During the two last decades ago, audio compression becomes the topic of many types of research due to the importance of this field which reflecting on the storage capacity and the transmission requirement. The rapid development of the computer industry increases the demand for audio data with high quality and accordingly, there is great importance for the development of audio compression technologies, lossy and lossless are the two categories of compression. This paper aims to review the techniques of the lossy audio compression methods, summarize the importance and the uses of each method.