You can utilize two basic kinds of files to store audio on PC. One type is generically known as a sound file and utilizes formats like WAV, VOC, AU, and AIFF. Sound files have waveform data, which means they are analog audio recordings that have been digitized for storage on a PC. Just as you can store graphic images at various resolutions, you can have sound files that use different resolutions, trading off sound quality for file size. The default sound resolution levels utilized by Windows Sound Recorder are shown in following Table.

If you have a sound card that supports DVD-quality, you can also keep sounds at that frequency with Windows Sound Recorder, but you should choose that setting manually. Windows Sound Recorder applet utilizes Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) technique for storing sounds. PCM makes highest quality of sound, but because it does not utilize any kind of data compression, file sizes can be large.

You can notice the difference in file sizes between the highest and lowest audio resolution levels is large which is shown in table. CD-quality sound files can occupy large amounts of disk space. At this rate, just one minute of audio would need more than 10MB of storage. For applications that do not need or advantage from these high resolutions, like voice annotation, telephone-quality audio is adequate and creates much smaller files. To get a balance between high quality and smaller file sizes, you can change usual WAV files into compressed formats, like MP3 or WMA audio files.

The other kind of file is a MIDI file, which has a musical score that is played back by synthesized musical instruments included into sound card's MIDI support.

On a multimedia PC, it is frequently probable for two or more sound sources to need services of audio adapter at similar time. Any time you have many sound sources you want to play through a single set of speakers, a mixer is required.

Most audio adapters contain a mixer that enables all different audio sources, MIDI, WAV, line in, and CD to utilize single line-out jack. Beginning with Windows 95 through most recent Windows versions, Windows utilizes a single mixer for both recording and playback features, rather than using separate mixers as with Windows 3.x. generally, adapter ships with software that shows visual sliders like you notice on an actual audio mixer in a recording studio. With these controls, you can set relative volume of every sound source.