MP3 Reviews

MP3 Introduction

MPEG Audio Layer 3, commonly referred to as MP3, is an audio format which uses a form of data compression. It’s a very common audio format for audio storage and a standard encoding for the playback and transfer of music on all kinds of audio players. MP3 is an audio format co-designed by many teams of engineers at AT&T Bell Laps, CCETT, Thomson-Brandt and Frauhofer IIS in Germany. In 1991, it was finally approved as an ISO standard.

The use in MP3 of compression algorithm is aimed to hugely reduce the amount of data needed to represent the recording and sound like an authentic reproduction of the original audio for most listeners but is not high fidelity audio by those geeky audiophiles. An MP3 file created using the mid range bit rate will result in a file typically around a tenth the size of the normal audio CD file created from the original source.
An MP3 file too can be constructed at lower or higher bit rates with lower or higher resulting quality. Such a compression works by simply reducing accuracy of parts of sound deemed beyond the resolution capability of most listeners. Such a method is widely referred to as perceptual coding. It provides a representation of sound within a brief term frequency analysis window by using special models to discard precision of components less audible than normal human hearing and recording the information in an efficient fashion. This is similar to the principles employed by JPEG, an image compression format.