Music - The MP3
I will have many future posts regarding music, most of which will be related to MP3s. Since this website is geared towards the average consumer, let’s briefly talk about the MP3.
MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer III and it is a standard for audio compression that makes any music file smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. MP3 is part of MPEG, an acronym for Motion Pictures Expert Group, a family of standards for displaying video and audio using lossy compression.
What that means in brief, is that on a digital audio file (ie. a song) the file size is HUGE. This is in part because in order to maintain a high quality sound, you need a lot of information. An MP3 is a format that says “Well that’s nice, but you don’t REALLY need that high a quality” so it takes things out in such a way that makes for a far smaller file size. The good part is that you can fit several songs on your computer, or other device like an MP3 player. The bad part is that you do lose some quality. How much loss you notice depends upon how good of an ear you have. Considering that most of the time we are listening to music with other outside noise, the quality is acceptable for most.
If you’d like to learn more about the MP3, checkout “The History of the MP3″
