Sound

is waves, an analog format.BUT what is stored on a computer, or music

CD is digital.Vinyl, and cassette (and 8 track) are already

analog.

What you hear

Since what you hear is not digital storing (and retrieving) sound must be done in such a manner as to make the differences small enough.

A codec (compression – decompression algorithm) is used to transform information from one form to another.

So, for example, if you have a file that contains a song in mp3 format then in order to “play” it on your computer, the player must have access to a codec that converts mp3 files into the correct format to play.

Conversion

There are codecs for converting data in a variety of formats: audio, video, streamed.

When data is converted it is then stored in a “container” file.

Some software for playing files has the codecs built in (VLC) while others require separate Codec libraries.

Codecs