For preservation, file formats matter just as much as the storage medium.

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Smartphones have long since surpassed the old MP3 player when it comes to portable music, and continue to include more and more impressive audio hardware to win over the audiophile crowd – from front ...

A file extension is a suffix that is added to the end of a file name after a dot. It is usually two to four letters long. File extensions help Windows and other operating systems to know the standard ...

Digital sound is nothing more than numbers. What separates one container from another is how those numbers are packed, how much data (if any) is thrown away, and which devices understand the result.

If you have ever worked with computer graphic images, whether they be from digital cameras, found on the web, or you create them yourself, then you know there are a lot of image file formats that are ...

Xvid is rarely used these days, but that means it can be hard to know what to do with it if you come across it while digging through your old files. It’s essentially a method for compressing video, ...

You can open or import a surprising number of file formats into Microsoft Word. Not to be confused with file formatting, which—in most programs—refers to the design of a page, file formats are little ...

USB flash drives (a.k.a. “thumb” drives) may seem passé in a world where AirDrop and cloud storage solve the file-transfer problem. But they’re still quite useful for handing over files to another ...