format these days is .MP3 mainly because of its high levels of audio quality,
its small file size, the Internet, ever-improving technology.
Digital music formats such as MP3 hold a bright future. In addition, MP3 will
continue to evolve along with industry support for the format, and provide a viable
music format for the next decade and beyond with the love of the Net surfers.
References formats

* This paper is written by Myongsu Park for the course of EDC 385G
Multimedia Authoring at the University of Texas – Austin

Link to this paper is here

Song Director is the perfect way to organize these music records

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