anyone heard of this format before?

[qoucher]

the sound card i've got is SB Audigy gamer, it's a bit of an old one but it works well, anyways it introduced me to quite a different type of music format.
it's called .ac3 and the thing that's so special about it is that: one. practically the only player that supports it is the playcenter that comes with SB and two. it supports 5.1 or more sound channels, i found that quite odd i've heard of wav actually doing that but not being able to edit it the only thing is, it's like 3 or more wav files in one, aweosme quality, it has left & right for front rear or which ever channels sub and center it has an awesome compression rate for 3 mins of 6 different channels, 3 mins is only 10mb on it. but i was wondering if anyone has ever heard of this format, much less knows about an editor for it..thx

[Technix]

I have the Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro (the one with the external I/O hub) and well...I have heard of .ac3 but never really knew what it was. Probably for surround sound applications I'm guessing?

I'll stick with MP3.

[decypher]

http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/te...by_digital.cfm

[ebbomega]

Atrac3. Proprietary format. No real interest in it. AFAIK, Sony NetMD Minidisc players use the same format.

I stick to oggs, mp3s and occasionally an m4a or two. If you use wma you are a tool.

[Mr.Wrong]

what is an .ogg file//i found one earlier but didnt wanna DL it cause wtf is that shit


---.m4a and .mpga//these too...????

[Skyles]

.ac3 is a widely used format when authoring dvd's. I use them alot when doing 5.1 mixes, although it can support stereo, 5.1, 7.1 in the encoders I use.

As for anything else about them, got me. I just send the appropriate channel to the encoder and there it goes to an .ac3 ;).

hope that helps.