VoxForge
Uncompressed audio is audio without any compression applied to
it. This includes audio recorded in PCM or WAV
form.
Lossless audio compression is where audio is compressed without
losing any information or degrading the quality at all. Examples of lossless formats includes WMA
Lossless or FLAC in Matroska.
Lossy audio compression attempts to apply to discard as much 'irrelevant' data as
possible from the original audio, thereby producing a file much
smaller than the original that sounds almost identical. This results in
a much smaller filesize then lossless or uncompressed audio.
Lossy audio formats include AC3,
DTS, AAC, MPEG-1/2/3, Vorbis, and Real Audio.