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Ok... In the world of audio codecs there are two kinds. Lossy (MP3, Vorbis, Musepack, AAC) and Lossless (FLAC, APE, SHN, WAVPACK, WAV). Lossy looses some of the information you arnt supposed to be able to hear when it encodes it, while lossless saves all the information. Lossless codecs are just like RAR or ZIP. There are many popular ones. WAV is just normal uncompressed lossless. Not popular with trading or torrents on the internet. FLAC is the standard for torrents and such, but SHN is often used for concerts taped at sites such as this. I heavily prefer FLAC to SHN. Another popular one is WAVPACK. It is a bit more advanced, and often used by audiophiles (people who demand good quality music and hate everything else). WAVPACK has a hybrid mode where it can make a lossy file, but there will be a restore file that you can merge them together to make it lossless again.