WAV vs MP3: How to choose the right audio file format

WAV is an uncompressed, lossless format best for recording, editing and archiving, while MP3 is compressed and lossy, producing much smaller files suited to sharing and streaming. One minute of CD-quality stereo audio is about 10.6 MB as WAV, versus about 0.96 MB as a 128 kbps MP3 and about 2.4 MB as a 320 kbps MP3. Converting MP3 to WAV makes the file larger but cannot restore the data lost during compression.