MP3

**MPEG-1 Audio Layer III** or **MPEG-2 Audio Layer III** (**MP3**) is a lossy data compression format for audio. Using it makes smaller computer files containing digitized music and other sounds.  Many people copy music into MP3 files  so they can listen to it on their computer or a small, portable MP3 player.

## History

In the 1980s, Dieter Seitzer started the development of a code for audio format of high-quality. Together with his team at the _German Fraunhofer Institut_ in Erlangen, the professor had the idea to create code with a low bit-rate. The German institute received the patent for MP3 in 1989. MP3 was then passed to the International Organisation for Standardisation. In the same year the MP3 was included into MPEG-1 specification. (MPEG means Moving Picture Experts Group).

The first player for the MP3 format was designed by the same Fraunhofer Institute in 1990's. A Croatian student named _Tomislav Uzelac_ developed _AMP MP3 Playback Engine_ in 1997. After the player appeared on the Internet, two students named _Justin Frankel_ and _Dmitry Boldyrev_ transformed it into Winamp. They took the engine of the original player and added the interface of the Windows.

When Winamp was launched into the net for free use it became successful at once. This way began the era of free music download. Soon various programmers started creating additional features for the MP3 player. Very often they created new encoders, rippers (software for transforming audio tracks into MP3 files) and players.

## MP3 players

Because there is no need to pay licensing fees in order to build the player, today many software MP3 players are free. Some companies claim to have patents covering the MP3 format, but the validity of these patents is questionable because the format specification was published more than 20 years ago, meaning that any relevant patents would have expired. The most famous MP3 players are _Winamp_, _Sonique_, _iTunes_ and _MusicMatch_. The main feature of an MP3 player is to turn the MP3 files into standard audio form and then send them to the soundcard of the computer. The soundcard then outputs the files into speaker so the user can hear them. Every MP3 player interprets music differently, though each one of them uses the same code for playing the MP3 files. There are also stand-alone (without a computer) MP3 players. These may be portable, or they may be built-into a stereo system or car stereo. According to the MPEG standards, MP3 players are supposed to also be able to play MP1 and MP2 files, although many don't.

## Technical details

The MP3 format is a lossy compression format. This means that each time something is compressed with it, some information is lost. This information can not be recovered. When encoding to MP3 (converting some audio data to it), the encoder deletes some not important parts. The human ear can not hear certain sounds if they are masked by other sounds. This means that when encoding certain sound samples, some sounds can be left out as they will not be heard. This makes it possible to compress audio by a factor of about 5, without noticeable change to the sound of the music. With slight audible changes to the sound, compression factors of about 10 are possible.

When compressing, for each frame a small section of audio, the encoder first splits the audio into 32 different parts using a filter bank, similar to MP2. The audio is then split further into either 192 or 576 different parts (depending on the complexity of the audio being compressed more complex audio is split into _fewer_ parts using the modified discrete cosine transform. The MP3 encoder then removes parts that it thinks the human ear cannot hear. The remaining parts are then compressed using Huffman coding. Decompression does these same steps except removal of parts of the audio in reverse.

When an MP3 file or stream is encoded, the user selects a particular bitrate. This can be either a constant bitrate (the bitrate is the same throughout the file) or a variable bitrate (the bitrate is higher in more complex parts of the song and lower in simple parts.) MP3 can have a bitrate up to 320 kbit/s. Higher bitrates such as (192 to 320) kbit/s produce larger files, but the sound quality is better. Lower bitrates such as 128 kbit/s are useful for streaming over the internet, but the quality is not as good.
|Data rate (kbit/s)|Analog equivalent|
| --- | --- |
|32|Mobile phone|
|40|Landline phone|
|48|Intercom|
|56|AM radio (distant)|
|64|AM radio (near)|
|80|Low-end TV|
|96|FM radio (distant)|
|112|FM radio (mid-distance)|
|128|FM radio (near transmitter)|
|160|Cassette tape (ferric)|
|192|Vinyl record, cassette tape (chrome)|
|224|Cassette tape (metal)|
|256|Reel to reel tape|
|320|Master tape|
Other formats for audio compression are Ogg Vorbis, AAC, and FLAC. Ogg Vorbis and AAC are very similar to MP3, although they have many improvements, for example, they encode noisy signals such as tape hiss more efficiently, and they don't use the MP2-style filter bank. FLAC is a lossless compression meaning no information is lost, and gets compression rates of 2-3.

## Timeline

- 1987 The German Frauhofer Institute starts its research on _Digital Audio Broadcasting_
- 1988 MPEG is established as part of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization)
- 1989 MP3 is patented in Germany
- 1993 MPEG-1 was published
- 1994 MPEG-2 was designed; The first MP3 encoder for the PC (L3enc) was released.
- 1995 MPEG-2 was published
- 1996 MP3 is patented in United States
- 1998 The LAME encoder is released.
- 1999 Music in MP3 format is for the first time distributed, the distributor was _SubPop_; the first portable MP3 player appeared.
- 2017 The last MP3 patents expire.

## Related pages

- Discrete cosine transform
- MPEG-4

## Other websites

- MP3 Players and Their Variety  - Find out more about MP3 players, their types and their functions
- The Features of MP3 Format and MP3 Player  - How does MP3 work?