Several teachers have tried placing audio files in folders on shared networks for teachers to access during classroom listening activities. Originally these in-house recordings on were done on CDs in WAV format, and some teachers have been ripping these CDs to their hard drive via Vista’s Media Player.

So far so good. But many teachers are choosing to save these ripped files into MP3 format rather than the default WMA format assigned to it by the Windows Media Player - even though all teachers at this college are using Windows-based computers. This is because they mistakenly believe that MP3 format results in smaller audio file size. However, this is not true. The file size of an audio saved as MP3 is not much different to that of one saved in WMA.

Although resulting files size may be very similar, the audio quality of WMA and MP3 audio formats is noticeably different. When streaming at at 128kbps, Microsoft claims the WMA is nearly CD-quality. Also, WMA files require less processing power to execute. Just be aware that files in this audio format can only be played on a Windows-based computer.

While MP3 typically provides higher quality sound than WMA because it uses perceptual audio coding to compress CD-quality sound by a factor of 12, at low bitrates MP3 quality is likely to suffer. By far the strongest point of MP3 is that it is a much more universal audio format, that can be played on media players in various computer operating systems.

Regardless of which audio file type you choose to save audio in as a teacher, be aware that your decision should not be because one offers smaller audio file size than the other; they are both almost identical in size. If you and your students are all working in a Windows-based environment, either format will do.