Do MP3 & WAV files contain audio?

Please forgive me for being a total novice when it comes to computer audio. This is a basic question and I hope someone can steer me in the right direction. I am wondering if MP3 and WAV files use a computer's sound card to produce the sound or are they independent. I assume they contain their own audio within the files since they can be played back on MP3 players and such. Am I correct in thinking that the computer's sound card is important when it comes to making MP3 and WAV files and that a low quality sound card will produce a low quality file that will sound bad when played back, but that the MP3 or WAV file can be played back independent of a computer sound card?

Or to hear the files - of course.

You can, of course, have more than one "card" in a computer.  Tho many say to disable your internal soundcard if you have one for music, I've never had problems.  I guess you are heading for the question - do I need a better sound card?  The answer is yes if you are recording audio.  The answer is also yes if you plan on doing any serious mixing of stuff you do - even if it is all internal.  A computer sound card and little bitty computer speakers limit what you hear (esp. the speakers).  The digital to analog convertors in the internal audio card are alright, tho not for serious work.

@

jarogers


So, say I use Sonar to lay down a midi track using a soft synth and my keyboard and then export the project as a wav file, is the quality of the wav file dependent on the quality of the sound card I am using?

No not at all. It might not sound great listening on your system but if you take that same file to a machine with a high end sound card and it will sound as good as it can. The quality happens in the mix engine of Sonar and never goes though the sound card during the mix.  That's why it can mix at higher then real time, it's not using a clock or converters it's just stacking samples in a row on the hard drive.

jarogers


Please forgive me for being a total novice when it comes to computer audio. This is a basic question and I hope someone can steer me in the right direction. I am wondering if MP3 and WAV files use a computer's sound card to produce the sound or are they independent. I assume they contain their own audio within the files since they can be played back on MP3 players and such. Am I correct in thinking that the computer's sound card is important when it comes to making MP3 and WAV files and that a low quality sound card will produce a low quality file that will sound bad when played back, but that the MP3 or WAV file can be played back independent of a computer sound card?

technically .... NO. A wave file or an MP3 is simply data. there is no audio in it... just data bits of "0" and "1"... that is all that is in any computer file including waves.

I am not a computer geek.... but what little I understand about this is that the date is formatted as a wave or in the MP3 format. When that data is used by a computer, the computer recognizes the file format and sends it to a D/A converter... a section of the hardware that takes the data and converts it from the digital domain to the audio domain. It then becomes audible. But the file itself does not contain any audio... just the data that can reconstruct it with the proper software and hardware instructions.

Audio being recorded as a wave file in Sonar takes the opposite route.... the audio is converted into the data bits by an A/D converter, and stored as a what we call a wave file.... but at this point it's all ones and zeros.

 Hope this helps.

Actually the wave file has the superior quality.

When I export a song, the wave for it could be...lets say....60MB...quite large. After I convert it to MP3 at 320kb sample rate it is about 6MB.

That means a lot of the data that determines the sound quality has been dropped from the final file. Since other, much lower sample rates exist, a common one is 128kbs, those files are even smaller with even more data dropped in the process. Now, to be fair, the coders have designed software compression algorithms to try to make up for the dropped data.

So the question...why does the MP3 ringtone sound better...... I'm only guessing but perhaps it has to do with the size of the file. With the wave being bigger by far.....IF the processor that plays it in a phone is slow, it can not handle the data in real time in it's buffers... it is constantly having difficulty playing it in real time.... your ears hear that as a crappy sound..... however, the MP3 being smaller and "streamlined" is not a problem for the phone to play. It plays smoothly and therefore sounds better to your ears.

I have had the opposite experience..... playing an MP3 through a nice PA system for backing tracks..it sounds like crap.... using a CD with a wave...nice sounding backing track.

A mp3 file has usually been squeezed down from a wave file, losing some of the information.  Converting an mp3 to wave doesn't add any information back, just adds more artifacts.  It can't sound better, but probably worse.  I often have to go back when converting Wave files to mp3 and lower the volume, etc. so I don't get overs in the mp3.

@

A full answer:
WAV and MP3 files contain audio. For the one that started talking that it basically doesn't contain audio but contains bits and stuff - that's true but complicating it too much. You can say that your dinner is chicken, or you can say that your food is a bunch of organic molecules made mainly out of carbon and hydrogen, with a large concentration of calcium and phosphate in the bones. So for simplicity's sake, it contains audio.
MIDI files contain notes. This depends on what is playing the notes. When you play the midi notes in sonar, it can use a soft synth, send it out to a midi device or whatever else you choose. If you record this to a wav file, the specific sound becomes permanent and is independent (to some degree) of the playing source. mp3 do not sound better than wav by definition. If you think that your mp3 sounded better than the wav, either the playing device messed up the wav playing, or the lower quality of the mp3 somehow psychologically made it sound better (which happens - so it might be the issue).