Music and audio products from our online shop are delivered in a variety of formats to suit the content and its intended destination.

On this page you can find out more about the file formats, and what they enable you to do with your purchase.

MP3 audio

Where a file is for personal use, such as listening on a portable audio player, it's delivered in mp3 format for maximum compatibility with a range of devices. This is more flexible than Windows Media Audio (wma) or Apple iTunes (aac) formats, which sometimes don't work on generic portable players.

For playing mp3 files on Windows computers, we recommend 
the free MediaMonkey, which also has great music library 
management features and CD burning facilities.

Like wma and aac, encoding a file to mp3 compresses the audio by removing information about frequencies to which the human ear is less sensitive. This hugely reduces the file size for quick download, but it does diminish quality depending on the rate at which the file has been encoded to mp3.

Our free download previews, for example, are encoded at the relatively low rate of 112kbps (kilobytes of data per second) to enable fast streaming, and you can tell this by their slight fuzziness. Conversely, our commercial products are much higher-fidelity. We encode our stereo music mp3s at 320kbps, and our mono voiceover mp3s at 128kbps: these are the highest possible encoding rates for stereo and mono files.

We feel that this is an excellent balance between manageable download sizes and audio quality. In all everyday situations it is impossible to tell the difference between a 320kbps stereo or 128kbps mono mp3 file, and a CD recording of the same material.

If you already have music management software, and want a dedicated 
CD burner for Windows, we recommend the free CD Burner XP.

FLAC audio

Where a file is for professional use, such as broadcasting, it's usually delivered in Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) format so that sound quality will be maintained during further editing. Encoding a file to FLAC compresses the audio, but without removing any information. It therefore differs from mp3 in two ways. Firstly, it does not reduce the file size as much - for example, a FLAC version of Heliography is 237mb, whereas a 320kbps mp3 file of the same material is 97mb. Secondly, FLAC does not diminish audio quality at all, and that's why it's known as 'lossless'.

Many pro audio and multimedia editing applications support opening and saving to FLAC. For more information on the FLAC format, click here.

It's useful for an audio professional to have material in a lossless format because the material can then be compressed to whatever rate is needed for a specific creative project. As well as being more flexible, this gives an audibly better result than re-compressing an mp3 file. Lossless audio is also more amenable to frequency-specific sound processing such as equalization, because the sound is more detailed across the frequency spectrum than a compressed file.

FLAC files can contain audio at a variety of bit depths and sample rates; each professional product description in our shop provides this information.

MediaMonkey has FLAC support, but is Windows only. 
For Mac users who wish to open and save to FLAC, 
we recommend the free X Lossless Decoder.

DRM-free audio

All our audio files are free from Digital Rights Management (DRM), as used for several years by many online music stores. Whilst DRM is usually well-intentioned, common problems with it can include being unable to play your audio files on more than one computer, being unable to play them after reinstalling your computer's operating system, being unable to freely transfer audio files between your personal audio players, and being unable to burn them to CD for your personal listening.

Songbird is a media player that supports both mp3 and FLAC, 
and works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It can play files with and 
without DRM. To download Songbird for free, click here.

By supplying files free from DRM, we give you the flexibility to exercise your fair use rights with the audio you've purchased. In turn, we respectfully ask that you are mindful of the copyright law that applies to all audio from our store: like most commercial music and soundware, it's supplied under license from the copyright holder, Iain Morland, so it's not yours to give away. Because we recognise that customers want to use our audio in a range of contexts, products are offered under two different licenses, personal and professional. If you are unsure which license is right for you, please do not hesitate to contact us.

ZIP files

All our downloads are supplied in zip files, which enables us to bundle the product with any relevant documentation, and to deliver multiple audio files within a convenient folder structure. Zip files are natively supported by all modern operating systems, but users of older Apple Macs may need the free MacZip utility to unpack them.

For Windows users seeking more advanced zip file handling, we recommend WinRar.