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2. Sound Interface Device file

File type: Musical notation

Most common file extension: SID

“Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you,” says the jingle, which (apologies to “Apple II Forever”) is the height of 80s computer commercial jingles.

But the Commodore 64 had something to cheer about with its Sound Interface Device chip, which was one of the first specialized audio chips in a modern computer, and was able to create sounds well past many video game consoles of its era. The SID files that could be extracted from many C64 applications—something first done by Amiga programmers in the early 1990s—are obviously relics of their time, but very much reflect the state of their era-appropriate art.

5. Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC)

File type: Lossy compression, proprietary

Most common file extension: AA3

This is a file format with a basis in a noble device’s history, but was so tied to the company that made said device that its proprietary nature completely got in the way of its commercial use case.

The device was the Sony MiniDisc, perhaps the most-loved proprietary cult device of all time, and ATRAC was the compression format that made it possible for those discs to reach near-CD quality in a small amount of space. The problem was, the market had pushed into the direction of the MP3, leaving ATRAC in the dust, despite Sony’s many attempts to push it onto later devices, such as the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3. (Larding the format up with digital rights management at some point really didn’t help things, either.)

The company killed the format once and for all in 2009, not long after the company decided to end its DRM-oriented Sony Connect Music Store.

8. Mobile XMF (Beatnik)

File type: Musical notation, polyphonic, ringtone

Most common file extension: XMF

While the XMF format is technically not dead and is still being produced today as an open standard under the wing of the MIDI Association, the format had a major degree of mainstream pop culture success in the early 2000s, thanks to its use by Beatnik as a way to produce polyphonic ringtones.

Beatnik, as you’ll recall, was Thomas Dolby’s audio company, which previously produced a format called RMF that was used with the WebTV set-top device. (RMF is even more dead than XMF in this context.)

XMF’s use in ringtones was a huge success for a time, but as phones increasingly became able to produce high-quality audio on their own with no assistance, the specialized ringtone format faded away.

You know an audio format that you might think would be on this list, but very much isn’t? Ogg Vorbis.

Released in 2000 under an open-source license, it was a seen early in its life as essentially an exotic alternative to the MP3 file, produced with open standards and without licensing fees, that could create audio files of a quality level similar to or slightly above MP3, while creating a smaller file as a result.

In a way, it seemed destined to live in obscurity, because who uses an .ogg file these days, anyway, right? Well, there’s one key user that, if nobody else used this format, would ensure that it could never be included on this list: Spotify.

Spotify has been using the Ogg Vorbis format since its start, and as a result, hundreds of millions of people use this format every single day without even realizing it. Sure, it has DRM on it, which might dampen its open-standard status, but it’s nonetheless a huge win for what some might see as an also-ran audio format that it takes on such a center-stage cultural role.

So know that, next time you play a song on Spotify, you’re listening to the way that Ogg Vorbis secretly won the war with the MP3 without the mainstream consumer even realizing it.

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