maybe someone in here can help me out with a question about saving recorded audio. I use cool edit pro for my recordings. When I go to save my audio it gives me a choise to save the file under different file extentions.

.dbl
.sam
.iff
.svx
.aif
.snd
.txt
.cel
.voc
.vox
.dwd
.mp3
.au
.smp
.wma
.asf
.asx
.pcm
.raw
.wav

what is the best file extention to save the file as so i dont loose any quality in the recording? i'm assuming i should save the file in the .wav format but there are 5 different .wav formats...

A/mu-Law Wav (.wav)
ACM Waveform (.wav)
DVI/IMA ADPCM (.wav)
Microsoft ADPCM (.wav)
Windows PCM (.wav)

whats the difference and whats the best? thanks for you help

www.wotsit.org should have the differences between the various formats, but probably not in the way that you want to know. a windows pcm wav should be fine, just make sure its 16 bits and in stereo, 44000 hz sampling rate

of course, if you are creating your own music in cool edit, you could/should use higher bits per sample, and more samples per second. to each his own.

If you are preparing music for normal "red-book" standard audio cd's, using anything other than stereo 16-bit, 44.1KHz format is either going to cause problems or will make little or no difference once the software resamples and dithers the files back to that format anyway.

Use pcm .wav files.

you can always lower your sample rate / bits per sample, but you cant raise it .