At 8 bits to the byte that would mean that 1 second of CD quality music would occupy 88,200 bytes or 88 Kb of your floppy disc which holds 1.2 Mb of data. Reduces the memory required to store a sound and therefore reduces the file transfer time. You should avoid the bit-depth reduction for the sake of clarity. Avoid MACE compression. It is an Apple Compression Routine that few programs can read and will cause you much grief.
All methods discussed below are lossy.
AIFF stands for Audio Interchange File Format and was developed by Apple. It is one of the best choices for cross-platform audio. AIFF is a very flexible file format, allowing the specification of arbitrary sampling rates, sample size, number of channels, and application-specific format chunks which can be ignored by other applications. AIFF-C is basically AIFF with compressed samples. Both are lossy compression algorithms, but provide reasonable quality with a great space savings.