Glossary: Speech and Audio AI

Audio file formats (WAV, FLAC, MP3, AAC, Opus)

Also written: WAV, FLAC, MP3, AAC, Opus, .wav, .m4a, .opus, .webm

WAV is uncompressed PCM (a small header plus samples; size = sample rate × bytes per sample × channels × seconds). FLAC is lossless at half to two-thirds the size; MP3 and AAC (`.m4a`) are lossy and common for music and phone apps; Opus (`.opus`, `.webm`) is lossy with the best quality per byte for speech. soundfile can't read `.m4a` or `.webm`, so convert them with ffmpeg first.