MP3 is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg, with support from other digital scientists in other countries. Originally defined as the third audio format of the MPEG-1 standard, it was retained and further extended — defining additional bit-rates and support for more audio channels — as the third audio format of the subsequent MPEG-2 standard. A third version, known as MPEG-2.5 — extended to better support lower bit rates — is commonly implemented, but is not a recognized standard.
Adobe Flash is, except in China, a discontinued multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich internet applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players.
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Based on the PostScript language, each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, vector graphics, raster images and other information needed to display it. PDF has its roots in "The Camelot Project" initiated by Adobe co-founder John Warnock in 1991. PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008. The last edition as ISO 32000-2:2020 was published in December 2020.
Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The original WMA codec, known simply as WMA, was conceived as a competitor to the popular MP3 and RealAudio codecs. WMA Pro, a newer and more advanced codec, supports multichannel and high resolution audio. A lossless codec, WMA Lossless, compresses audio data without loss of audio fidelity. WMA Voice, targeted at voice content, applies compression using a range of low bit rates. Microsoft has also developed a digital container format called Advanced Systems Format to store audio encoded by WMA.
Audio Video Interleave is a proprietary multimedia container format and Windows standard introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows software. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback. Like the DVD video format, AVI files support multiple streaming audio and video, although these features are seldom used.
Speex is an audio compression codec specifically tuned for the reproduction of human speech and also a free software speech codec that may be used on voice over IP applications and podcasts. It is based on the code excited linear prediction speech coding algorithm. Its creators claim Speex to be free of any patent restrictions and it is licensed under the revised (3-clause) BSD license. It may be used with the Ogg container format or directly transmitted over UDP/RTP. It may also be used with the FLV container format.
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate.
Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems.
Adobe Audition is a digital audio workstation developed by Adobe Inc. featuring both a multitrack, non-destructive mix/edit environment and a destructive-approach waveform editing view.
Digital Negative (DNG) is an open, lossless raw image format developed by Adobe and used for digital photography. It was launched on September 27, 2004. The launch was accompanied by the first version of the DNG specification, plus various products, including a free-of-charge DNG converter utility. All Adobe photo manipulation software released since the launch supports DNG.
These tables compare features of multimedia container formats, most often used for storing or streaming digital video or digital audio content. To see which multimedia players support which container format, look at comparison of media players.
The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is an ISO standard, originally created by Adobe Systems Inc., for the creation, processing and interchange of standardized and custom metadata for digital documents and data sets.
Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are two different Flash Video file formats: FLV and F4V. The audio and video data within FLV files are encoded in the same way as SWF files. The F4V file format is based on the ISO base media file format, starting with Flash Player 9 update 3. Both formats are supported in Adobe Flash Player and developed by Adobe Systems. FLV was originally developed by Macromedia. In the early 2000s, Flash Video was the de facto standard for web-based streaming video. Users include Hulu, VEVO, Yahoo! Video, metacafe, Reuters.com, and many other news providers.
Soundbooth was a digital audio editor by Adobe Systems Incorporated for Windows XP, Windows Vista, 7 and Mac OS X. Adobe has described it as being "in the spirit of SoundEdit 16 and Cool Edit 2000". Adobe also has a more powerful program called Adobe Audition, which replaced Soundbooth as of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium. Soundbooth, discontinued in 2011, was aimed at creative professionals who do not specialize in audio or people who need a simple editing program and do not require the full features of Adobe Audition. Due to Intel-specific code, Adobe stated that the Mac OS X version would only be available for machines using Intel processors. Soundbooth CS4 was the first version to support 64-bit officially.
Gnome Wave Cleaner (GWC) is a digital audio editor application. The graphical user interface for the editor has been produced employing GTK+ for the GUI widgets. Its primary author is Jeff Welty.
ExifTool is a free and open-source software program for reading, writing, and manipulating image, audio, video, and PDF metadata. It is platform independent, available as both a Perl library (Image::ExifTool) and command-line application. ExifTool is commonly incorporated into different types of digital workflows and supports many types of metadata including Exif, IPTC, XMP, JFIF, GeoTIFF, ICC Profile, Photoshop IRB, FlashPix, AFCP and ID3, as well as the manufacturer-specific metadata formats of many digital cameras.
TooLAME is a free software MPEG-1 Layer II (MP2) audio encoder written primarily by Mike Cheng. While there are many MP2 encoders, TooLAME is well-known and widely used for its particularly high audio quality. It has been unmaintained since 2003, but is directly succeeded by the TwoLAME code fork. The name TooLAME is a play on LAME and Layer II.
MediaHuman Audio Converter is a freeware audio conversion utility developed by MediaHuman Ltd. The program is used to convert across different audio formats, split lossless audio files using CUE and extract audio from video files. The app can be run on Mac starting from OS X 10.6 and on Windows XP and higher. This software does not support CD burning and CD ripping.
