Digital sound works by sampling analog sound waves and representing them with numeric data. For audio CDs, sounds are sampled 44,100 times per second with 16-bit precision. Audio compression reduces file sizes by removing extraneous sounds. Digital audio is played back through sound cards and popular formats include MP3, WAV, and AIFF. MIDI files store musical instrument commands instead of sampled sound. Speech synthesis converts text to speech while recognition converts speech to text.