There is a multitude of different compressions types used in digital media, here is a quick overview of the most common ones. They are separated into three categories: Uncompressed, Lossless, and Lossy.
Uncompressed audio is just audio without any compression, the upside is that nothing gets lost but at the cost of bigger file sizes. Lossless audio is audio that is compressed but without losing any information or degrading quality at all.
Lossy audio attempts to apply to discard as much ‘irrelevant’ data as possible from the original audio. They become way smaller than uncompressed and lossless audio but no longer contain all the information.
Compression types quick overview:
Uncompressed
- WAV
- AIFF
Lossless
- FLAC
- WMA
- ALAC
Lossy
- MP3
- AAC
- MQA
- OGG
There are many more, not listed here.