This is from Apple’s documentation on CoreAudio.
Since I find wikipedia to be only marginally helpful these days (it actually suffers from TOO much information) I found it explained these concepts so well, I had to quote it for future reference.
A Little About Digital Audio and Linear PCM Most Core Audio services use and manipulate audio in linear pulse-code-modulated (linear PCM) format, the most common uncompressed digital audio data format. Digital audio recording creates PCM data by measuring an analog (real world) audio signal’s magnitude at regular intervals (the sampling rate) and converting each sample to a numerical value. Standard compact disc (CD) audio uses a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, with a 16-bit integer describing each sample—constituting the resolution or bit depth.
A sample is single numerical value for a single channel. A frame is a collection of time-coincident samples. For instance, a stereo sound file has two samples per frame, one for the left channel and one for the right channel. A packet is a collection of one or more contiguous frames. In linear PCM audio, a packet is always a single frame. In compressed formats, it is typically more. A packet defines the smallest meaningful set of frames for a given audio data format.
In linear PCM audio, a sample value varies linearly with the amplitude of the original signal that it represents. For example, the 16-bit integer samples in standard CD audio allow 65,536 possible values between silence and maximum level. The difference in amplitude from one digital value to the next is always the same.
