There are three major groups of audio file formats: Although most audio file formats support only one type of audio coding data (created with an audio coder), a multimedia container format (as Matroska or AVI) may support multiple types of audio and video data. A codec performs the encoding and decoding of the raw audio data while this encoded data is (usually) stored in a container file. It is important to distinguish between the audio coding format, the container containing the raw audio data, and an audio codec.
