Music files, Windows Media Player,

Yes, mp3.

If you plan to use iTunes and WMP at the same time see Getting iTunes & Windows Media Player to play nicely for some ideas.

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Windows Media Player will play as standard the following music formats

MP3

AAC

WAV

AIFF

WMA

iTunes for Windows will play as standard the following music formats

MP3

AAC

WAV

AIFF

Apple Lossless

iTunes for Windows can also import and convert WMA but cannot directly play WMA.

However while it might seem WAV and AIFF are options in reality they are not suitable, this is because while iTunes supports tags in AIFF even album artwork, WMP does not, and likewise while WMP does metatags for WAV iTunes does not.

In addition to the above formats, it is possible to get WMP to play and support other formats, for example FLAC, however iTunes for Windows does not support FLAC. What is possible is to get WMP to fully support Apple Losless - including metatags and even embedded album artwork.

Therefore if you want to keep your music in a lossless format the only option that fully works between iTunes and WMP is Apple Lossless. If your happy with using a lossey format then use AAC or MP3.

Note: iTunes can automatically convert Apple Lossless to AAC when syncing to an iPod/iPhone/iPad meaning you can keep the fully lossless format on your computer and still use a smaller format on your portable music device which has less capacity.

My article below will be of help if your interested in getting Apple Lossless working with WMP. (I devised the original solution to do this and was therefore the very first person in the world to play an Apple Lossless file in WMP.)

See http://jelockwood.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/using-apple-lossless-aka-alac-in-window s.html

Metatags, or tags, are the additional data stored in the audio file that record the track's name, artist, album etc. These are useful when accessing content from different applications. Without them you would need to manually re-enter all the details for the content to be organised properly.

Lossless audio formats preserve the original audio quality of the source, e.g. CD, that the audio was copied from. Lossey formats make smaller files but will lose some of the detail of the original recording. Whether this is noticeable or significant depends in part on the level of compression, the source, and your own hearing.

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Things like the track name, artist, album name, etc. are all stored as tags in the music files, different music formats use different tag formats.

Lossless means that 100% of the original quality is kept and this means it has the same quality as an Audio CD. Lossey means that some of the original quality is thrown away in order to make the file smaller, the more you throw away the worse the quality but the smaller the file.

AIFF and WAV do not compress the files at all and are exactly the same quality and size as an Audio CD. FLAC and Apple Lossless while being lossless and therefore keeping all the original quality do manage to compress the file a bit usually saving between 25% and 30% of the size. MP3 and AAC are lossey and sacrifice quality in order to give you smaller files, depending on settings you can save up to 90% of the original size.

If your listening to music in a quiet home with either good speaker or headphones you can certainly tell the difference, in a car which is a noisey environment or using cheap headphones the lower quality of MP3 or AAC is less noticeable.