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. Windows and MacOS users can play MP3 files right out of the box without having to install any third-party software. By installing the new music application, it is highly likely that the new application will affirm its association with MP3 files during installation.
The MP3 version of the song doesn't sound exactly the same as the original song on the CD because part of it has been removed. Many MP3 encoders have plug-ins that create full-size WAV files from MP3 files, and some of the encoders also decode. If you're an artist who records music at home or in a small studio, you can use MP3 files and the Web to distribute your music to a wider audience. Most MP3 encoding programs allow the user to select the bit rate when converting files to the MP3 format.
If you recently purchased a new computer, you probably already have software that can play MP3 files installed on your hard drive. It's perceptive in part because the MP3 format uses characteristics of the human ear to design the compression algorithm. Unlike other movements (for example, the introduction of the cassette tape or the CD), the MP3 movement did not start with the industry itself, but with a huge audience of music lovers on the Internet. 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.
A big part of the MP3 movement is the fact that it has brought an incredible variety of powerful tools to desktop computers and has given people a reason to learn to work. Users then played MP3 files with audio software on their computer or burned the audio to CD that could be played on a CD player. As mentioned earlier, MP3 is the most commonly used audio file format, and because of this, almost every audio player application can open MP3 files, possibly even your eReader. If you have a CD collection and want to convert the songs on your CDs to MP3 files, you can use extraction and encoding software to do just that.
However, other people argue that it is impossible for the human ear to detect the difference between an uncompressed CD file and an MP3 encoded with a bit rate of 320 Kbps.
