The MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer) format is a standard technology and format for compressing a sound sequence into a very small file (approximately one-twelfth the size of the original file) and, at the same time, maintaining the original level of sound quality when played. MP3, entirely MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, a data compression format for encoding digital audio, most commonly music. MP3 files offered substantial fidelity to compact disc (CD) sources with very small file sizes. The MP3 format is a music compression system.
The purpose of using MP3 is to compress a CD-quality song by a factor of 10 to 14 without significantly affecting the CD-quality sound. With MP3, a 32-megabyte song on a CD is compressed to about 3 MB. This allows you to download a song much faster and store hundreds of songs on your computer's hard drive. Among them, advanced audio coding (AAC) is the most used and was designed to be the successor to MP3. In addition to lossy compression methods, lossless formats are an important alternative to MP3 because they provide unaltered audio content, albeit with a larger file size compared to lossy compression.
The popularity of MP3s began to increase rapidly with the arrival of Nullsoft's Winamp audio player, released in 1997. You can choose how much information an MP3 file will retain or lose during the encoding and compression process. Many music sites and blogs urge people to use a bitrate of 160 Kbps or more if they want the MP3 file to have the same sound quality as a CD. The higher the bitrate, the greater the MP3 data stream and, in general, the closer it will sound to the original recording. The MP3 lossy audio data compression algorithm takes advantage of a perceptual limitation of the human ear called auditory masking.
Many people who start collecting MP3 files find that they want to listen to them in all kinds of places. In addition to the bitrate of an encoded piece of audio, the quality of the sound encoded in MP3 also depends on the quality of the encoder's algorithm, as well as on the complexity of the signal being encoded. Compared to CD-quality digital audio, MP3 compression can normally achieve a 75 to 95% reduction in size. The MP3 (or mp) format as a file format usually designates files that contain an elementary stream of encoded MPEG-1 audio or MPEG-2 audio data, without the other complexities of the MP3 standard.
MPEG-1 included three schemes, or layers, for audio encoding, of which the third, called MP3, quickly became the most popular thanks to the wide availability of simple computer programs for compressing music files. Most MP3 encoding programs allow the user to select the bit rate when converting files to the MP3 format. Later, more sophisticated MP3 encoders were able to use the bit deposit to obtain an average bit rate, selecting the encoding rate for each frame based on the complexity of the sound in that part of the recording. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) designed the MP3 format as part of its MPEG-1 and, later, MPEG-2 standards.
MP3 decoders extract information from labels or simply treat it as ignorable junk data that is not MP3.
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