You cannot talk about audio and computers anytime in the last 15 years without hearing about mp3 music. It was the new file format that revolutionized the way music is stored and played, enabling online services like Napster to start the movement away from buying CDs, tapes or records at record stores and toward digital downloads. It also allowed people to carry a large library of songs in a player the size of a deck of cards, or even thinner.
When a song is an mp3 it is a compressed version of a high-resolution digital audio recording that is typically saved at 128 kbps, or about 1/5 of the original resolution. The compression is achieved by removing parts of the sound that the human ear can’t hear, usually low-frequency information and high-frequency information. The result is a smaller, much easier to store and play back audio file that sounds very similar to the original recording.
MP3 Music: A Beginner’s Guide to Online Streaming and Downloads
The quality of an mp3 can be improved by using higher bitrates (which result in better sound quality), or by reducing the sample rate, which results in more distortion in the music. Most mp3 players let the user choose the quality level that is best for them and they also can adjust the sampling rate, or sample-rate, of the song in order to get the best possible sound from their player.
A 32 MB song on a CD compresses down to about 3 MB on an mp3 – so it is not surprising that many people have a hard time figuring out how much space an mp3 takes up. However, it makes sense to realize that the physical space on your computer or MP3 player has to already exist – you are just rearranging patterns of 1s and 0s that are there already.
Karlheinz Brandenburg developed the MP3 algorithm while working on his doctoral dissertation in the early 1980s at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He later worked as a staff member at the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’s Heinrich Herz Institute in Erlangen and holds a patent for MP3 technology in both Germany and the United States.
When a song is an mp3, it is basically a long string of binary numbers (zeroes and ones) that are encoded in a specific way so that the computer can easily read the data. It starts with a header that contains information about the track including its name, artist and album, as well as any lyrics. The actual music is then stored in a sequence of frames that each start with the header, followed by the music itself. A small amount of additional data, called metadata, is also included in each frame and most MP3 programs include an option for editing these tags. The result is a very compact file that can be downloaded and stored very quickly, and played by a wide variety of hardware and software media players. The sound is very high-quality, and it is a great improvement over the older analog formats used for recording and storage.