What is Music in the Computer?
Music is a specific kind of audio, which means it's recorded sound data that can be reproduced by the computer.
How do I Play Music in the Computer?
To play music in the computer, you need an application in the "audio player" or "music player" category. There are various such programs, with all sorts of varied features, including the ability to create playlists of music files in your computer, rating music tracks, and downloading information about the music tracks from the Internet.
Alternatively, you can simply access a website that lets you listen to music for free and just listen to music in your web browser. Such websites include:
Note that you can only listen to music on these websites while you're connected to the Internet. It's a good idea to download music files to your computer so you can listen to them in your preferred audio player even while offline.
What are Common Music File Formats?
Most digital music is stored using the same audio file formats as audio in general, such as:
- WAV - lossless, uncompressed audio.
- FLAC - lossless, compressed audio.
- MP3 - lossy, compressed audio.
- Ogg Vorbis (or Opus) - loss, compressed audio.
Their file extensions are .wav, .flac, .mp3, and .ogg respectively.
Certain kinds of music can also be stored in special, lightweight formats such a MIDI. In the case of MIDI, the file only contains the data about the music notes that should be played (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si). This means that the actual audio data that is sent to the speakers or headphones must be somewhere else. Normally, the MIDI data is installed somewhere in the operating system. In the past, MIDI files were extremely common because you could fit an entire composition, such as Phantom of the Opera, in a single 40 kilobyte MIDI file, which would take only 8 seconds to download via dial up Internet. Nowadays people listen to music on Youtube, by downloading a whole 720p video via broadband, so the MIDI format isn't as popular as it once were.
Another peculiar format are "chiptunes." The term can refers to a genre of music based on retro hardware (e.g. old consoles, like the Nintendo (Famicon), Sega Genesis (Megadrive), Super Nintendo, Dreamcast, etc.) that could only play a limited range of synthesized sounds. It can also refer to special file formats that encode chiptune music. In order to to play these special chiptune files, you would need special software (e.g. plugins) to reproduce the chiptunes in a normal audio player.
Music-compositing and editing software such as FLStudio will have their own proprietary format. Just like in an image editor, you would need to export the audio as a file in a common format in order to play them in other applications.
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