Although essentially unchanged since production began, the Llama now hosts tens of thousands of concerts in lossless and lossy formats.

That's because they are both lossy formats - the compression loses detail every time you save.

These lossy formats use "psychoacoustic modeling" to compress the audio waveform by eliminating certain frequencies and harmonics that humans are least likely to notice are missing.

For audiophiles who can't stand lossy formats like AAC or MP3, it offers a better sounding alternative.

More frequently, the smaller file sizes of compressed but lossy formats such as MP3 are used to store and transfer audio.

Transcoding files between lossy formats always results in lower quality sound.

This characteristic sometimes results in a smaller file size for some lossless formats than lossy formats.

The key drawback of transcoding in lossy formats is decreased quality.

However, the conversion from digital to analog and back is likely to force a loss of quality, particularly when using lossy digital formats.

It was only available, initially, as a music download in lossy formats such as MP3 and AAC.