What‘s MP3 Format

MP3 format is familiar to many people. Mp3 is short for Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer III, it is a very popular digital audio encoding format in the marketplace. In fact, other terms we come across such as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3 or MPEG-1 or 2 Audio Layer III are generally referred to as MP3, which adapts a kind of lossy data compression to compress the music into the audio file of smaller size at the ratio of 1:10 or 1:12. The most important point is that the original audio quality is kept the same even after the compression. MP3 has become one of the most popular formats because it enables consumers to download music from the websites easily with its ability to make music manageable, besides, MP3 video file is usually very small, therefore, it can be transferred over the internet with ease.

At first, MP3 was developed as a part of the MPEG-1 standard by Moving Picture Experts Group(includes the engineers at Fraunhofer IIS, AT&T-Bell Labs, Thomson-Brandt, CCETT, etc), and later, it was extended to be MPEG-2 standard. In 1993, MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2(MP2) was published as a committee draft of ISO/IEC standard while in 1995, MPEG-2 Audio was published as well.

Generally speaking, the bit rate determines the audio quality of MP3. That is to say, the higher the bit rate is, the better the quality will be. There are two kinds of MP3, one is CBR (Constant Bit Rate) and the other is VBR(Variable Bit Rate) which is quite often used. So far, we can download MP3 files from the internet easily. However, despite its popularity, MP3 is not used by Apple iTunes Store which adapts AAC instead).  Up till now, more and more popular portable mobile devices(iPhone, Galaxy, HTC, Nokia, etc) offer support to the MP3 format, but as far as we concerned, most of standard CD players like car stereo’s CD-Player cannot play MP3 audio files directly. Therefore, a special MP3 player or a third-party software is required if you would like to play MP3 on CD-Player smoothly.

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