Lossless and lossy
Lossless describes a way of compressing data which still keeps all the data. If you have a compressed file, you can use it to create an exact copy of the source file.
Lossy is the opposite to Lossless. Some data is discarded. This makes the file a lot smaller, but reduces the quality of the audio slightly.
| Lossy | Lossless |
|---|---|
| MP3, Vorbis, AAC, WMA, All video codecs. | WAVE, FLAC |