The international standard telephony-encoding format, used to compress audio before posting it to the WWW. It’s a fast 2:1 compressor for 16-bit audio used mainly by Sun and NeXT computers. This scheme compresses 16-bit files to 8-bit, nonlinear resolution that offers better dynamic range than standard, linear 8-bit audio files. However, the sampling rate is low-fidelity, only 8kHz, about the sound quality of a telephone receiver. It has strong cross-platform support with playback software for Macs and Windows systems.