There are many file formats used to store digital audio, and they're good for different purposes. Digital audio is, of course, only a representation of sound, a rendering of soundwaves that get translated into sound by a decoder and a set of speakers. Some audio formats, generically called lossless formats, aim to encode audio close to its original analog form. Still, there's a lot of data in the real world, and as yet, digital can only approximate it in very large files.
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